‘It’s Been Hell,’ Housing Chief Says of Tenure

Leila Gonzalez-Correa, embattled chief of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, is the first to concede that differences with her governing board have caused her one headache after another.

As stated in a series of interviews:

- She is convinced that when she became executive director of the Housing Authority in 1986, her secretary had remained loyal to supporters of her predecessor and was assigned by them to spy on her.

- Relations between Gonzalez-Correa and the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners became so heated that the board called in a psychologist to mediate. After a single session, both sides gave up on the consultations as a waste of time.

- After her first year on the job, she submitted a report telling of her accomplishments--and the commissioners ignored it.

“It’s been hell. Two years. It’s been hell,” Gonzalez-Correa said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried. I can’t tell you how many times I have been angry. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve decided to leave L.A.”

Despite her anguish--compounded by disclosures Friday that she violated federal regulations while awarding contracts to acquaintances--Gonzalez-Correa appears in no danger of losing her $100,000-a-year job. She has demonstrated her skills as a savvy political survivor at City Hall and enjoys the strong backing of the mayor’s office.

Bradley ‘Supportive’

Bradley “has been supportive of the work she has been doing and recognizes it is a tough job,” one top aide to the mayor said. “He stands behind her.”

Gonzalez-Correa, 58, came to the Housing Authority with high hopes of turning around a troubled agency that had been poorly managed under former Executive Director Homer Smith. Her impressive credentials, background and dynamic personality made her the unanimous choice of Bradley and his commissioners following an exhaustive nationwide search.

A divorced mother of three, Gonzalez-Correa had submitted an eight-page resume chock-full of career accomplishments. She was graduated from the University of Puerto Rico Law School in 1958, established a law practice in Puerto Rico and taught law at InterAmerican University. She then became a staff attorney for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Dallas in 1981, general counsel for the Dallas Housing Authority from 1982 to 1985 and the head of housing authorities in El Paso and Austin, Tex., in 1986.

A further check of her background shows, however, that Gonzalez-Correa ran into problems at other housing agencies. The executive director position in Los Angeles was her third top post at a housing authority within a year. In El Paso, her stormy eight-month tenure was marked by a mass firing of 240 employees and constant bickering with tenant activists.

Gonzalez-Correa came to Los Angeles “to make things happen,” she said. “I wanted to work here for five years because that’s more or less the period of time that it takes to turn a Housing Authority around. And then I want to leave L.A. I’m afraid of the earthquakes.”

Gonzalez-Correa said she has been frustrated by an inability to deal with the Board of Housing Commissioners, whose seven members are appointed by the mayor to oversee the Housing Authority.

“When I came here, there was nobody in this Housing Authority that knew anything about anything,” Gonzalez-Correa said. “I didn’t have anybody to work with. I don’t have anybody to defend me. I don’t have the support of the board. I’m totally left out on my own. But you know, I’m a fool and I continue day after day because I believe in what I’m doing.”

For her part, Gonzalez-Correa said she is not worried about her status.

“Money is not a big thing to me. I come from a very good family in Puerto Rico. I’ve traveled all over the world. I have had everything. . . . I don’t need glory because I’m not going to stay here in L.A. It’s my loss in the sense that I have not been able to accomplish something that I wanted to do. But, you know, I’m not going to go on the welfare rolls.”