Rudderless at the top, crime challenged and guideline glitched, the agency that oversees a $51 million budget serving the housing needs of 12,000 residents could experience a major shake-up in the coming weeks as power struggles between board members and staff have gained greater scrutiny by the federal Housing and Urban Development that funds it.
With the recent departure of George Byers, James Slaughter is serving as interim executive director of Park City Communities, formerly called the Bridgeport Housing Authority, that now has had four leaders in about four years. Byers left following a dispute with Mayor Joe Ganim who appoints four of five commissioners, according to the website, currently Dulce Nieves, who serves as chair, Richard DeJesus, Rev. Sultan Stack Jr. and Janet Ortiz. Hadassah Nightingale is the resident commissioner. Ganim and Byers knocked heads over security and other issues.
Federal officials have also raised growing concerns about financial mismanagement within the organization.
Ganim staffer Ed Adams, a retired FBI agent, has recently served as the mayor’s point person reviewing department operations and guidelines set by HUD that regulates the authority. The mayor has no day-to-day supervision but has juice in appointing commissioners who ultimately select the executive director. HUD officials will look to the mayor to help implement changes through board appointments. Every 10 years or so the federal agency will urge a shakeup as irregularities are uncovered.
One area Ganim has taken an active interest in the housing authority operations is public safety. The Greene Homes was the scene of a shooting on Monday that wounded three.
Backed by the housing authority in March, Ganim announced the establishment of permanent patrols in the city’s public housing projects. The BHA agreed to commit $600,000 to fund the community policing campaign. The city funded $400,000 for infrastructure and beautification in the housing projects.
Ganim and Police Chief AJ Perez made the announcement at a newly reopened police substation near Trumbull Gardens. Ganim has established a Community Policing Task Force that includes two sergeants and sixteen officers assigned to Trumbull Gardens, Charles Greene Homes, P.T. Barnum Apartments, Marina Village and Harborview Towers. Officers are deployed over two eight-hours shifts per day. New security cameras in public housing locations will connect to the police monitoring center at 999 Broad Street that Ganim says will produce real-time intelligence in response to public safety.
But with the recent rash of shootings city officials are searching for answers to quell the violence that often can take on a life of its own.
It’s time to face facts, this type of housing does not work. Here is an example. Seaside village is a model for owner-occupied older housing. Across the street is Marina Village that was built around the same time as Seaside Village. There is a lot of trouble coming out of Marina over the years.
Here is what should be done.
1. Tear down Greene apartments, filling these high-rises with the poor does not work.
2. Remodel Marina Village and give the units to qualified tenants.
3. Tear down PT Barnum apartments and put condo-like units that will be owned by qualified owners (former tenants).
4. Help these complexes set up condo boards.
Here is the one that will piss off the bleeding hearts. The tenants who don’t qualify, give them $2,000 and a good bye. It’s time the bad tenants pay the price.
Andy, think for a second what would happen if you “gave” housing to any group, much less a group with no experience in home ownership. As soon as the ink were dry, many (not all, but many) would mortgage the property, then piss the money away, and then fail to make the payments, get foreclosed, and now have no place to live. I personally know many people like this.
My son who is legally blind has been on the waiting list for over a decade for subsidized housing. When he calls after a year or two and questions his status and the person answering his call doesn’t like his attitude he mysteriously disappears from the waiting list.
He was beaten by a group of thugs and was hospitalized and a story in the CT Post was done to call attention to his plight. This was in 2012 and he’s still on the waiting list languishing like he has for the last eight years or so. God forbid you call there and have the temerity to question them on anything because they aren’t conducive to answering one’s concerns. Here’s the story and his situation hasn’t changed since May 27, 2012 when this story ran.
m.ctpost.com/news/article/MariAn-Gail-Brown-Beset-by-thugs-then-3588373.php
Donald,
Did not know how close you were to this ongoing injustice. The Housing Authority, renamed Park City Communities does not adhere to OPEN, ACCOUNTABLE, TRANSPARENT and HONEST practices in governance or the tales being told would not be heard today. The Mayor appoints, but no one evaluates the experience, commitment, abilities, and willingness of volunteer Board members (in Housing or other City Boards and Commissions) from year to year. That says nothing about the quality of service on Boards and Commissions, only the power and influence the Mayor’s office is able to exert long term: See it my way, or see ya!
