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  Richmond Housing Authority Follow-up
April 19, 2014
 
 

A couple of interesting stories.
The first is about tens of thousands of dollars spent on travel by the Richmond Housing Advisory Commission. The charge of the Commission is as follows, which fails to mention traveling around the country:
The purpose of this commission is to advise the commissioners of the housing authority on all matters concerning the administration of the housing authority. The commission shall:
Review the operations and proposed activities of the housing authority and submit recommendations to the commissioners of the housing authority. Final decisions with respect to such recommendations shall be made by the commissioners of the housing authority;
(2) Communicate with tenants and tenant organizations at the housing authority concerning housing problems and potential solutions;
(3) Establish and maintain working relationships with organizations responsible for public housing development in the city;
(4) Perform such duties as may from time to time be requested by the commissioners of the housing authority.
The Richmond Housing Advisory Commission never did “submit recommendations to the commissioners of the housing authority, “ but they did manage to spend nearly $80,000 traveling during the years 2008-2011.
The second is an editorial criticizing the San Francisco Chronicle for slamming housing authorities in San Francisco and Richmond while ignoring the root cause of problems, which is insufficient funding by HUD. I’m glad someone is paying attention.
Embattled Richmond housing authority funded extensive training trips for volunteer advisers
By Robert Rogers
Contra Costa Times
Posted:   04/18/2014 10:50:14 AM PDT# Comments
Updated:   04/18/2014 09:32:34 PM PDT

Hacienda residents Clara Moore, left, and Geneva Eaton chat in the hallway at the public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb.
Hacienda residents Clara Moore, left, and Geneva Eaton chat in the hallway at the public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group) ( Kristopher Skinner )
RICHMOND -- While beset by mounting debt and low performance grades from federal officials, the city's public housing agency funded a series of trips, sending volunteer advisers to conferences to receive training with costs amounting to $79,315 from mid-2008 to 2011.
The expense documents -- obtained by this newspaper through a public records request -- show three instances in which individual members of the Richmond Housing Advisory Commission spent more than $7,900 in a single year to travel to training conferences. In contrast, members of the City Council are allotted a $5,000 maximum per year for travel.
Funding for the advisory commission travel was discontinued in 2011 by Richmond Housing Director Tim Jones.
A man walks a dog at the Hacienda public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News
A man walks a dog at the Hacienda public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group) ( Kristopher Skinner )
"We stopped the travel because money got tight," Jones said. "I had no problem with the travel expenses, which were in place long before I arrived here, and it wasn't a problem until the expenses couldn't be budgeted easily."
The funds came out of the housing authority's operating budget, Jones said.
While HAC members, who are appointed by the mayor to provide oversight and report feedback to top housing officials, were traveling to conferences in places such as Nashville, Washington, D.C., and Palm Springs, the housing authority was suffering from aging structures, pest problems and complaints of poor tenant services.
The troubles came to light in February when The Center for Investigative Reporting characterized the housing authority as among the most troubled in the nation, saddled with mounting debt, sloppy procurement practices, misuse of public funds and poor staff performance.
Jones was labeled "ineffective" by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the agency.
The City Council last month voted to relocate tenants from the Hacienda, an aging six-story building on Roosevelt Avenue where tenants complained of pest infestation and a leaky roof.
But while advisory commission members were traveling and receiving training, the monthly reports they produced were not getting to the City Council, according to an investigation by this newspaper.
One former commissioner, Arnie Kasendorf, penned monthly reports in 2010 and 2011 complaining about mold, bug infestation, security lapses and other problems in the system, but those reports stopped at Jones and never reached the council.
Council members expressed shock and outrage when those same problems were revealed by the news media three years later.
The largest single travel expense was by former HAC member Anntheia Yvonne Harrison-Farr, who spent $9,518 on travel from July 2008 to June 2009, according to city documents. Harrison-Farr could not be reached for comment.
Water puddles on the top floor at the Hacienda public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay
Water puddles on the top floor at the Hacienda public housing apartment complex in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group) ( Kristopher Skinner )
Commission member Jackie Thompson, who spent $7,932 on travel and training from July 2009 to June 2010, said the conferences were a good investment because the training she and other members received benefited public housing residents and the system as a whole.
"The training was valuable," said Thompson, who is also a public housing resident. "I brought back the skills I learned to conduct resident training, to teach my fellow residents about their rights and to give leadership classes."
Thompson said some members did not take their training seriously or disseminate learned information to the group or to other housing residents, but she declined to identify them.
Thompson said Jones told the advisory commission in 2011 that its travel budget would be taken away to help stem mounting debt. The city has loaned the housing authority at least $7 million over the years, which accounts in part for the agency's low HUD scores.
"Tim said we had to pay off a debt to the city, so we couldn't travel," Thompson said. "We agreed to forfeit our travel."
City Manager Bill Lindsay said he was unaware of the past travel expenses and needed to investigate the matter further.
"Although I don't know the context, I can say that those numbers are awfully high," Lindsay said of the travel amounts. "It was good that Tim (Jones) discontinued it."
HUD spokeswoman Gene Gibson said Friday that while the agency has the authority to look into travel expenses, there is no information indicating HUD funding was used improperly.
"Training and travel for tenant advisory groups is an eligible use of operating funds," Gibson said. "Whether it was a wise use of money (by the housing authority) is not a determination we will make."

