 | | Rudy Montiel |
TPR last interviewed you in July 2006. At that time, your department owned and managed over 7,000 units of public housing, and you owned and managed another 1,000 units of mixed-use buildings. What has changed over the last two years regarding your responsibility to deliver housing for the public?
Given the great leadership that we have in the city—especially in Mayor Villaraigosa and Deputy Mayor Bud Ovrom, working closely with our board of commissioners—a lot has changed over the last couple of years. Most importantly, we are now out of the federal oversight by HUD of the MOU we entered into when we went into near-receivership back in 2004.
This past year, we officially exited the MOU, which means we’re a freestanding agency like any other housing authority around the country. It’s an incredibly remarkable achievement, because the federal government is running the other authorities that were in similar circumstances back in 2004, which are now in receivership—Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans. That is a testament to the leadership that we have. We decided as a team that we were not going to let our authority go that route.
That’s on the regulatory side. On the operations side, our Section 8 program is 100 percent leased-up and high performing, once again. We have completed a couple public housing modernization activities, which put units that were vacant for many, many years back on the rolls, serving Angeleno families. We have also engaged in acquisition of properties in different parts of the city that allow us to serve clients in different programs and make progress on efforts to de-concentrate poverty.
How does all that impact your work? Two years ago, the housing authority was administrating almost 45,000 vouchers for families and serving upwards of 52,000 families. What are HACLA’s housing goals today?
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