Bradley to Propose New Housing Department

Mayor Tom Bradley is expected to announce plans today for the creation of a new housing department that will focus on the city’s growing shortage of affordable housing, aides said Tuesday.

At the same time, Bradley will propose the creation of a new seven-member commission to oversee the department, said Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani.

If the plan is approved by the City Council, the authority of the city’s beleaguered Community Development Department would be drastically reduced. The new department would take over the functions of the CDD’s housing division, leaving only job-training and other social service programs under the CDD.

The department would be the second one created by Bradley in recent months, coming on the heels of an Environmental Affairs Department that began operations this year.

The mayor’s office did not indicate the size of the new department’s budget or the cost of creating the agency. The CDD has a housing staff of about 120 and administers housing programs costing millions of dollars.

Fabiani said a nationwide search would be conducted for a manager to head the new department if the proposal gets council backing.

The proposal, to be announced at a morning news conference at City Hall, comes a few weeks after Bradley publicly criticized the CDD for poor management and other problems.

At that time, Bradley called for a staff reorganization, saying that “problems” had been brought to his attention involving “shortfalls” in the expenditure of state and federal grant money by the department and community-based agencies it deals with.

He said he also had learned that the department had failed to properly monitor subcontractors.

Bradley called for personnel changes at the management level but, as of this week, city officials said those changes had not been implemented.

CDD officials at the center of the management shake-up did not return phone calls Tuesday.

Fabiani called the mayor’s anticipated announcement “part of a renewed focus on the mayor’s part on affordable housing.”

“The mayor has made a determination that the best way to address the affordable housing crisis in the city is to create a city housing department,” Fabiani said.

Bradley has said repeatedly that most poor families in Los Angeles pay more than 50% of their income to rent, and that 40,000 families live in garages. Officials also estimate that there are at least 35,000 homeless people in the city.

Charles Elsesser, a housing consultant to state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), a leading supporter of affordable housing programs, welcomed the proposed action, saying he hopes “it indicates a change in the city’s housing programs.”

“We’ve had a lot of concern with the Community Development Department’s handling of housing (preservation) programs, and we hope this means the city will take a new look at these programs and possibly redo them along the lines of other cities,” Elsesser said.

Creation of a housing commission to forge and direct city housing policy was urged in 1988 by the mayor’s blue-ribbon committee on affordable housing, which concluded after a year of study that Los Angeles lagged several years behind Boston, San Francisco, New York and other cities in adopting innovative housing programs.

The group’s sweeping recommendations for reform of the city’s housing policies were approved in concept by the City Council last year.

Those recommendations hinge on using nonprofit housing developers, public and private funds, and innovative financing and land-use methods to build low-cost rental housing and preserve inexpensive rental stock that is currently being demolished or gentrified.

According to Sydney Irmas, chairman of the blue-ribbon committee and a wealthy businessman who has financed several nonprofit housing ventures, the city’s disjointed housing efforts are being carried out by 11 agencies, including the CDD, that are often involved in duplicative and outdated programs.

Late last year, Irmas and the committee turned up the pressure on elected officials, lobbying Bradley to create a housing commission and adopt other reforms it had recommended.

Another major proposal, to charge large commercial developers a fee that will be used to build low-cost housing, has already received preliminary approval by the City Council.