Architect of Recovery

Gary Squier, being ambitious, aggressive and the head of a 375-employee bureaucracy that provides housing for poor people, expected to catch flak.

And he has, even as he has basked in praise for leading the city’s quick recovery from the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

It comes with the territory, he said.

“If you don’t do anything, then you don’t have problems.”

Ever since his return to the Housing Department last month from a six-month assignment with federal housing officials, Squier has been in the headlines either amid controversy or when sharing his vision for how the city should deal with blight and decay.

Late last month, he drew praise in housing circles for his open letter to the mayor in which he called for a fundamental change in the way the city deals with its rundown neighborhoods.

He denounced current city policy that pours millions of dollars into model housing projects, which he dubbed “diamonds in the desert” because of the deterioration that festers in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Ironically, Squier’s earthquake recovery effort has attracted most of the criticism in recent weeks.

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Repair work in parts of North Hills--one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods-- virtually stalled after his department awarded almost $11 million in loans and grants to an inexperienced but politically connected nonprofit developer.

He also has had to answer for the failure of his department to take action against contractors doing earthquake repairs who violated the federal Davis-Bacon Act by not paying their employees prevailing wages.

“The prevailing-wage issue is one where we had our eye on one ball and not the other, and we let it slip,” he said.

Councilman Richard Alarcon, while giving Squier a good job evaluation overall, called the department’s failure to keep tabs on the wages of contractors’ employees “unconscionable” and said Squier needs to move faster to increase monitoring.

“It’s not like we haven’t identified this problem before now,” said Alarcon, who has also blamed the Housing Department for the slow pace of earthquake recovery in the North Hills area.

But Alarcon too has been criticized for the North Hills recovery effort. Critics believe his close association with officials of the nonprofit developer doing the repair work influenced the Housing Department decision to loan so much money to it despite its lack of experience.

Squier has conceded that the department should not have awarded so many projects to the organization.

Despite the criticism, Squier said he does not believe he tried to do too much too quickly after the earthquake.

“There are many things we could have done better had we not been operating on the battlefield,” he said. “But given the time and the many problems facing us, we made the right decisions in the main.

“A clear message had to be sent immediately after the quake that L.A. was on its way back, otherwise whole pieces of the city would start to fray. To wait till you know your response is absolutely perfect would destroy the momentum of recovery or maybe never even let it get started.”

Despite the problems in recent weeks, Squier gets good job ratings overall from people who have dealings with him.

While strongly criticizing Squier for the prevailing-wage problems, Alarcon praises him for guiding the department more toward repairing existing structures than building new ones.

“Gary is an extremely bright person who knows the housing industry, particularly the affordable-housing industry,” said Alarcon, who worked with Squier when they were on former Mayor Tom Bradley’s staff. “He’s done a good job against some incredible odds, especially the earthquake.”

Within two years after the quake, his department had brought $300 million in federal funds to Los Angeles and paid for rebuilding 11,400 houses, apartments and condominiums, which were 98% of the housing units vacated in the 17 hard-hit areas that came to be known as “ghost towns.” It was a pace that beat San Francisco’s recovery from the 1989 earthquake.

Those who know Squier say that rapid response has typified his style of leadership ever since Bradley made him the Housing Department’s first general manager in 1990.

Before he took charge, Los Angeles’ low-income-housing operation was mired in lethargy and fragmented among 11 agencies, according to Alan Heskin, a UCLA urban affairs specialist. With a 500,000-unit shortfall in affordable housing and most of the city’s poor paying half their paycheck for shelter, Los Angeles faced a housing crisis, studies showed.

Squier, a former VISTA volunteer, came in with a reputation as an aggressive advocate for the poor and moved quickly to mold his new department into an activist agency. With an array of financial incentives, he concentrated on luring both for-profit and nonprofit developers into the affordable-housing market, Heskin said.

“A whole industry was created around affordable housing,” he said. When the earthquake hit, that industry provided crucial expertise for helping the city rebuild so quickly, Heskin said.

Squier, 45, grew up in Portland, Ore. His father was a food services salesman and his late mother an interior decorator.

At the University of Oregon, he earned degrees in geography and journalism. He spent a brief time in Oregon as a cartographer but never pursued a career in journalism.

“I just thought it would be more fun to do things than to write about things,” he said.

Now, he is working on a master’s in urban planning at UCLA.

He traces his career interests to the influence of his mother and grandfather.

“I grew up around construction,” he said. “My mother bought houses and rehabilitated them, and my grandfather was an electrician. I’ve always been interested in building things and in architecture.”

Those interests, combined with a bent for social services, carried him into a career in providing affordable housing.

“Poor housing is not just a construction problem,” he said. “Housing is connected to all the problems that affect the quality of life. So housing is a quality-of-life business.”

After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, he worked for the Los Angeles Community Design Center to improve housing for low-income residents of inner-city neighborhoods. He rose to executive director in 1982.

He was co-founder of Skid Row Development, a nonprofit corporation that developed employment projects, a commercial and light-industrial center and a 130-bed housing shelter in South Los Angeles.

Throughout the 1980s, he led nonprofit organizations dealing with affordable housing, and in 1987, Bradley hired Squier as his housing coordinator. He worked on Bradley’s Blue Ribbon Committee for Affordable Housing, whose recommendations led to the creation of the Housing Department and the Housing Commission.

Its work was to become the framework for housing policy. The panel found that the city’s housing program seriously lagged behind those in comparable cities. It recommended using nonprofit housing developers, public and private funds, innovative financing and land-use methods to build and preserve low-cost rental units.

After that job, Squier served a year as acting director of the Housing Authority, which owns and operates federally subsidized apartment projects.

When Bradley tapped him to head the city’s new Housing Department, he became responsible for making low-interest government loans and grants to developers of low-cost housing, administering the community development and rent-control programs and other efforts to expand the stock of affordable housing.

His move to the Housing Department was seen as a message that Bradley was getting serious about solving the city’s housing crisis. Bankers and developers as well as advocates for the poor saw Squier as the man most capable of bringing widely differing housing interests together to solve the city’s problems.

He is sometimes described as ambitious to a fault, but Squier said he is satisfied with his position for now, although he expects to work in private business someday.

“My only ambition is to make a difference,” he said.

“If you want to get something done, you have to be ambitious. There are a large string of bureaucracies that are difficult to move unless you are ambitious and driven.”