From Despair to Hope: Hope VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in America's Cities

12. How HOPE VI Has Helped Reshape Public Housing

205 chapter The world of public housing is currently undergoing a great deal of change. Much of the shift is due to draconian reductions in federal funding that have created great challenges for the more than 3,100 local housing authorities that administer the traditional public housing program and its nearly 1.2 million housing units.1 Years of funding shortfalls have left housing authorities struggling to simply maintain their properties, let alone chip away at long-deferred needs for repair and replacement.2 But in an industry seemingly awash in bad news, there is good news. The ongoing quest to do more with less coincides with an emerging paradigm that will transform the public housing industry and equip local housing authorities to weather today’s challenges better than the old top-down, process-oriented system did. This new way of being has its roots, in great part, in HOPE VI: – By requiring the public housing industry to focus on projects as real estate, HOPE VI forced it to rethink its basics and move toward a more effective system of management. – By opening the door to leveraging federal public housing funds with private capital, the program gave local housing authorities, which manage public housing, greater control of their own destinies. – By introducing local housing authorities to new tools and partnerships, the program changed their perceptions about what they could be. – By reintroducing a generally long-absent mix of incomes in public housing communities, the program spurred housing leaders to reexamine what public housing should look like and whom it should serve. That HOPE VI would serve as “the laboratory for the reinvention of public housing” and produce “models for ending the isolation of the public housing agency” was expressly spelled out by HUD in one of the early funding notices for the program.3 But although HOPE VI did lead to a real revolution in thinking within the world of public housing, the new operating model has not yet been adopted and institutionalized across the public housing industry. If the industry richard c. gentry How HOPE VI Has Helped Reshape Public Housing 12 The unrepaired kitchen ceiling in Inez Davis’s apartment in Lincoln Heights Dwellings in 1971 attested to the severe dysfunction afflicting the District of Columbia’s public housing authority , which, like many big city PHAs, was just as troubled in the early 1990s. 206 richard c. gentry hopes to maintain the critical resources that it offers U.S. communities, it must continue on its positive trajectory. Dysfunction Begets Distress In 1990, when I was CEO of the Redevelopment and Housing Authority of Richmond, Virginia, I testified before the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. I told the commission that distressed sites were not the only entities needing an overhaul: the terrible conditions at some sites were in many respects the physical manifestation of fundamental design flaws in the public housing system itself. At the time, running a local housing authority was akin to being an East German business manager. One had to learn how to make do in an overly centralized , top-down system in which program control was vested in Congress and HUD, leaving almost no autonomy to local housing authorities. Due to an odd provision in the Annual Contribution Contract (ACC), which sets the terms by which local authorities receive funds for operating public housing units, the unilateral right to call the shots rested with the federal government. The ACC stipulates that a local housing authority must accept any change to the ACC made by the federal government (that is, adhere to future HUD regulations , notices, and directives). HUD tended to operate by issuing rigid, uniform directives and evaluating housing authorities on how well they complied with the one-size-fits-all program rules. Furthermore, the rules dictating housing authority operations would change, sometimes drastically, whenever the Democratic or Republican Party got control of the federal government. As a result, many authorities had abdicated the role of self-evaluation and self-direction and they saw little relevance in standard real estate principles, such as the notion that each property comes with a unique set of issues, problems , and opportunities. Few metrics were developed to measure the performance of individual properties; the focus was on program compliance and uniformity of standards. The disconnect between the public housing industry and the larger real estate industry also meant that few real estate experts were working in public housing, even at the CEO level. The government’s skewed...