The essential housing authority
Truth, Plato posited, is perfection: ideas are more real than things, and the world we see is but a dim and watery reflection of the perfect, crystalline reality. Every object has its Platonic ideal, the one true form from which all its earthly expressions take their nature, and of which every earthy object is merely an imperfect shadow.
My existence is pure — how ’bout yours, Aristotle?
Although at times I despair of public housing, many of us have a vision of the essential housing authority – a local outpost of the shining city on the hill, a defender of affordability and an expression of political and policy good. We hold to that image even as the real housing authorities we see about us, and the housing stock they own and operate, fall ever farther short. We excuse their performance as isolated, or absolvable, because the reality facing public housing properties and public housing authorities makes it impossible for them to succeed.
We operate within this well-defined impossible framework
A little over a year ago, I published an article in NAHRO’s Journal of Housing and Community Development, “The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come,” that dealt with the systemic and economic breakdown of public housing as we know it:
Is the future as grim as Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come foretold:
“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
Christmas Yet To Come? For public housing, the present circumstances are grim enough.
“Dear, HUD’s underfunded the operating subsidy again.”
Its followup, “The Gordian Knot,” proposed radical change in housing authorities’ governance, ownership, and financial structure:
When a whole delivery system creaks and collapses, as I believe is occurring here, the only solution is root-and-branch change. Mere tweaking will not suffice. The systemic elements are interdependent: removing or dramatically modifying one part compels compensatory changes in other parts.
Confronted with the endless Gordian knot, Alexander slashed through it with a stroke of his sword.
“That’s for your operating subsidy!”
Problems are insoluble only if you accept unstated conditions. For too long, public housing has meekly accepted an intellectual servitude whereby housing authorities are presumed unable to manage their own financial and operational decisions — unworthy, in HUD’s eyes, to be treated like owners.
It’s time for housing authorities to think like owners, to act like owners, and to be given the powers and responsibilities of owners.
But I didn’t say how. Finally, in the July/ August JOCHD, I published the proposed How, in The Essential Housing Authority, also available via Recap Update 68. As I define it in the article:
Today most housing authorities are comprehensive companies — they do every single function in-house. Yet in the larger business world, maturing businesses specialize as the capacity of service providers rises. Market-leading companies find ways to shed all the technical functions.
I look better when I’ve shed the inessential functions
As they are contracted (outsourced), quality goes up, cost goes down, and as they do, both customer satisfaction and profitability rise.
So what is a housing authority, in essence? What is the thing that distinguishes it from all other critters?
It holds a public trust — to provide quality housing at very low cost to those who are least able to find it in the private marketplace. Effectively a publicly accountable charitable institution, a housing authority receives public subsidy, via the indirect collection agent of government — if it doesn’t, the system breaks down completely — and deploys it for the public benefit of affordable housing and healthy low-income communities. That’s the essential function:
Everything else is a technical function, which means it can be contracted, and if it can, it should.
Yes, we can do that — what do you want done?
Thus the essential housing authority is a holding company:
Yet today’s typical housing authority is anything but a holding company. Instead it’s an insular expanding universe unto itself.
“The only thing we to fear … is an endlessly expansive housing authority.”
Way back when Franklin Roosevelt invented the public housing authority, the affordable housing ecosystem was primitive, practically clear-cut forest. Housing authorities took on technical functions because they had to, and today they maintain those technical functions because they always have. Until recently, housing authorities could ignore the wider world, so they have continued on, doing a little better the same things they did before, and seldom acting upon the radical restructuring that would bring them into a modern holding-company, effective real estate ownership structure.
With the economic and regulatory system breaking down, they can no longer afford to. Decisive action — cutting the Gordian knot — also means changing what the organization is, and how it envisions its essential role. Stepping away from technical functions simplifies life and enables commissioners and directors to concentrate on the larger goal. They can, as the government-regulatory cliche puts it, steer rather than row, harnessing the private sector’s thirst for profit into a mission outcome.
You contractors do your job, and I keep us on the right course
They can then return to their Platonic ideal form — their essential, intrinsically governmental function — protecting residents and communities.
Now that we’ve sorted out the housing authority problem, let’s talk about an NCAA football playoff system …
Write a comment