Read A Prayer for the City Online
Authors: Buzz Bissinger
In his first year of office, Rendell had concentrated on the city’s financial condition and the union negotiations, but public housing had inserted itself on his agenda anyway, without waiting for an appointment. In February of 1992, Smerconish, in his capacity as HUD’s regional administrator
and eager to establish himself as bold and aggressive, froze millions in federal funds earmarked for the rebuilding of Southwark, the high-rise public-housing project that had played such a pivotal role in driving Linda Morrison out of Queen Village.
About a month after that, a draft audit of the housing authority by HUD showed conditions that were shocking even to those who had already assumed the worst: in a random inspection of eighty-seven units, eighty-six had failed HUD’s standards for safe and sanitary housing. Each unit inspected averaged eleven violations. Infestations of roaches were common. So were tub and sink faucets that would not shut off. One unit had twenty-nine violations, including a rotting subfloor in the kitchen, a second-floor bedroom ceiling that had caved in because of leaks in the plumbing, and large holes in the living room walls. The inspectors doing the audit declared the unit uninhabitable, but because of the limited availability of decent housing in the city, that wasn’t the case. Instead, a household of five slept in one bedroom.
The audit presumably did not include units that the mayor himself talked about, where sewage and excrement came through the sink. Nor did it include unit 3C of the Cambridge Plaza high-rise on North Tenth Street, where the radiators raged with such heat 365 days a year that Gaynell Gillespie could put a pot of water on top of them and literally boil eggs. Gaynell lived in the three-bedroom unit with her seven children. She was well aware of the dangers of those radiators, and over and over again she asked maintenance people to come and fix them before something horrible happened.
Six of her children were old enough to stay away from them; they understood why the windows were open and why the fans were blowing in the dead of winter, but her youngest child, Adam, was too young to grasp such incongruities. He was a little bit over a year old, just learning how to walk, and, when she heard his screams from one of the bedrooms and smelled the odor of sizzling hair, she knew what had happened. She ran to the bedroom and grabbed him, but it was too late—his head was jammed between the radiator and the control knob. There was a burn in an oblong shape from right below the earlobe to the jawline, and whole pieces of his skin looked as if they had been ripped off. She prayed and she called 911, and when the doctor at the hospital fixed him up, he told Gaynell Gillespie that if she had found her son a second later, he would have been glued to that radiator, the flesh of the baby’s skin melded with a boiling chunk of metal in a public-housing high-rise in the city. She spoke with other tenants,
and they too had stories to tell of scaldings, including that of one girl whose lobe had been melted. She once again begged the maintenance people to do something, but, she said, she was told she was lucky to have heat. It was only when she appeared at a public meeting and told her story in the presence of a reporter for the
Inquirer
that something was finally done. “I sat home and waited and waited,” she said. “They didn’t take it seriously about my baby’s face. If they could have been there when he screamed.”
Maintenance workers put wrappers of insulation around the pipes and new plastic knobs on the radiators, but the one in the bedroom that had burned her son still raged, and in the dead of winter she still had a fan on to stifle the heat.
As awful as it was, her story didn’t appear to be isolated, for the audit depicted an institution that had, at the very least, a lackadaisical attitude toward those it was supposed to serve and, at the very worst, outright contempt for them. Maintenance work orders that should have been completed within a week were still outstanding forty-five days later. Millions of dollars in rent that should have been collected from tenants, thereby solidifying the authority’s financial condition, was simply ignored. On the other hand, the audit found that the authority had nearly five hundred more employees than it should have had according to recommended staffing patterns, a strong indication of the degree to which the authority existed not for the housing needs of its tenants but for the patronage needs of local politicians. In one two-year period, while the authority’s uncollected rents rose by $2 million and operating reserves declined by $5.4 million, its board saw fit to award bonuses of $82,000 to senior staff members for their performance. The audit did not specify who exactly received the bonuses, and finding out might have proved an unfathomable pursuit anyway, since the authority had no less than forty-nine directors, deputy executive directors, deputy and assistant directors, division directors, and executive assistants.
The HUD audit was as scorching an indictment of a public institution as any in America. The Philadelphia Housing Authority was the ultimate quagmire, drowning those who stepped into it regardless of the purity or the impurity of their intentions. Ed Rendell also knew that this was hardly an issue of public urgency. The eighty thousand tenants who lived in public housing in the city were by and large invisible, holed up inside monoliths of hopelessness, treated with scorn. “The general public doesn’t care at all about the housing authority,” said Rendell at one point. “Because it
serves only poor people, it has no constituency.” But with the results of the audit, he knew he had to do something. Michael Smerconish knew it too.
Both knew that the authority provided a perfect Harvard Business School case study of why public institutions fail—because they are guided not by efficiency or accountability but by power, patronage, webs of impenetrable bureaucracy, and racial politics. Both knew that the driving force behind the authority had not been the needs of the tenants but had been the needs of the feudal kingdoms that existed. Both knew that major decisions affecting PHA, particularly those involving personnel, required the OK of certain politicians, as if they were major shareholders of a private corporation with access to an enormous number of proxies. Both knew of the potential for corruption in free-flowing contracts. Both knew the degree to which the question of race swirled through everything, since the vast majority of those living in public housing in the city were black. Both knew, because they were white, that anything they did, regardless of how much managerial sense it made, was likely to be treated with suspicion and contempt and accusations of racism. These ideas, more than mere suspicions, were vividly expressed in a remarkably candid letter that the mayor received from John Paone, the executive director of the housing authority until he left under fire in the spring of 1992.
