The fate of the D.C. Housing Authority now lies in the hands of a new, nine-member governing board. They’ve got roughly two years to turn around DCHA, an agency that’s been floundering for most of the past two decades.
Emergency reform legislation the D.C. Council passed Tuesday afternoon established the new state of play, an outcome Mayor Muriel Bowser and Chairman Phil Mendelson engineered as they attempt to respond to the latest public outrage about DCHA’s failures. They’ve assured the public that this is the antidote for the agency’s many problems, arguing that only a reconstituted “stabilization and reform board” can stave off a federal takeover of the District’s largest landlord. Now, lawmakers have started the clock to find out if they’re right.
The measure appeared in danger of failing as recently as two weeks ago, with Mendelson pulling a prior version as questions mounted about its provisions. The perception that Bowser was using the bill as a way to boot prominent critics from the DCHA board was particularly damaging. But you can’t count out Mendelson’s ability to swing votes—he managed to find exactly the nine votes he needed to pass the legislation on an emergency basis, moving the bill to the very start of the Council’s agenda in a signal of just how confident he was that it would pass.
It all had to feel a bit circular for At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, one of the bill’s most determined critics. She started her Council career eight years ago as one of the few voices prominently challenging Bowser and Mendelson’s agenda; a lot’s changed since then, but she spent her final meeting doing the exact same thing.
She’d offered a more comprehensive alternative along with Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, hoping to reform the DCHA board but also address more structural problems with the agency’s operations, but it barely got a second look. Even some of her traditional allies sided against her, with votes from Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, and At-Large Councilmember Robert White ensuring that Bowser’s measure survived. Only Pinto, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White joined Silverman in voting against it.
“This bill represents the tightest leash we’ve had on the authority,” Nadeau said during the meeting, despite previously announcing her opposition to the bill.
Loose Lips is cynical enough to note that you can’t view big votes at the end of the year as purely principled stands when committee assignments are still up for grabs. Despite rumblings that the new Council could take a more muscular role in voting down Mendelson’s recommendations, the chairman still mostly controls that process and hasn’t been shy about trading favors in the past. What if, say, Robert White was eager for a better post than his role chairing the dry government operations committee? What if Allen was tired of the social media criticism that comes with chairing the judiciary committee? It can’t hurt to cast a vote Mendelson’s way in those cases. (Nadeau’s motivations are less clear, unless she thinks she can add some big agencies to her human services panel or make some sort of other jump.)
But that is all just innuendo, for now—just wait a few days until committee assignments are announced for more. Some lawmakers expressed their sincere belief that this board will deliver better results for DCHA residents, so it’s worth at least considering taking them at their word.
“Even if I like some of the members on the current board, this is about: Can this board make public housing better?” Robert White said. “The answer is ‘no’ or else it would’ve done it already. The new board can.”
Mendelson similarly expressed his belief that DCHA currently “doesn’t have a functioning governing board,” noting that many current members have expressed such a belief in public. The HUD report that kicked off this current round of reform efforts documented similar claims. And Nadeau hailed the fact that this proposal is now “more the Council’s than the mayor’s,” considering lawmakers opted for the “somewhat unprecedented move” of negotiating nominees to the board directly with Bowser. Despite initial fears that the new board would be entirely beholden to the mayor, Nadeau argued that the Council has found the right crop of relatively independent experts to steer DCHA.
Trayon White succinctly summed up the problem with that line of thinking: “I’m unable to hear how restructuring this board will be able to fix some of the problems.” Similarly, a coalition of eight housing-focused advocacy groups wrote in a Dec. 19 letter that it sees “no
explanation as to why the ‘Stabilization and Reform’ Board would be more effective than the current board.”
The whole debate underscores just how unfamiliar most lawmakers appear with how the soon-to-be-former Board of Commissioners operated. LL has tortured himself with many hours of watching these meetings and reading board transcripts, however, and can offer some small amount of insight.
Undoubtedly, a lack of expertise with public housing issues was part of the problem that this legislation is meant to address: The board was littered with political allies of the mayor who had virtually no experience in this arena. Chair Dionne Bussey-Reeder, LeJuan Strickland, and Jose Ortiz Gaud (who recently left the board) were all fine examples of Bowser’s tendency to staff the board with pals rather than pros. Readers with longer memories may recall that Josh Lopez also won a spot on this board before making some very poor decisions about where to hold a microphone in 2018.
