At hearing on the future of public housing in DC, more questions than answers

An attorney testifies that her client’s children have visible bites from insects and rodents. A mother tries to justify why she had to grab a gun to save her son’s life. Another openly weeps when she discloses that her rental voucher expires the next day, and she can’t find a landlord to accept it. 

The details change, but the substance of the complaints never does. 

Those anecdotes, shared Friday afternoon at an oversight hearing held by the DC Council’s housing committee, all point to the same truth: In one of the wealthiest regions of the country, people living in housing owned and operated by the DC government still have their kids removed by child protective services because conditions in their homes are life-threatening.

“The pace of deterioration is accelerating,” DC Housing Authority director Tyrone Garrett said of living conditions in the city’s public housing, which requires more than $2.5 billion in backlogged repairs. “Neither time nor money is on our side,” he said.

Garrett oversees a sprawling system of more than 40 federally funded housing properties in DC — home to about 20,000 people — that his own staff has said is falling apart. Black mold, rat and cockroach infestations, electrical fires and weak infrastructure are just a few of the conditions that have sent the housing authority’s tenants to the hospital.

Early last fall, the agency published a blistering document outlining the broad contours of a 17-year plan to bring 14 of the worst buildings in its portfolio up to code. Those buildings include buildings from across DC, like Ward 1’s Garfield Terrace, Ward 6’s Greenleaf Gardens and Ward 7’s Richardson Dwellings.

“The financial need is unprecedented,” agency staff wrote in the rehabilitation pitch. “The $2.2 billion needed to … refresh the entire forty-one site public housing portfolio is about 150 times the typical annual capital improvements funding [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] and the District of Columbia provide.”

The housing authority’s proposal, which was the subject of Friday’s hearing, suggests that the agency will rely on private developers to renovate or buy those properties outright. To do that, it will use financing strategies implemented and popularized during the Obama administration — and require thousands of the city’s lowest-income residents to leave their homes for the duration of the repairs. 

One of those strategies, called Rental Assistance Demonstration, has led to the conversion of over 100,000 units of housing across the country from public to private management since the program was created in 2012.

More than merely a plan to renovate old buildings, the housing authority’s proposal has the potential to alter the socioeconomic fabric of entire swaths of DC. It also raises questions about which neighborhoods have enough vacant and affordable housing to accommodate families who must temporarily relocate, and comes as Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced an effort to create 12,000 new units of affordable housing in the next five years. 

Garrett, for his part, emphasized on Friday that he has not asked Bowser to earmark more District funds for the proposed renovations. (DC’s chief financial officer, Jeff DeWitt, announced last week that the city now has $1.43 billion in savings, with a roughly $324 million surplus last fiscal year.)

Critics of the housing authority’s plan have called it both vague and aspirational, arguing during Friday’s hearing that its implementation requires nearly $800 million that DCHA doesn’t have.

“Our concern is simple,” testified Amanda Korber, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. “While DCHA has presented a plan to demolish thousands of vitally important, deeply affordable housing units, it has not presented any plan for how it will rebuild those developments.” 

Public housing residents also remain concerned that the 130-page plan is scant on tenant protections. 

And those living in the 14 buildings identified by the housing authority say they still don’t know where they’ll go in the interim. While they’ll likely rely on Tenant Protection Vouchers distributed by HUD, residents have balked at the prospect of having to find and qualify for appropriately sized units.

It is notoriously difficult for rental voucher holders to find homes on the private market, where rental discrimination runs rampant.

“We’re asking for accountability and transparency,” Linda Brown, a resident of Greenleaf Senior in Ward 6, testified on Friday. “We need funding [but also] strong control over how the money is spent.”

Some members of the DC Council have likewise expressed skepticism that the agency is up to the task. Ward 1 Council member Brianne Nadeau introduced a bill in February 2019 that would strip DCHA of its status as an independent body and bring it under control of the mayor, citing the agency’s poor communication with the public and a need for better oversight. The bill — essentially a vote of no confidence — has the support of eight legislators. (At-large member Anita Bonds, chair of the Committee on Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization, has not held a public hearing or markup on that bill.)

Last week, Nadeau also introduced a bill that would require the housing authority to provide the public with 45 days’ notice before submitting a demolition/disposition application to HUD, as well as codify the rights of “potentially displaced” public housing residents. Bonds did not sign onto either of Nadeau’s bills.

On Friday, at-large Council member Elissa Silverman had tough words for the agency.

“I fear that it’s grown into an appendage of our deputy mayor for planning and economic development,” she said, adding that the authority is cobbling together deals “not for the benefit of residents that live in public housing, but for developers.” 

Silverman pressed Garrett to disclose how much of the properties he would be willing to privatize, arguing that the authority needs to make clear that we’re “not just giving away valuable real estate in our city to developers.” Garrett declined to disclose his bottom line publicly, saying he didn’t want to lose leverage with potential development partners. 

But in his statements about the portfolio’s condition, Garrett has signaled his belief that private capital is the most viable way to secure money for renovations. “DCHA must engage private resources and capital to fill [the] gap” in public funding, he wrote in the introduction to the rehabilitation plan. The council gave DCHA an additional $25 million for repairs that became available in October. 

“In essence, our operation needs to resemble a corporation,” Garrett said Friday.