New Life at Housing

Providing housing for low-income people in Los Angeles has been stalled for months, even years, because of administrative turmoil in the city’s Housing Authority. But now the authority’s board of commissioners has shown uncommon leadership and independence by insisting that the turmoil must end and by showing the way: buying out the last year of executive director Homer Smith’s contract.

Smith came in for repeated criticism for failing to follow competitive-bidding procedures in awarding lucrative contracts, overpaying people who turned out to be his friends and then failing to implement reforms to correct the problems even when they were repeatedly outlined in the press and by city authorities. The housing agency might even have been able to do its job despite these problems had Smith’s personnel management not been so poor. City management audits disclosed a 75% turnover in the top 20 Housing Authority positions. Housing does not get built and managed without people who do the job staying on the job.

This failure to move forward in recent months has cost poor people in real terms. The federal government recently reclaimed money for about 400 housing units that had been approved but weren’t being built. The housing authority has also fallen eight years behind in modernizing existing units for the poor.

The authority commissioners, who include two tenants and people from the business community with solid management sense, have pledged a nationwide search for the best possible successor. He or she will inherit an agency that now has an upbeat feeling, a sense that changes ahead will be good ones. The new executive director can capitalize on that feeling and get on with the job at hand: creating housing for people with low incomes.