HUD Built Unsafe Homes for Alaska Natives, Report Finds

A Department of Housing and Urban Development program intended to provide decent housing for Native Americans in remote areas of Alaska has instead built “primarily substandard” homes that pose serious safety hazards and will require millions of dollars to repair, according to a new report by HUD investigators.

A major factor in the pervasive problems in the program was a decision early in the administration of former HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr. to impose an “arbitrary” cap on how much could be spent to build homes, a cost-cutting limit that was set “without any realistic relationship to the actual costs needed to develop . . . housing in remote and rural regions in Alaska,” according to the report by HUD’s independent inspector general.

Houses Toppling

As a result of cost-cutting, poorly built plywood houses unsuited to Alaskan winters are now toppling from shaky foundations; ice builds up to thicknesses of six inches on interior walls, and at least one resident died in a fire after she could not escape through thick plastic put up as a makeshift barrier against howling Arctic winds, investigators found.

HUD’s housing program for Alaska’s Native Americans began with good intentions 14 years ago but has been riddled with problems from the beginning. The program has been poorly planned and managed and did not account for the unique life style of the hunters and fishermen who live in the houses, investigators said.

But the problems were made much worse by the cost limits imposed by HUD headquarters during the 1980s when most of the houses were built in Alaska. The report does not specify whether Pierce played any personal role in the decision to impose the cost limits.

Expensive Repairs

The cost-cutting steps may ultimately prove more expensive in the long run than if the houses had been built properly at the outset. HUD has already spent more than $19 million, from 1984 to 1988, to repair some of the defective homes, with some of the repair funds obtained only after Native Americans sued the agency. Local Indian groups filed claims during the last year seeking another $21 million to correct conditions that investigators said are often “hazardous” and “life-threatening.”

The primary HUD housing program for Native Americans living in remote areas of Alaska is the Mutual Help Homeownership Program, through which individual houses are built on land owned by a tribal or village council. A family pays fees similar to mortgage payments, amounting to 30% of income, for 25 years and must also pay its own utility bills and provide necessary maintenance on the property.

About 3,200 houses have been built in Alaska under the program, and investigators found that 64% of those houses have been involved in litigation over substandard conditions or have received federal funds to correct defects after construction.

But, based on an inspection of 714 homes in 42 villages, HUD investigators concluded that virtually all houses built under the program have serious problems and defects.

“In a sense, HUD has been building experimental housing for Arctic conditions,” according to Virginia Spencer, executive director of the Native American Indian Housing Council in Washington.

Most of the houses are small prefabricated boxes, with plywood siding, that are transported during short summer construction seasons on barges to coastal villages and then assembled on the homesite.

“These houses don’t seem to be much different from what you’d find in Tucson, Ariz. . . . They are not modified for the Arctic,” said Richard E. Nygaard, HUD’s regional inspector general for audit in Seattle, whose staff conducted a seven-month investigation and flew with bush pilots to inspect houses in remote villages.

Built on Piers

The chief concession to the Alaskan climate is that the houses are built on stilt-like piers, from two to eight feet above the ground, because of permafrost or tundra and the heavy winter snows. But the houses shift and move on their bases, requiring frequent adjustment and jacking up, which the residents often do not have the skills or tools to do.

The investigators found virtually all the houses they inspected had “unsound and weakening foundations,” and they documented, with photographs and eight hours of videotape, many houses in imminent danger of collapse.

Moreover, the houses have been built with little regard for the residents’ “subsistence life style,” the report said.

Most of the villagers hunt game and fish to provide food for their families and have little cash to buy even basic supplies, which must be ordered by mail. Even an incandescent light bulb is a luxury.

Many villages have electricity provided by diesel generators owned by a tribal council, with residents billed according to their usage, Nygaard said. Since fluorescent lighting tubes last longer and are cheaper to operate than the incandescent fixtures built into the houses, residents have tried to wire their own fluorescent fixtures. HUD investigators found numerous examples of dangerous rewiring.

Kitchen stoves are designed to be fueled by large propane tanks, but many villagers are too poor to buy them. Instead, they often use portable camp stoves fueled by small propane canisters that are cheaper and easier to obtain.

Some villages have no running water or sewage collection, and bathtubs in the houses are unusable. Inspectors found some residents storing dead game animals in bathtubs and in one home a seal carcass awaiting butchering was lying on a kitchen floor.

“Many residents ask, ‘Why can’t the houses have an attached cold room for storing game,’ ” Spencer said. In winter, it is too cold outdoors to operate chain saws needed to carve frozen game.

A HUD headquarters official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that some houses have been built with cold rooms, but he acknowledged that under the construction cost cap most houses could not be built with the added room.

Some more prosperous villages have built communal smokehouses for treatment of game, Spencer said, but HUD does not provide grants or loans for such projects, which are too costly for many poor villages to build on their own.

Representatives of the Native Americans in Alaska and HUD officials all agree that the HUD housing is better than the sod houses or tiny shacks that housed extended families before the program began. But the HUD houses are “nonetheless hazardous, unaffordable, maintenance-intensive and generally unsuitable for the unique Alaskan environment,” the report said.

“The housing conditions are abominable” in most remote villages, Spencer said, and Alaska’s Native Americans have “the highest rate of substandard housing” in the United States. A 1987 survey by the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that about 10,000 new housing units were urgently needed for Alaska’s Native Americans.