The Mayor Yells Fire

On Friday, May 11, Mayor Gavin Newsom released a blue-ribbon commission report saying San Francisco public housing is so decrepit it would take $267 million to make apartments habitable.

"This is a crisis of monumental proportion," the mayor was quoted as saying. "We've got to do something about it."

A few weeks before that, the mayor convened a different panel, which issued a separate report, saying the city must rescue its decayed public housing.

"There is no choice," the mayor was quoted as saying. "This is not a city that's going to abandon thousands and thousands of individuals."

Strangely, the more emphatic our mayor's bimonthly statements have become about fixing public housing, the further he seems to distance himself from actually following through on his words.

In Sept. 2006 Newsom was quoted saying fixing public housing "is where all my political capital will go."

In March 2005 Newsom was quoted emphasizing his dedication to fixing up public housing, saying "the worst thing we can do is maintain the status quo."

Not long after he was elected mayor, Newsom told journalists he would lift San Francisco's public housing out of disrepair and despair.

"What we're trying to do is give people alternatives, give them hope, give them something else to believe in, give them a moment to reflect and pause and say, 'Maybe things are changing, maybe there is something new that's happening,'" Newsom was quoted as saying, in June 2004.

Reality check: Three years later, conditions are getting worse.

According to Newsom's new blue-ribbon commission report, the entire time the mayor was making these pathos-imbued statements, public housing projects deteriorated and crime worsened due to inadequate maintenance, bad financial oversight, and poor security.

And these problems can be traced to management failures during Newsom's time in office.

When it comes to public housing, in other words, our mayor has spent three years running around screaming his hair's on fire, without bothering to extinguish the flames.

For example, the report encourages the Housing Authority — which oversees 6,400 apartments housing 35,000 residents and which is run by a commission appointed by the mayor — to do what it can to obtain federal grants to replace decrepit apartments.

Newsom, however, is the only mayor in a generation not to have signed applications for federal grants aimed at fixing substandard public housing under a program called Hope Six. This failure could have cost the city as much as $60 million in federal grants during the past three years.

Those funds are desperately needed. Apartments at public housing projects citywide are decaying at an ever-worsening rate, due in part to a disastrously run maintenance operation, which the mayor should have changed but didn't.

Also according to the report, plumbers and other maintenance workers performing repairs on San Francisco public housing enjoy featherbedding work rules that would do Hollywood Teamsters proud, resulting in extraordinary delays and extra costs to fix the simplest clogged sink. Instead of calling a handyman to unclog it, building management must call in a union plumber, and then call a different, specialized worker to repair the floor that was soaked by the sink overflow.

The results are cracks, leaks, mold, stoppages, water damage, and other ruin that can take weeks to repair, costing the government a fortune in the process, hastening the overall decay of apartments and the buildings they're in.

"It not only causes the costs for maintenance to skyrocket," the report said, "it causes a backlog of work issues and effects the timely completion of work orders."

Thanks to featherbedding, a typical vacated apartment takes 128 days to prepare for re-rental — despite the fact that the maintenance department is overstaffed, the report says. This means the Housing Authority unnecessarily loses hundreds of dollars in rent money every time an apartment becomes vacant.

These egregious work rules have been in place throughout Newsom's mayoralty. Somehow, however, he hasn't announced he's "spending political capital" to confront unions and insist that the Housing Authority Commission renegotiate these labor contracts.

When the Housing Authority's management of its work force has come under more detailed scrutiny, the results have been ugly.

A 2000 federal inspector general's audit determined that between 1997 and 1999, at the Clementina, Sunnydale, and Potrero Annex projects alone, the Housing Authority may have given staff workers more than $18 million in excessive pay.

In response, the Housing Authority essentially flipped federal auditors the bird, saying the investigators' conclusions were "unfounded," but that the agency would nonetheless be a good sport and "continue to monitor its processes to make them as responsive and user-friendly as possible."

During his cyclical public expressions of concern about public housing, Newsom has not addressed this apparent system of money squandering. (Newsom's press office did not return calls requesting comment, nor did the director of the Mayor's Office on Housing.)

Our mayor's public expressions of concern about public housing often follow outbreaks of shootings. This makes sense, given that, depending on the year, 30 to 40 percent of the city's gun violence happens at or near public housing.

What doesn't make sense, however, is our city's approach to policing the projects. The Housing Authority pays into the general city budget $1 million every year for police services, getting in return four teams of four police officers.