Under the umbrella of confidentiality, Paone’s letter told a sordid tale of the forces that controlled a public institution supported by taxpayers’ money, a system of spoils in which three groups—tenant leaders, employees, and politicians—were guided by complete self-interest. The tenant leaders, Paone wrote, formed
your shadow government. In other words, continue to maintain a plantation society type organization where the tenant groups really ran the show in the developments and kept the peace. In return, they expected certain perks, jobs for relatives and friends, transfers to better developments, trips to conferences etc. I found out early on that you didn’t have to have leadership qualities or even abilities to be part of the top management at PHA, you just needed the political savvy to stay on the right side of the tenants and their political allies.
Race, Paone wrote, was used as an effective cudgel:
Another factor to take into consideration is that 95 percent of all PHA tenants are Afro-American, they have been able to use
racism as a weapon against successive administrations that have been predominantly white and, thus have been able to frustrate reform. This is not to say you can’t have a white Executive Director, but you must have a minority Board Chairman and a significant number of minority senior staff members, including a minority Chief of Staff.
The employees of the authority, wrote Paone,
have sought protection from the tenant groups or politicians to maintain their jobs because they see that the tenant groups and politicians have power and influence. Their loyalty is to the tenant leaders and to politicians, not the PHA administration.… Over the years, the tenant groups and the tenant leaders have established their own system of patronage and coerced the various PHA administrations to support it.
As for the influence of politicians, Paone was equally blunt.
Let’s make no bones about it, PHA has been a political dumping ground for every inept political crony in this town for the past twenty-five years. It has served as a retirement home for former city/state officials and their relatives who needed some place to go to finish out their careers. No one’s hand is clean here, everyone dumped on PHA; the tenants, the Board, various city administrations.…
In a private meeting in 1992 with Smerconish shortly after the federal audit was released internally, the mayor framed the authority in a startlingly blunt way: “The two things that have driven PHA over the past three or four years have been patronage and the black issue. Many of the blacks [hired] are incompetent. Many of the white contractors absolutely fuck the tenants and skimp on everything because they know there’s no oversight.” Rendell understood the suspicions of black politicians in the city in regard to whites coming in and trying to run the authority. But incompetence was incompetence regardless of skin color, and in the crisis seizing the authority, he made it clear that there was no time for racial politics. “All of us have to be conscious of the black issue, but it can’t be the tail that wags the dog.”
Shortly after that meeting, in May 1992, the federal government took over the housing authority on the grounds that it was in “flagrant substantial default of its obligation … to provide decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings.” It was a stunning act, the largest takeover of a public-housing authority in the history of the federal government, and for a one-year period, HUD assumed control of all the authority’s functions, including hiring, firing, and daily management. The appointed board that had run the authority in the past was still there, but only in an advisory capacity.
True to what Smerconish and Rendell had spoken about privately, a plan was put into effect to reorganize the authority, fire the worst managers, and hire the best managers available on the basis of merit. But the urgency for change that had seized the authority, based on the idea that an institution sustained by $200 million a year in taxpayers’ money had some accountability to those taxpayers, quickly sank in the all too familiar racial flogging that had already made effective management nearly impossible. Tenant leaders claimed that the hiring process was racially biased against blacks, and in January of 1993 the accusations were so intense and furious that a memo was faxed to Cohen listing those who had been hired at the authority as part of the reorganization. The list did not give any insight into their qualifications, what they could do or could not do, their strengths and weaknesses and sources of expertise. Instead, next to each name were two rows: one listed the person’s race, and the other listed his or her sex.
It was the issue of race that had set the stage for the memorable exchange between Smerconish and Congressman Blackwell. Tenant leaders in particular were incensed by the firing of two individuals they had supported, so they did what came naturally to them: they ran to the congressman. And the congressman went to the mayor and waved the race card in front of him like a gigantic Fourth of July flag.
“Someone has given the appearance, even inadvertently racial, that we’re letting go of Afro-Americans while hiring Caucasians” came Blackwell’s squawky voice over the speaker phone. As a result, both he and City Council President Street wanted the hiring process stopped.
Smerconish balked. For more than a decade, every politician in the city had clamored for radical change at the authority, and now that it was happening, why was it necessary to go through this? It wasn’t possible to please everyone in a purge such as this, and the process had already been the subject of a federal court challenge and had been deemed fair and reasonable. The two people in question weren’t let go because of racism. They were let go because they were no longer found qualified for their
jobs, and the person presiding over the process, the special master appointed by HUD to run the authority in the aftermath of the takeover, was himself black. Halting the process, even temporarily, would smack of the political favoritism and meddling that had made the agency such a hopeless morass. In addition, tenant leaders themselves had said repeatedly that the authority needed to be reshaped.
In trying to make his point with Blackwell, Smerconish used the analogy of the person who repeatedly says that it’s time to clean up Congress, just as long as his favorite congressman goes unscathed. “Throw the bums out, but not my congressman.”
Rendell rolled his eyes. He knew that of all the analogies that could have been uttered at that precise moment, using the infinite variety of words in the English language, this
was
the very worst.
“Why’d you say Congress?” snapped Blackwell over the phone.
The screaming of Blackwell and Smerconish just got louder and louder. Blackwell said that a mistake had been made in letting Smerconish, a Republican appointee under George Bush, stay on now that a Democrat was in the White House.
“
I’m not backing off
!” screamed Smerconish. “
If you don’t believe I deserve to be here, have me terminated!
”
“
I know we made a mistake when we asked you to stay on!
” the congressman screamed back.
“
Any racial charge is not going to get landed on my doorstep!
” Smerconish screamed back.
“
I’m the reason that he’s there! I’m the reason that he’s there!
” the congressman screamed back.