Public housing: what’s wrong with this picture? Part 2
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yesterday we started to untangle the San Francisco Housing Authority mess of $15,000,000 (and counting) in total judgments that SFHA has not paid. SFHA has been getting little help from the City of
None of these people work in
Today, in part deux, we explore, among other things, how could HUD possibly have any responsibility here? The San Francisco Chronicle enlightens us:
HUD ran the Housing Authority from the spring of 1996 to the fall of 1997.
A previous receivership. SFHA has been troubled for a long, long time.
The fire at the Hunters View housing project that killed six people, and led to the first legal judgment, occurred in December 1997.
After HUD’s receivership ended.
A jury concluded that the Housing Authority was to blame for not having installed a smoke detector or fixed a faulty heater.
The two sexual harassment cases occurred in 1998 and 1999.
Also after HUD’s stewardship ended.
“I’m from HUD and my work here is done.”
In one of the cases, HUD hired the harasser during its time overseeing the Housing Authority, even though the woman had previously been fired from her position on the Housing Authority Commission for neglecting her duties, Agnos said.
Perhaps all that harassing kept her from doing her job?
“Memo to self: harass co-worker”
Agnos is also seeking documents related to Ronnie Davis, who was appointed by then-Mayor Willie Brown to run the Housing Authority after HUD returned control of the agency to the city.
Davis pleaded guilty in late 2001 to wrongdoing in his previous job at the Cleveland Housing Authority.
So if former mayor Agnos is now actively prosecuting the matter, he must be on the job, right? Uh, no — the Examiner again:
Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos has yet to officially take over as receiver of the city’s troubled Housing Authority, but he is already seeking documents as a private citizen that he says could prove the federal government ignored mismanagement in the agency and punished those who tried to bring it to light.
A San Francisco Superior Court judge appointed Agnos last month as receiver of the agency and charged him with getting the judgments paid. The Housing Authority has appealed the appointment, so Agnos has not officially started the job. [As of
Agnos said Thursday he believes that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the Housing Authority, was culpable in three multimillion-dollar legal judgments that the city agency says it is unable to pay.
Let me get this straight: a former
Putting aside the eyebrow-raising financial arrangement,
$400 an hour?
the appointment of Agnos would be obviously problematic to anyone who has even paid scant attention to
I have never heard of a receivership being mandatory, and the Examiner quotes Mr. Agnos:
“This is not my idea, this is a job I do not want nor should I have it,” Agnos said. “It came to me — I did not go seeking it.”
The right way to end all flirtatious speculation is
“If nominated I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”
Why then did the reluctant Mr. Agnos take it on?
“But it’s The City’s responsibility to deal with it and it’s wrong that it’s been avoiding it for 10 years. This should have been taken care of a long time ago.”
No one can argue that.
Not even an argumentative lawyer
And while Agnos may have the experience to deal with housing matters after his years working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, he is still not the proper person to fix the agency’s problem. Agnos is no more able to magically find $15 million that The City owes to pay off the Housing Authority’s legal bills than you or I, but overseeing a city agency during an election year would certainly provide a bully pulpit for a prominent political player.
For HUD, Mr. Agnos had ominous words:
“If the documents I’m seeking demonstrate that HUD had a major role (in the conditions that led to the legal judgments), then I will expect them to play a major role in paying the judgments,” he said. “I believe that HUD has a role in this that they must acknowledge.”
Such funding from HUD would be welcome relief to
Donna White, a spokeswoman for HUD, said Thursday that she hadn’t seen Agnos’ requests but she was confident they wouldn’t amount to much.
What HUD thinks the claim is worth
“HUD’s only role in this is to ensure that federal funds are not used, as it would adversely affect thousands of low-income
Why is HUD involved at all? Aren’t these fundamentally SFHA’s misdeeds? To hear Mr. Agnos tell it, the rot goes back years and years:
Okay, maybe not that long ago …
Agnos is seeking any documents related to John Phillips and Richard Mallory. Both served as regional director of HUD based in
Phillips was acting director in 2001, and President Bush appointed Mallory to the position in early 2002. Agnos held the job under President Bill Clinton.
Both Phillips and Mallory complained to HUD in writing about the San Francisco Housing Authority. Phillips was demoted after making his complaints, and Mallory was fired after making his, Agnos said. Mallory could not be reached Thursday, but Phillips confirmed Agnos’ version of his demotion.
“I do think responsibility lies on several plates for having these issues unresolved for such a long time,” Phillips said. “HUD is certainly one of the responsible parties.”
Indeed, courtesy of the Google, one finds this Chronicle story from October, 2002:
In a series of sharply worded letters — including one to President Bush’s White House counsel — a former top federal official says he was fired to stop him from cracking down on misuse of public funds at the San Francisco Housing Authority.
Richard W. Mallory complained he was fired as Western regional director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of a “coverup” of fiscal improprieties that was allegedly engineered by a powerful Republican official in
The one, the only
Former mayor Brown, one may recall, is a Democrat.
In the letters, copies of which were obtained by The Chronicle after HUD formally denied their existence,
“I tell you, I don’t know anything about any letters.”
Oh, those letters whose existence we formally denied!
Mallory makes a series of serious accusations against the man who fired him: HUD Deputy Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is [October, 2002; today he is the HUD secretary — Ed.] the nation’s No. 2 public housing executive [Number 1 today — Ed.], as well as a confidant and longtime political supporter of President Bush.
When Mallory took office last December, the San Francisco Housing Authority was under fire. Housing Authority executive Patricia Williams had recently been sentenced to prison for taking bribes in exchange for federal rent subsidies. Its executive director, Ronnie Davis, was awaiting misdemeanor sentencing for misusing public funds at a housing agency in
Mallory, 49 [Now 54, we presume — Ed.], is a career housing expert who served as a regional director of the U.S. Farmers Home Administration under President Ronald Reagan and as state director of Housing and Community Development under Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.
Who at HUD did Mr. Mallory replace? Why, someone we have already met in this post:
Is this where I find my next job?
In December, President Bush named him to replace former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos in the $135,000-per-year regional director’s post in
Mr. Agnos is thus seeking documents relating to the man who superseded him at HUD. What do Mr. Mallory’s accusations have to do with the current litigation?
The agency’s current director, Gregg Fortner, dismissed Agnos’ document requests Thursday [
“That’s a HUD issue, way back when Willie Brown was mayor,” he said. “If we’re going to start digging that up …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but added, “I never said I liked this job.”
What’s wrong with this picture? The Examiner:
The words troubled and Housing Authority have been linked for so long, you’d think that city officials would have come up with a new euphemism by now to describe the agency that oversees public housing in
But the terms politics and public policy have an equally bad history together here, which is why the current case involving the San Francisco Housing Authority is an unseemly, frustrating, unmitigated mess.
Years ago, when I was a mere snarky young lad, I subscribed to Mad Magazine, which ran a grotesquely awful cartoon of a completely dysfunctional family, with the caption What’s wrong with this picture?
What’s wrong with this story, I wonder?
The answer, as I still remember after more than forty years, was:
Better you should ask, What’s right with this picture?
And the answer in
Follow the fingers to those taking responsibility
As Dickens might have written, were he a Chronicle reporter:
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.
Perennially hopeless?
Everything about the SFHA case and situation is a mess. That one of the nation’s most prosperous, vibrant, intellectually rich cities should have a housing authority that is a ten-year deadbeat is a disgrace. It’s brought about in essence because housing authorities are not economic owners, have none of the rights and responsibilities of owners, and thus frequently neither behave like owners nor are rewarded or penalized like owners. As I wrote many months ago, it’s long overdue for public housing to cut the Gordian Knot.
