A too-friendly landlord? Part 2, the management
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
As we saw yesterday in Part 1, for nearly forty years, Bromley-Heath has been tenant-run (with occasional bouts of BHA takeover, only to revert to the Tenant Management Council), and throughout that same interval, it has been troubled, a haven for drug dealers, gang turf wars, and homicides.
What can property management do about this?
A can-do attitude always helps
Property management is a service, not an entitlement. Whatever the original motivations for placing the Tenant Management Council in charge, after any reasonable break-in period the TMC should be judged like any other manager: on how well they are doing this essential, and extremely difficult, job.
Affordable housing property management is harder than conventional, because sustainable affordable housing has a dual mission: economics and social goals. And management when a property is cash-constrained is an order of magnitude harder, for every day is a series of unpleasant fiscal triage choices. So the TMC is within its rights to tout its efforts and the challenges it faces and surmounts.
Still — this is neither a referendum nor a popularity contest, but a decision to be made by the owner (that is, the Boston Housing Authority) in its sole discretion. And the BHA’s decision should be not whether the TMC is trying hard, or even if it is doing better than (say) last year or last decade, but rather, is this the best management we can secure for this property?
No property management company I know has an 83-year-old as a chief executive officer; all the great ones I know who have attained that glorious age have long since handed over property management to younger men and women, for the simple reason that it is a young person’s business, and the market’s performance standards have risen over time.
It’s more than pushing clicking buttons
Have they risen at Bromley-Heath? Let’s go back to the crime, for without security, there is no community, and a management company that cannot maintain peace and safety on-site is failing the task. There’s no mystery about where the crime originates. The criminal activity is concentrated in a few notorious households:
Of the 199 Bromley-Heath residents arrested between 2000 and 2005 for violent crimes including shootings, domestic violence and drugs, 82 are related by blood or marriage, according to a classified BPD report obtained by the Herald. Those 82 relatives live in just 13 apartments at Bromley-Heath.
Under current rules, those households should be gone:
Under the federal “one strike” policy, tenants in HUD-funded developments can face eviction if someone living with them is accused of or charged with selling drugs.
But a year after that stunning BPD report was shared with the Bromley-Heath TMC board of directors, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, BHA and HUD officials, the problematic tenants have yet to be evicted.
“I had the report. I chose to go in a different direction,” BPD Capt. James Claiborne said. “We are not going to arrest our way out of problems.”
Captain Claiborne at a Jamaica Plain event
Captain Claiborne did so, I suspect, in large part because Bromley-Heath is the last redoubt of an experiment in pure tenant management. As the TMC web site puts it:
In 1968 in response to pressure from public housing tenants from around the country for increased autonomy, the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity [One of several agencies Lyndon Johnson glued together to make HUD -- Ed.] agreed to make funds available for demonstration projects in tenant management. The Administrator of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) sought the approval of his board to attempt a one-year tenant management project at the Columbia Point housing development. When tenants at Columbia Point rejected the proposal, the Bromley-Heath group won the grant after an intensive organization effort and campaign.
Today Columbia Point has been reinvented into Harbor Point, a mixed-income success story fueled by very substantial amount of funding, private-public partnership, and income mixing.
Even with the new townhouses, the old bones of public housing are visible.
Meanwhile, back in 1971, at Bromley-Heath the TMC started out full of enthusiasm:
There was enormous work to be done, from defining board and staff responsibilities to hiring and educating staff in management, maintenance, security and financial activities, and even training prospective board members.
The organizing activity of the volunteers, led by Anna Cole, who today chairs the Tenant Management Corporation’s Board, encouraged a growing number of tenants to get involved in the process of improving the conditions in their environment. Not only was a base of community support being developed. But a leadership core also was emerging from this process.
We’ll come back to that leadership core.
The Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation (TMC) was incorporated on
Mildred Hailey, 1974
Today, under the leadership of Mildred Hailey, who has served as the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation’s Executive Director for more than 25 years, it remains the premier model for a successful tenant management operation in the
Way back when, direct tenant management was thought a worthwhile experiment:
Founded in 1971 by Hailey and Anna Mae Cole, Bromley-Heath’s TMC was a groundbreaking model for tenant control of public housing developments, imitated nationwide. But now, there are only two TMCs left, according to HUD, and Bromley-Heath’s has been plagued by management concerns and scandals.
There’s no doubt that TMC had a tough row to hoe:
The TMC faced a daunting task. Looking back on the accomplishments of the TMC in an April 1973 Wall Street Journal article, Liz Roman Gallese recalled the conditions at Bromley-Heath in early 1971. She said it was “the worst place in the city.”
Unfortunately, it claims that distinction today.
On
A typical courtyard, close up
Lax or incompetent management. BHA and other officials have long doubted TMC’s ability to handle the property, and even its motivations:
…For years, [officers Troy Chappelle and Arthur Prince of the Bromley housing development private police] had felt stymied in the eight-member police force, unsupported by their chief, Joseph Macaluso, in their efforts to aggressively fight crime on the grounds….
In the aftermath of the Oct. 30 raid on Bromley-Heath — which netted more than two dozen arrests and forced an embarrassing takeover of the renowned Tenant Management Corp. — several current and former members of the development’s private police force have expressed similar frustration with their superiors, including tenant leader Mildred Hailey, accusing them of undermining basic police work on the Jamaica Plain grounds….
They were routinely discouraged from [acting as real police officers], particularly when their arrests involved people closely connected to Hailey…. Rubin Williams … a member of the Bromley-Heath police department for six years, said the message delivered by tenant management officials was, “basically, keep them (the residents) from getting arrested.”
[…] Since the October drug raid, questions have surfaced about how much Hailey knew of drug dealing on the premises and Hailey, as a national icon of tenant management, has taken her share of the blame.
After twenty-year-old Jahmol Nofrleet was shot, a few weeks later an even younger alleged gang member, Luis Gerena, was gunned down, inside Bromley-Heath. Ms. Hailey expressed bafflement:
“I don’t understand it,” Hailey said, of the recent coverage. “We are working on the issues with the youth. The youth worked out the truce. It’s painted us as the worst community in the city, which isn’t true.”
[Concluded tomorrow in Part 3.]
