Bradley Picks Director for L.A. Housing Partnership

Gary Squier, acting executive director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, has been named by Mayor Tom Bradley to direct the as-yet unformed Los Angeles Housing Partnership, it was announced Tuesday.

Squier, who helped the beleaguered Housing Authority land millions of dollars in extra federal funding this year, had been considered a top finalist in the Housing Authority’s nationwide search for a permanent director--a position that is expected to be filled in January.

However, Squier said Tuesday his new post--considered by housing experts a plum position for its oversight of the city’s major new push toward creating affordable housing--”will really be on the cutting edge.”

“I’m excited about it,” Squier said. “It’s a real opportunity for me to become very involved in the policies that we need to help create and rehabilitate housing for low-income residents.”

Squier, a longtime advocate of housing for low-income families in Southern California, was a nonprofit developer of housing for the poor at the Community Corp. of Santa Monica before being named two years ago by Bradley to act as his first-ever housing coordinator.

Widely considered an innovative thinker on housing issues in city government, Squier was named acting director of the Housing Authority eight months ago. He replaced the agency’s controversial executive director, Leila Gonzalez-Correa, who resigned amid growing criticism for her plan to sell the troubled Jordan Downs housing project in Watts and after charges of improperly awarding contracts to acquaintances.

In a letter to Squier, Bradley commended him for his excellent job of managing the Housing Authority and for the “vision and drive” he brought to improving the agency and to helping fashion the city’s fledgling housing policy.

“It is for this drive and vision that I ask you to assume the chief staff position of the Los Angeles Housing Partnership to help direct public policy to combat Los Angeles’ housing problem,” Bradley wrote.

In the last two years, Bradley has made housing a key issue. Studies have shown that Los Angeles families face the nation’s worst rental affordability crisis, with 300,000 families paying rents considered unaffordable by the federal government. But city policies have lagged several years behind Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities that have aggressive affordable housing programs.

The Los Angeles Housing Partnership, whose formation is now under way, will be a public-private agency overseen by the city but run by professional housing, development, financial and architectural executives.

The partnership, closely patterned after successful public and private agencies in several U.S. cities, will raise and disperse hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to create and rehabilitate housing for the poor. The agency, the brainchild of Bradley’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Affordable Housing, will also train and develop nonprofit, independent developers to create low-income housing and renovate their own neighborhoods.

Squier’s formal title will be chief of staff of the agency. Several sources said within the next few weeks Bradley will name an executive director who is a well-known businessman and whose name is expected to attract major corporate leaders to the housing effort.