Yet, in recent months, the board slowly but surely saw an influx of more qualified members. Melissa Lee and Ed Fisher might have both been friendly to the mayor, but at least both had a bunch of experience in the development world (if not public housing specifically). The Council also appointed Raymond Skinner, a former Maryland housing secretary with a wealth of housing experience in D.C. government (he’ll stay on as chair of the new-look board). The board wasn’t perfect, but it’s certainly better than it used to be.
The bigger issue is how the board actually governed DCHA. The mayor’s nominees often voted as a bloc, largely without asking any questions of DCHA leaders (as the HUD report noted), allowing the executive director pretty much free rein over the agency’s major policy moves. Current agency head Brenda Donald has complained frequently that the board was not “supportive” enough of her initiatives, but that ignores the favorable outcomes of most votes.
Some members were critical and asked tough questions—most notably, Bill Slover and Ann Hoffman, both of whom will be booted from the new board—but DCHA-backed measures rarely failed. To the extent that the board was “not operating well,” as Mendelson put it, that’s because the board’s chair (first Neil Albert, before a scandal enveloped him, and then Bussey-Reeder) was often busy trying to shut down questioning from Slover and his few allies.
Read most charitably for Bowser, this new board could come in with a clean slate, free of the old conflicts and divisions—only Skinner, Lee, Denise Blackson, and Ronnie Harris will remain from the old board. But that doesn’t change the underlying structural problem: Like the board of any corporation, the agenda was driven by the top executive. Board members never proposed initiatives on their own; they were presented with items Donald and her deputies prepared, then voted on them.
The board was essentially designed to provide oversight, not steer the ship. It barely even had a role in setting the agency’s budget, theoretically one of the most important decisions of the year for DCHA. Generally, the director would present the entire budget in one detail-free document for a single up-or-down vote—compare that to the months of horse-trading between the Council and mayor on the city’s spending plan. Really, the board’s most important role was in hiring (and firing) the executive director.
Is there any reason to believe things will be any different for the new board? The legislation describes a role for it in monitoring DCHA’s progress in meeting the recommendations of the HUD report (and delivering updates to the Council on that progress), but will it be empowered to force change at the agency? The lone tool the board used to have was in demanding answers from DCHA leaders as they presented policy changes. Booting Slover sends the message that even that bit of mild criticism is unacceptable. So what will the new board actually do that the old one couldn’t?
“Notably, HUD found that the current Executive Director ‘has no experience in property
development, property management or managing federal housing programs,’ yet this bill does not address current leadership or other staffing concerns,” Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, Legal Aid of District of Columbia, Bread for the City, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Legal Counsel for the Elderly, Children’s Law Center, Rising for Justice, and Empower DC wrote in their letter. “True reform aimed at resolving the fundamental problems at DCHA must also address leadership, internal agency deficiencies, and the grave failings to meet the many needs of DCHA constituents in the provision of safe and affordable housing.”
There is hope yet for more substantial change. Pinto pledged to re-introduce her broader reform bill even without Silverman on the Council, and Nadeau said she hopes lawmakers don’t view Bowser’s legislation as a “one-and-done” effort to fix DCHA.
But Silverman herself didn’t sound terribly optimistic Tuesday. She dug up a Washington Post article from May 1994 describing then-Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s efforts to stave off federal receivership for the agency formerly known as the D.C. Department of Public and Assisted Housing, seeing plenty of echoes with the debate ongoing today. Kelly fired her housing director, ordered up some hasty repairs, put up fences around some properties with high crime rates, and even established a five-member board with HUD to give the agency some input. None of it made much of a dent, and the feds took over later that year.
Silverman sees Bowser’s latest plan as a similar attempt at making some “quick fixes” without generating actual results. For one of the rare lawmakers to actually devote attention to DCHA’s problems before the HUD report, it seems a fitting warning to sound on the way out the door.
“Let’s not cross our fingers and hope this is going to make the changes we need this time,” Silverman said. “Turn down the alarm decibel and I guarantee you we’ll see this story again and again and again.”