The scene has been happening for decades: low-income tenants complaining at City Hall hearings about the lack of repairs, inadequate staffing, and other problems in housing projects operated by the SF Housing Authority. As Supervisors earn cheers by vowing to make the Housing Authority perform its job, ignored is the question of why they and their colleagues have not stepped in to take responsibility for the failed agency. Progressives regularly bemoan the decline in San Francisco’s African-American population---yet they have not safeguarded the housing stock where many of the city’s black residents live. The Board of Supervisors can vote to abolish the Housing Authority Commission and replace it with itself---and if it does not act quickly, the city’s largest supply of low-cost family housing will be sharply eroded.

After former Mayor Art Agnos wrote an editorial about the San Francisco Housing Authority in the March 11 San Francisco Chronicle, I asked longtime Agnos critic Barbara Meskunas, a former chair of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission and currently an aide to Supervisor Ed Jew, what she thought of his analysis. “ It was great,” she said, “he got everything right except I thought six kids rather than five died in the 1997 Housing Authority fire.”

When Agnos and Meskunas are on the same page, there is clearly a broad consensus over the need for systemic change at the SFHA.

Agnos was the last Mayor who really made improving conditions for Housing Authority tenants a priority---and it did him little good politically, as voters defeated him for re-election. Other mayors have seen little upside in getting into political fights with entrenched and politically powerful interests on behalf of a constituency that does not give campaign contributions and whose voting is infrequent at best.

When Terrence Hallinan was on the Board of Supervisors in the early 1990’s, he held hearings on the issue of the Board taking control over public housing. Opposition was strong, and the idea went nowhere.

In 2001, Supervisor Matt Gonzalez floated the idea of a Supervisors takeover and held a hearing to get input. The Housing Authority organized a march opposing any discussion of the idea, and speakers accused Gonzalez of racism for raising the issue even though a proposed takeover was not even on the meeting agenda.

Opponents of Housing Authority reform sent two powerful messages at the Gonzalez hearing.

First, the political downside of taking on the Housing Authority could be huge. Second, anyone prepared to talk about structural reform of the agency that houses thousands of African-American tenants will be accused of racism.

The SFHA employs African-Americans in far greater numbers than their population in San Francisco, and these employees apparently see structural reforms as negatively impacting them. The fact that the projects overwhelmingly house African-American families, and these families are the ones complaining at City Hall about conditions, has not muted the charge of “racism” by defenders of the status quo.

If there were a progressive African-American Supervisor who could lead the charge for reform, the racism allegation would be mitigated. But over the past fifty years in San Francisco, Sophie Maxwell and Doris Ward come closest to meeting that description, and neither has promoted increased Board control over the SFHA.
But the Bush Administration’s attacks on public housing should force the Board to act. As Sarah Short has documented, the Housing Authority faces over $200 million of capital repair needs at a time when federal funding is being reduced. This means that local funds could be essential for maintaining the city’s public housing stock---and the voters are not going to approve a bond for public housing under the current Housing Authority administration.

It seems like years ago that Mayor Newsom said that a public housing bond for this November would be a “top priority.” But the Mayor never sought to build a campaign around support for the bond, and then recently announced that, while he was not giving up, poll numbers on the bond did not look good.

Why would they “look good” in the absence of a campaign promoting the bond’s importance? And why would 66% of voters support giving more money to an agency that has failed to access currently available resources (a point Agnos brilliantly makes in his editorial)?

The Mayor appoints all of the SFHA Commissioners, but has taken no political heat for the problems in the projects. This could make the Board of Supervisors reluctant to become responsible for the SFHA’s performance, as, unlike the Mayor, they know perfectly well that the minute they take over the SFHA, the San Francisco Chronicle will blame them for the projects’ longstanding problems.

But that’s what leadership means. In contrast, continuing the status quo means a further decline in living conditions for low-income, mostly African-American families. It also means more units leaving the market in disrepair, and the possibility of a project being sold to raise the funds necessary to maintain the others

San Francisco has cared so little about the low-income children living in public housing that prior Housing Authority Commission Presidents include the Reverend Jim Jones and, more recently, Julie Lee. Jones was the People’s Temple leader responsible for the deaths of over 900 in Jonestown in 1978; Lee was personally involved in wrongful evictions and now faces felony prosecution for the misuse of state funds (her scandal forced Secretary of State Kevin Shelley out of office).

A Board takeover would mean that twice a month, the Board would adjourn its regular meeting and become the Housing Authority Commission, just as it does for the SFCTA (the County Transportation Authority). Since the Supervisors are interested in solving problems at the SFHA, this would give them the authority to actually do something.

Even if the entrenched interests responsible for the current dilapidated conditions at the SFHA rise up to defeat the Board’s takeover, at least the Supervisors favoring the reform will have done what they could.

And after all of these years of frustration, San Francisco owes its poorest families no less.

Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org.