Where are the results of the most recent report on Park City Communities relative to misuse of millions? Who is responsible? Is the City the payer of last resort? Isn’t that issue worthy of reporting by the Mayor’s Office? Time will tell.
Andy, QD and Lisa thank you so very much for your concerns. JML, you are on point again, these people are put in these positions without any knowledge or expertise and there is no follow-up to see if they are at the very least competent.
You can rest assured those who work in that office have given their relatives and friends preferential treatment at the expense of my son and others like him. I will today forward my concerns and the plight of my son to James Slaughter, but my hope for resolution was dashed years ago. Time will tell?
Don, no one should have to go through what your son went through. I think the housing person who was the spokesman, Nicholas Calace, should be fired. The way he responded to the questions shows he is an arrogant prick. I wish your son the best.
DD, I wish your son well. I will pray for him!
Donald, your son’s misfortune is a perfect example as to why they should have priority housing for those with permanent health situations. I think it’s unconscionable; that agency always had an adversarial attitude towards those who need help the most. There should be more light shed on the way your son and others are left to languish.
Andy, you are right. The difference is Seaside Village is a co-op. When someone has the pride of ownership and responsibility of their property, they have a vested interest in keeping it safe and its upkeep.
How many people in Bridgeport who are not currently homeowners could be realistically pointed in that direction? How many current homeowners in Bridgeport are remaining such by the skin of their teeth?
Poverty-tinged, insecure homeownership isn’t conducive to the type of social stability we want to attribute to the situation of having one’s name on a lease. As a matter of fact, jobless people trying to hang on to their homes can be driven to some pretty desperate measures.
Abundant, living-wage jobs have to give rise to homeownership if it is going to impart the kind of social stability we’re aiming for.
No neighborhood is ever going to be livable if its inhabitants are largely mired in jobless poverty without hope of upward mobility.
And of course public housing is going to be mired in violence and social problems if it is run by politically appointed, poorly qualified, unmotivated suburbanites trying maintain the physical plant and social aspect of neighborhoods populated by unemployed people affected by the social diseases of poverty.
Public housing has become a convenient repository of the working poor and unemployed (in Bridgeport’s case, the “cheap labor” that keeps the region running at a discount for the affluent).
It is amazing it has taken HUD and the city of Bridgeport so long to recognize and begin to deal with this mess. The tenants and the taxpayers deserve better.
Bring back Clarence Craig. Joe and he had a very good working relationship.
All Joe wants from the BHA is money. Lots and lots of money. If he can flip Housing Authority money over to the city side of the ledger it would be like manna from heaven.
Obviously Byers wouldn’t play ball with Joe so he had to go.
It is absolutely about Ganim getting his hands on the $$$.
Clarence Craig once showed me some archived documents from the creation of Yellow Mill Village, the first federal housing project in Bridgeport and one of the first in the nation.
I remember clearly the mission statement which included “to provide clean, affordable housing for the workers of Bridgeport.”
I doubt Father Stephen Panik and other incorporators could have imagined what public housing would evolve into.
For years I have expressed my opinion that public housing is the housing component of a failed social welfare system.
In most (if not all) urban areas of the U.S., factories are gone and workers have been replaced by a population dependent on government programs.
Rick Torres floated the concept of public housing residents becoming owners. That went over big with public housing tenants. Family members get priority for public housing units. It’s essentially a birthright.