Stair

Is the SF Chronicle Trying to Kill Public Housing?
by Randy Shaw‚ Apr. 15‚ 2014
If you think the San Francisco Chronicle’s ongoing stories criticizing the SF Housing Authority are designed to help long-suffering public housing tenants, I have a bridge to sell you.

As the federal government continues to starve public housing authorities of the billions of dollars needed to improve and maintain their buildings, the San Francisco Chronicle and other media continue to miss the forest for the trees. Instead of rallying readers to demand that House Republicans provide funds necessary to preserve public housing, local media promotes penny ante local scandals that have nothing to do with the billions needed to maintain the nation's largest housing resource for the poor.

The Chronicle stories are not pushing Congress to allocate needed funding for PHA tenants; to the contrary, many readers view the coverage as confirming that money spent on “corrupt” housing authorities will be wasted, with many concluding that the best solution is eliminating public housing altogether.

SFHA’s “Legal Woes”

The most recent example that the Chronicle cares little about the longterm future for SF’s public housing tenants was Heather Knight’s April 12 story, “S.F. Housing Authority’s legal woes add up.” The news hook for the story was a $1500 discovery sanction against the SFHA for not providing information in private lawsuits brought against it.

Knight acknowledges that this “amount may sound like peanuts”---she got that right---but claims that “for an agency trying to climb back from the brink of financial collapse - and unable to quickly fix basic living conditions like broken elevators, leaking sewage and rampant mildew - we'd argue it may not be the best use of taxpayer money.”

If everything you knew about the SFHA came from the SF Chronicle, you’d likely believe that this “financial collapse” was entirely caused by poor management. As if great management can get elevators fixed without money to do so, or can the perform multi-million dollar upgrades that some of the projects require through effective administrative techniques.

Knight rarely reminds readers that public housing authorities across the nation are experiencing the same problems we are seeing in San Francisco, and that the problem impacting all is caused by Congress’ refusal to allocate the necessary funds. This is not a problem that the best of management can solve, and one reason so many housing authorities have poor management is that highly qualified administrators won’t take a job where they know they don’t have the resources to succeed.

Butt Takes on Media

Longtime Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt similarly addressed the local media’s failure to highlight the lack of federal public housing funding in his February 26, 2014 article, "Expose" of Richmond Housing Authority Misses Key Facts.” Responding to a widely-promoted attack on the RHA by Amy Julia Harris of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Butt’s core point applies equally to the SF Chronicle’s coverage of the SFHA:

“Most conspicuous by its absence was any criticism by Harris of HUD, which entirely funds public housing and by any informed source, actually underfunds it by billions. Since 2010, public housing agencies have lost a cumulative total of $3.4 billion in federal funding (ignoring losses due to inflation) to operate and maintain public housing developments, which provide affordable homes to 1.1 million low-income families. These developments now face a $26 billion backlog of repair needs. While (RHA Director) Tim Jones and his crew may have a number of shortcomings, any honest coverage of the problems in Richmond or anywhere else has to start with a lack of resources and unreasonable expectations (See http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3993).”

Butt goes on:

“Yet CIR never once cited HUD for inadequate funding or suggested any legislation or policy changes to address that issue. The entire focus was on the shortcomings of the Richmond Housing Authority and its staff. The closest Harris got was quoting Jones about the funding issue, but she failed to evaluate whether or not he had a valid point, a very important, even critical, piece of information, particularly with respect to public policy. “When I arrived, we had a staff of 65,” Jones said. “Now there’s a staff of about 28. We are lean here. There is no fat.”

The authority’s executive director, Tim Jones, said he’s “running an operation on life support.” He blamed years of budget cuts from the federal government for the problems plaguing the housing authority and insisted that the agency is on the road to recovery. He said the problems come down to money. “

As Butt accurately concludes, “The Center for Investigative Reporting must think they have done a great service by taking on Richmond’s public housing… What they also haven’t done is describe what is needed to fix it.”

There are remarkable parallels between the Chronicle’s coverage of the SFHA and CIR’s story on Richmond, and I strongly suggest reading Butt’s entire piece.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Reporting on bad housing conditions and management problems at the SFHA is like shooting fish in a barrel; newspapers could have filed these stories almost any day of the week in San Francisco for decades.

A major daily newspaper truly concerned about public housing tenants would inform readers how the problems at the SFHA can be fixed. And that would mean detailing how the federal government has dropped the funding ball. In San Francisco’s case, it would also mean covering Mayor Lee’s ongoing reinvention of public housing

Instead, Chronicle readers are likely to believe it’s all about former SFHA Director Henry Alvarez’s inept leadership, or the alleged wrongful firing of two SFHA attorneys (whose lawsuits provide continued material for Knight but have no relevance to SFHA’s multi-billion dollar funding shortfall).

Ongoing attacks on public housing authorities across the United States have been and still are used by Republicans to justify defunding the nation’s housing of last resort. So when the Chronicle covers SFHA problems without even referencing the federal funding shortfall, you know it is not promoting public housing’s future in San Francisco.

Randy Shaw is Editor of Beyond Chron.


 

 
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