Sara Shortt Archives — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

How to save the Housing Authority

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January 23, 2008

OPINION After repeated media attention to the myriad problems at the San Francisco Housing Authority, Mayor Gavin Newsom asked the agency’s director, Gregg Fortner, to resign. An interim director, Mirian Saez, was appointed to fill his shoes until a national search is conducted to find a permanent replacement. The mayor has announced replacements for two of the seven commissioners; one of the new appointees, Dwayne Jones, is a senior Newsom staffer.

As an affordable-housing advocate who works with residents of public housing, I am overjoyed at the prospect of change at the agency. No matter who is chosen to be the new director, a few key changes should be seriously considered for the city’s largest low-income-housing provider. Here are some suggestions:

1. Appoint commissioners who get it and care. The mayor could have made sweeping changes after he asked the SFHA commissioners to submit letters of resignation. Instead, he used the opportunity to appoint someone who is on his payroll. As long as political connections continue to trump experience, understanding, and compassion, tenants will suffer. What about having a public process in which residents and the community can nominate candidates? How about sharing the power to appoint housing commissioners with the Board of Supervisors, as is done with some other city commissions?

2. Listen to the residents, damn it! While it is refreshing to see the mayor look for solutions to the rampant problems at the SFHA, a panel of national experts is hardly necessary. The best experts are right here. They are residents, and they are clamoring to have their voices heard. Conduct a local survey, have regular open meetings, encourage the formation of resident councils, work with service providers and community groups that reach out to residents, and allow for resident participation as much as possible.

3. Talk among yourselves. The same lessons we learned after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina apply to this disaster as well. City agencies that serve public housing residents are often unaware of the major issues at public housing developments. The Departments of Building Inspections and Public Health, for instance, should be monitoring conditions and reporting to the mayor and the supervisors. The Mayor’s Office of Housing should be working closely with the Redevelopment Agency, the Office of Community Development, and the Human Service Agency as they plan for the demolition and rebuilding of distressed projects. City officials and agencies shouldn’t have to pull teeth to get basic information from the SFHA.

4. Tell Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to fight like hell. Whoever leads the Housing Authority in the future will always have a defense against charges of not addressing poor conditions because Congress keeps hacking away at the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. We have powerful congressional representation in San Francisco; let’s push harder.

5. Step up to the plate to provide local resources to improve public housing. As hard as we fight to leverage more federal funds, it is nearly certain that the SFHA will still be severely underfunded. We can no longer rely solely on federal funds to house our lowest-income residents. A commitment to creative and innovative local funding solutions must continue or we will see an increase in the exodus of African American families, which the mayor claims to be committed to curbing.

Sara Shortt

Sara Shortt is executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Make housing, not war!

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January 23, 2007

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OPINION As President George W. Bush requests more money to fight the war overseas, a stealth war is being fought here on domestic soil: the war on housing for the poor. Since the Bush administration took power, the public housing program has suffered $1 billion in cutbacks.

As a result, conditions have rapidly deteriorated in public housing developments throughout the country. Maintenance, security, and services have been slashed annually as budgets are drained with each appropriations bill. A climate of violence, fear, and despair has taken hold in the projects, where years of deferred maintenance, toxic and unsanitary conditions, and government neglect are simmering to a boiling point.

As we fought terror abroad, the Republican-led Congress created a breeding ground for terror here at home. Just ask the desperate, homeless families who refuse offers to move to the city’s public housing developments for fear of their lives. Or ask the mothers of children who have been shot at in their front yards while attempting to escape the leaking sewage and toxic mold in their homes.

Yet rather than fight this terror in our own backyards, lawmakers have attacked the very programs that can provide a solution. Job training, education programs, and social services have all been casualties of the war on public housing. Agencies have been forced to make cuts in security and maintenance staff every year. In the past five years alone, the San Francisco Housing Authority has lost 250 employees, a 50 percent cut.

While military spending has continued to rise, the offensive against housing has also escalated. A full $600 million was cut from the 2006 public housing budget, funding housing authorities at only 85 percent of overall need. Layoffs and cutbacks occurred throughout the country as cities began planning for desperate measures such as disposing of properties, raising tenant fees, and increasing response time for repairs. In San Francisco, 26 housing authority staff lost their union jobs last year. As a result, vulnerable senior and disabled residents in high-crime neighborhoods saw their security services eliminated.

Last year was devastating for public housing residents, and the battle is far from over. The generals of the war on housing are out for blood, and it appears that they will not stop until the last vestiges of federally funded, low-income housing are destroyed. This was made abundantly clear recently when the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that in 2007 housing authorities will be funded at only 76 percent of the actual need. By proposing a budget that is $1 billion short, President Bush has raised the stakes in the fight to preserve our precious remaining federal housing for the poor.

Congress has a chance to increase funding when it passes a spending bill next month. Without an increase, San Francisco will face a $3.5 million shortfall. Our powerful new leadership must take a stand against these unconscionable cuts, which could starve local housing agencies to death.

The only way to avoid increased homelessness; displacement of poor families; loss of union jobs; heightened violence; and turn-of-the-century, tenementlike living conditions for San Francisco’s poorest residents is for our representatives to insist on an increase in funding. Tell Congress to fight the war at home and not the one overseas by sending a letter at www.local-impact.org. *

Sara Shortt

Sara Shortt is the director of subsidized housing programs for the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

The attack on public housing

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August 29, 2006

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OPINION If the Bush administration has its way, conditions for San Francisco’s public housing residents are about to get much worse.
The San Francisco Housing Authority, which operates 6,000 units of public housing, is facing a $7 million shortfall this year due to Republican-led cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget. Congress has already cut the public housing budget by $1 billion since 2001 and has now created a $300 million shortfall in operating funds for already cash-strapped public housing agencies. As a result, agencies will receive 85.5 percent of what they need. But that’s not all. The president’s proposed budget for 2007 guarantees that funding will drop again to (at most) 80 percent of the need.
San Francisco will be one of the hardest-hit housing authorities. That’s because HUD uses a nonsensical funding formula that unfairly cuts funds to some agencies while providing increased funding for others.
The impact of these budget cuts is alarming, as agencies try to do more with less. Housing authorities across the nation are being forced to cut back vital tenant services such as security and maintenance.
The impact on San Francisco’s public housing residents will be nothing short of disastrous. The housing authority will now have to operate with only $342 per unit (down from $454).
Since Bush took office, per unit funding has declined sharply, from $585 in 1999; combine that with rising housing costs and other expenditures and you’ll see that San Francisco’s poorest have been hit hard. Residents are plagued with deferred maintenance and growing repair needs. Units sit empty because there are no funds for rehab. Shootings continue on many public housing sites while cutbacks in security are made. There’s a backlog of $245 million in immediate capital improvements needs and no plans for new development, despite the 30,000 families who have been languishing for years on the waiting list.
A loss of $7 million will mean dire consequences: longer turnaround on repairs, less secure buildings, and a further halt to modernization and new construction — this at a time when the agency has already failed its tenants and when housing costs continue to climb out of reach of San Francisco’s homeless and low-income families. Congress must take a stand now and stop the Bush administration and its unconscionable attempts to dismantle low-income housing programs. Democrats in Congress should take the lead and demand that a $300 million budget supplemental for public housing be passed to stop the losses for this year. It will also take strong leadership to ensure that public housing is fully funded for 2007. If the Republicans succeed once again in ridding cities of housing for the poor, it would be, as Erni Young of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote, nothing short of “an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by our own government.” SFBG
Sara Shortt
Sara Shortt is an organizer with the Housing Rights Committee.
To send a letter to your congressional representative, visit www.localimpact.org.