Social scientists come up with theories explaining the violence we are seeing in Bridgeport, Chicago and many urban centers. The ingredients are there, lack of family structure, etc, etc. We’ve heard it for decades.
BHA directors have long complained of unionized government employee staff dictating how they perform their jobs and board members who do not understand what their role is.
Will it ever change? Let’s see who Ganim appoints. What is our congressional delegation doing to address the situation? This is a Federal program and Bridgeport taxpayers should not be burdened with the cost of services, such as police.
Tom, I can’t resist telling you my family lived in Yellow Mill Village until I was 16 years old, and they’re the best memories of my young life. I went to St. Cyril’s School. The village was beautiful and gave us the opportunity to interact with so much diversity. At that time the intent of Yellow Mill Village was a stop gap, and once families reached a designated income level they had to move on to make way for others. I had five siblings, a blue-collar Dad and stay-at-home Mom. We had everything we needed and if we were poor, it didn’t matter, we were all the same so nobody knew the difference. It’s sad to see how the concept of public housing has deteriorated over the years. I was in my second term on the CC when HUD gave permission for it to be demolished; it was a little nostalgic for me, it was my first home.
Lisa, my parents and older brothers have fond memories of living in ‘The Village.’ There were families–mother/wife, father/husband and lots of children. My father worked at Bridgeport Brass and my parents bought a modest home when I was a toddler. That was the purpose of public housing.
I never knew that Tom, thanks for sharing that.
The public housing of the last century was intended to be “workforce” housing for local, mainly walkable and bus-route jobs.
As “workforce” housing of the above description, Father Panik Village worked well, as did much of the other public housing built in the US cities that hosted large facilities for the manufacturers of the day.
No form of public housing or “neighborhood” situation is going to work well when it is used to warehouse the unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable. Public housing was meant to provide working people with a means of saving for future security and homeownership.
When our multinational corporations and their political lackeys decided to exploit the slave labor and markets of the third world and relocate US manufacturing, and even food production, overseas, the whole US social and economic dynamic changed into the disaster it is today.
Public housing was intended to be part of the solution, and it was, until corporate greed derailed the American Dream and changed all the rules Add the drug scourge as a constant to the new, impossible-to-balance socioeconomic equation, and no type of public housing/neighborhood setting is going to work.
If working families with living-wage paychecks were occupying public housing, there wouldn’t be any problem with public housing. Right now public housing is describable more in terms of refugee camps than as integral parts of cities. Refugee camps full of hopeless, warehoused people administered by unqualified, unmotivated bureaucrats.
The solution to the safety/livability problems of public housing isn’t just a new configuration of efficient housing units, or the implementation of physical and administrative means of social control within these newly-designed “neighborhoods; the whole solution must involve the recreation of American prosperity and an upwardly-mobile society. Until we have that, public housing will just be a refugee camp equivalent. (And scattered-site public housing eventually evolves into concentrated public housing. Refugee camps.)
Mr. Kohut, great comment. I’d add my two cents with NAFTA, President Clinton’s doings including Hillary, was the start of the end of American jobs and American Made. Just simply look at every item you touch, look for where it was made or manufactured.
As usual, it’s all about the money being made, mostly by out-of-towners, with the inefficient, nonsensical huge relocation and demolition projects using obscene Federal grants. A great example is the demolition of Marina Village with City taxpayer money, about $2 million, citing mold and flood issues and using it as leverage to get the $30 million shoreline Resiliency grants from the Feds, constructing overpriced housing in other flood zones and spending large amounts of Section 8 money to relocate troubled, violent families into decent neighborhoods, maybe a cause for recent gun violence on Wood Terrace and Plymouth Street?
The untold story is how these relocations hurt decent neighborhoods. It’s déjà vu all over again aka FPV relocation of the late ’80s!
What would be helpful is for someone who actually understood the regulations associated with a federal housing program to step up and join the board of commissioners. The agency workers, mostly from Bridgeport aren’t the ones making these poor decisions, the mismanagement is the board not supervising the executive staff of the agency who they keep busing in from other states. Byers never even met a Puerto Rican before he came to CT!
