Activist to Lead Housing Dept. : City Hall: The mayor names Gary Squier, a longtime advocate of more low-income housing, to run the new agency. Observers say Bradley is shaking up the bureaucracy in response to a deepening crisis.

Mayor Tom Bradley on Tuesday named Gary Squier, a longtime advocate for the poor and for reform of the city’s affordable-housing programs, to run the city’s new 244-person Housing Preservation and Production Department.

Squier, 39, who began his career in the mid-1970s as a VISTA volunteer on Skid Row, has been a private housing consultant and developer as well as acting director of the city Housing Authority. He was previously city housing coordinator under Bradley.

Bradley, at a press conference in front of an uninhabitable brick building that once housed 100 families, gave a plug to the city housing bond measure, Proposition K, and a state housing bond measure, Proposition 145, before calling Squier “an ideal choice.”

Squier has been praised by many developers, bankers, advocates for the poor and neighborhood revitalization groups as an expert strategist who can bring together disparate sectors of the city to attack the housing crisis.

At the same time, his appointment is of interest for the activist political message Bradley is sending, said several City Hall observers.

“That’s fantastic!” cried UCLA Associate Prof. Alan Heskin when told of the appointment.

“A political appointment was a great early fear of many people, and there’s no question that instead what we are getting is a tremendously qualified, exceptional person,” said Heskin, who is head of the urban planning program at UCLA and a member of the interviewing team that scored Squier highest among six finalists.

Squier said his department will control a $50-million annual budget to build and rehabilitate low-income housing. The housing department also will review the housing efforts of all other city departments, including the Community Redevelopment Agency. That agency’s budget has become the target of intensifying criticism from City Council members who complain that it is so complex they cannot tell what they are paying for.

“We’ll be acting in an advise-and-consent role to that agency,” Squier said. “Both of us are looking at better ways to get things done.”

Squier will join a fellow activist, Charles Elsesser, a former Legal Aid Foundation attorney who was named this month as chairman of the city’s newly formed Housing Commission, a citizens panel that oversees the housing department.

Elsesser, who is also an aide to state Sen. President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), battled the city in the late 1980s as a Legal Aid lawyer, arguing that longtime city policies had diminished low-cost housing in Los Angeles.

Squier and Elsesser met 15 years ago while working on behalf of the poor on Skid Row, and their appointments represent what many say is an increasingly determined effort by Bradley to shake up the city’s housing bureaucracy and respond to a deepening housing crisis.

Bradley’s push to create low-cost housing began in 1988 with the formation of the Blue Ribbon Committee on Affordable Housing. The group recommended, among other things, raising large sums to build affordable housing by charging a fee to big commercial developers.

A slow response by the City Council to those recommendations prompted some Blue Ribbon Committee members to criticize Bradley several months ago for not lobbying council members hard enough. Today, however, 15 of the group’s 16 original recommendations are being implemented, including the developer fee.

Two other key recommendations--the creation of a housing department and a Housing Commission--were implemented this fall and are considered by many to be the most extensive bureaucratic reforms in City Hall in a decade. Before that, housing efforts were overseen by 11 different divisions within city government.

Squier said passage next week by voters of Proposition K would boost his department’s budget by 40%. However, he said, “Even with that, we have to get other local sources of funds because no one source can make up for federal housing cuts of the past decade.”

Aside from funding, he said, the issue in the 1990s will be to change city policies that work at cross purposes to discourage housing construction.

Squier cited the failure by planners to create high-density housing zones along the new Blue Line, saying that such a transportation corridor, if planned in today’s climate, “would be an obvious choice for low and middle-income (apartment units).”

According to City Housing Coordinator Michael Bodaken--another 1990 mayoral appointment from the activist ranks--Bradley selected Squier after the city Personnel Department chose 12 candidates from 36 applicants nationwide.

During a four-month search, a four-member committee, including Heskin, narrowed the finalists to six and forwarded those names to Bradley, Bodaken said.

“The mayor was looking for administrative experience, vision and problem-solving,” said Bodaken, a former Legal Aid attorney. “Nobody--not the department or the mayor or the council--wanted a political appointment.”

Heskin said scores given to the candidates by the four-member committee “are public record, and Gary Squier got 95 out of 100. The next candidate, a really terrific choice from New York, got 91, but Gary had a clear edge for his knowledge not only of housing but of City Hall.”