Not for the first time, HUD may need to step in and take control of the Housing Authority.
Someone should be demanding full disclosure on vital data. Such items as:
1) How many people are on the BHA waiting list?
2) How long have the longest individuals been waiting?
3) What is the actual occupancy/vacancy rates based on type of housing?
4) How long does it take to fill a vacancy?
We need a baseline as of today to determine if progress is being made. I have heard a number of apartments sit vacant in case a “political” need arises and they want to put someone who is connected into a unit. I have also heard their maintenance department is so dysfunctional, apartments sit empty waiting for minor and major repairs before they can be occupied again.
Hi Bob,
I can give you answers to most of your questions as a landlord who owns units in a very dysfunctional partnership with BHA/PCC.
1. No one knows how many people are on the BHA waiting list (which has actually in the past been multiple waiting lists) because the list is so old, not even BHA/PCC knows who is still trying to obtain housing. If you were on a waiting list for over five years, what is the likelihood you would have moved somewhere else or just given up?
2. I cannot say the longest any one family has been waiting, but I am sure there are examples of families passed over, missed, ignored. For example, the procedure when either Section 8 vouchers or project-based voucher vacancies come up is to mail a physical letter to the address on file for a family. But if you have been on a waiting list for years, you could have moved multiple times and never get that letter.
3. For the project-based voucher units, there are dozens of vacancies right now. BHA/PCC staff does not process the waiting list in a timely fashion (where they check income eligibility, criminal background etc.) so units sit vacant and families wait while nothing happens. For tenant-based vouchers, if BHA/PCC does not use up its allotted funds each year, HUD takes funds back and gives the money to other towns (this happened in 2011 or 2012).
4. It should only take 30 days to fill a vacancy at the most, but in reality we have seen units sit vacant for over a year (I can provide documentation to back this statement up).
There is no progress being made. I have no idea about apartments being vacant for “political” need, but it is definitely the case numerous units that are out of service could be put back into service with just a little effort.
The irony is BHA/PCC controls a subsidiary non-profit called Baldwin Holdings that has about 80 project-based voucher units where at least 12 are vacant right now. HUD would provide the funds for those units if BHA/PCC would just fill them with tenants from their waiting list and make those minor repairs. But instead the units sit vacant and families languish on the waiting list.
Jeff Kohut and Bob Halstead made points that rarely get spoken.
In our frustration, we attempt to explain how this social problem came about.
Lyndon Johnson’s legacy as president may be Viet Nam. In my opinion though, the ‘Great Society’ has done lasting harm that we see to this day. Remember ‘Model Cities?’ The ‘War on Poverty?’ We have a permanent underclass created by multiple generations of dysfunctional ‘families’ supported by social welfare programs.
Remember the influx of Vietnamese immigrants? Kurds? Are they living in public housing? They wanted nothing to do with the government dependency public housing represents.
Twenty-five years ago the solution to violence in public housing projects was to reduce the density and disperse public housing residents around the ‘host city.’ The high-rise Beardsley Terrace (the terrace) became mostly townhouses called Trumbull Gardens. Did anything change?
Can a mayor change the situation by appointing different BHA board members? Or will there be a major overhaul at the federal level?
Unlike existing great society programs, Viet Nam did not leave behind a lasting liability in the form of government bonds. Viet Nam was paid entirely by deficit spending as opposed to deficit borrowing.
The pivotal moment came early President Reagan’s term when he ordered Paul Volker to stop printing money and start borrowing it.
President Ronald Reagan COULD NOT AND DID NOT order the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to do anything because Reagan, as President, DID NOT have the authority to do so. Please get your facts straight.
The Fed chair works at the pleasure of The President. After he took the oath and before he attended The Inaugural Ball, he called Volker and gave him his orders. I understand The Fed’s independence; I also understand The President’s powers. Reagan was within his limits.
Get your facts straight; that’s an order!
I am not talking to a handle.
DD, the old Fireside Apartments on Palisades and Sheridan would be a perfect fit. It’s still a fairly quiet, well-maintained, easy access area.
The Vietnam War was financed through deficit spending as well as through bonded debt and special surtaxes. The Social Security system (et al.) was raided and federal infrastructure projects and maintenance were curtailed and neglected. Aid to cities and states was also ultimately curtailed. The Great Society was derailed by Vietnam War Spending. (It was expensive dropping more explosive force on North Vietnam during that war than was dropped worldwide in WWII.)
The ultimate, net effect was a huge, lingering, budgetary hole that was describable as gaping by the end of the war. Since that time, the cumulative budgetary effects of our foreign military travesty-adventures have resulted in an accumulated liability that surmounts any other single contributing factor of our cumulative national debt.
Deficit spending through bonded debt, entitlement raiding, or deferred infrastructure spending, ultimately goes into the national ledger as an interest-accumulating debit that must be financed by increased taxes or harmful austerity measures. (In our case, we’ve been able to lay off some of the debt and destruction on other nations, temporarily, by way of a global financial shell-game related to our shaky, farmed-out, house-of-cards national economy.)
SOOO, we are still facing the same old question since the 1950s. President Eisenhower warned us about this and he saw the synergies of the military-industrial complex.
Correct, Frank. Maybe that’s an argument for a requirement (at least unofficial) for the POTUS to have military/combat experience. That old soldier was indeed a prophet. Makes me wonder how he got arm-twisted into falling into the Vietnam debacle/trap. (Truman got sucked into the Korea mess because of the post-war Russia-China-Communism hysteria. I think WWII had us so wound up, we just weren’t comfortable with peace until after about a decade.)
Jeff, you’re right. South Korea and South Vietnam saw what American forces could do when they enlisted our help. It is very important that our Armed Forces and the American people believe in the cause and there must be a clear plan. War should never be taken lightly and I’m a true believer that “strength equals peace.”
Lisa, I thought we were once neighbors. I still live in one of those war-era homes in the East Side.
Maybe Quentin, I have such good memories of that area of Bridgeport. We walked everywhere without even an expectation of harm. I still feel nostalgic when I’m driving and see streets that were so safe and friendly. My friends would love to come visit us in the Village because to them it was so modern compared to the old apartments they lived in.
Quentin: We drifted a little off topic, but you’re correct about American soldiers; they have always been the best and the bravest. The British forced them to set that standard and they only got better after that. Our military performance in Korea and Vietnam was superb, and our troops never lacked guts or tenacity. The problem was they were put in the untenable position of intervening in conflicts definable in terms of efforts to change the social order of countries, which was born of foreign occupation/colonialism. Korea and Vietnam were both civil wars born of
conflicting nationalistic movements. Really, neither war was originally rooted in “Communism” vs. “Capitalism,” per se, but rather in nationalistic struggles that were oriented somewhat differently in cultural and economic grounding, with the factions becoming somewhat geographically defined as a matter of proximity to sources of support. The sources of support had political inductive effects that came to cast mostly false light on the wars as idealistic vs. more cultural and civil. Indeed, Vietnam was able to unite for the purpose of evicting the French; it was only later Communist and Capitalist spheres of influence came to muddy the waters of what was really a purely civil war (and none of our business, especially being 10,000 miles away). The fact there is now a united Vietnam making steady technological, social, and economic progress speaks to the impropriety of the outside interference that created the intensely destructive Vietnam War that evolved from the original, relatively low-intensity civil war that followed the eviction of the French.
The lesson here is by not minding our own business, we inflicted grave injury on all of Indochina, as well as on ourselves. (And would we have the insane North Korean regime that threatens world stability if we had allowed Korea/the region to seek their own stable situation?)