The second in command of this city`s housing authority said he had to
”run like hell” last month when an angry mob surrounded his van and broke his glasses.
Three days later, about 50 protesters started up a bulldozer and a backhoe at the housing authority`s headquarters and threatened to plow through the one-story brick building unless officials came outside to talk.
The hostility no longer surprises the managers of the East St. Louis Housing Authority.
The managers, employees of Quadel Consulting Corp., of Washington, came to town last fall, a year after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) seized the troubled housing authority.
The move marked the first involuntary takeover of a local housing authority by HUD and followed years of local mismanagement, capped by the 1985 conviction of the authority`s former director for pocketing $1.4 million in repair funds.
HUD officials said the takeover was the only way to improve conditions.
Now they are repeating that argument in Chicago as they prepare to seize the financially troubled Chicago Housing Authority.
But in East St. Louis, two years of federal control have disappointed local officials and residents who say living conditions have not improved for the 6,200 public housing tenants, about 11 percent of the city`s population.
Officials of HUD and Quadel contend that local hostility has thwarted their efforts to make substantial changes.
”This hasn`t been the most conducive place to work,” said Stephanie Stafford, a Quadel official who is the housing authority`s acting director.
”It`s just not normal to have a bulldozer outside your office door.”
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Because of that incident and the scuffle between protesters and Robert Hattler, a Quadel official who is the housing authority`s maintenance director, the firm has hired security guards to patrol the headquarters.
But the opposition to HUD has extended beyond rallies. Mayor Carl E. Officer, who calls HUD`s presence in his city ”poison,” has appointed a new housing authority board with his brother as chairman and promised to wrest at least some control from HUD.
The hostility began last fall when local officials complained that Quadel wasn`t cleaning up fast enough after a Mississippi River flood caused sewers to back up and swamp two public-housing developments in four feet of sewage. Several hundred tenants were forced to flee.
Before then, Stafford said, ”We never heard from the mayor. But then all of a sudden it was the housing authority`s fault that the flood happened.”
Even under the best conditions, bringing the housing authority back to life will be expensive and time-consuming.
About 30 percent of the authority`s 3,200 units, most of them two-story town houses, are uninhabitable and empty, authority records show. Many of the remaining 70 percent need serious repair. And dozens of current and former tenants, participants in an innovative program to buy single-family homes built in clusters throughout the city, may never see their deeds or invested money because the paperwork is missing, city officials said.
The half-empty Roosevelt Homes, a 300-unit apartment complex on the city`s North Side, is typical of the challenge facing HUD and Quadel.
Vandals have punched floor-to-ceiling holes in the walls of some empty buildings, and the second floors of some have been gutted by arsonists. Gang members have renamed the project ”Folksville” in a spray-painted scrawl on the sign at one entrance.
”It`s no good out here,” said Lemont Jones, 21, who has lived in Roosevelt for 12 years. ”All the people are moving out.”
Jones said he has seen more housing authority workers at Roosevelt in the last two years, but their efforts have not significantly improved life for tenants.
”The grass is finally getting cut, and they`re cleaning up some of the weeds,” he said. ”But they aren`t doing anything inside the apartments.”
In 11 months on the job, Quadel officials say, they have not had time to tackle large-scale redevelopment, the kind needed at Roosevelt. But critics of HUD control say more work might have been done by now if HUD had not waited almost a year after the takeover to hire a management team.
Before HUD hired Quadel, a team of HUD officials ran the authority, and no major projects were started.
”We expected that it would take only a few months to get a private management firm in there,” said John Mooring, the HUD official in Washington who makes all policy decisions in place of the housing authority board. ”For that reason, HUD didn`t feel it was appropriate to revise major systems of operational procedures.”
In the meantime tenants suffered, said Lois Wood, a lawyer who helped prompt the federal takeover by filing a 1985 class-action lawsuit for tenants. She said the results could be similar at the CHA.
”After what they`ve been through down here, they know how hard it is to manage a housing authority and how bad it can get before they appoint a private manager,” she said.
James Baugh, acting assistant secretary of HUD for public housing, has said it would take at least three months to find a manager for the CHA if city officials cooperated in the search. But it would take longer if Mayor Harold Washington fights the takeover in court, as he has vowed.
In his battle with HUD, Mayor Washington has cited conditions in East St. Louis as an example of HUD`s failure to manage local public housing for the benefit of the tenants.
Last month, at the mayor`s request, Officer spoke to the Chicago City Council about HUD management in East St. Louis. ”They ran it into the ground,” Officer said.
But Stafford said Quadel has made progress in resolving the housing authority`s financial problems.
The company has instituted a tough rent-collection policy that has upset many residents but resulted in 79 percent of residents paying on time. Before the new policy, 56 percent paid on time. Also, Stafford credits a new eviction policy with improving the authority`s occupancy rate.
The company could make similar progress with repairs, she said, if the demonstrators, who have chased some contractors off jobsites, would stop.
”They are impeding our work,” Stafford said. ”The tenants are suffering.”
Quadel has won a court order temporarily barring three protest leaders from demonstrating outside housing authority headquarters. Two of the men are close associates of Mayor Officer: Kelvin Ellis, his chief assistant and a member of the new housing authority board, and Joe Davis, a self-styled street preacher whose unsuccessful aldermanic candidacy was endorsed by the mayor.
Officer says he`ll call for further protests unless HUD recognizes his board, but HUD officials have insisted that it has no power. In addition to the mayor`s younger brother, Marion, and Ellis, the board`s members are the deputy city clerk and two tenants.
”If I really wanted to get nasty and technical and hostile, I could put them out of the building,” the mayor said, referring to Quadel workers. ”If I put them under siege, they`d know it. They wouldn`t be able to get out of town.”
Sister Julia Huiskamp, a Roman Catholic nun and a member of a coalition of local leaders formed to monitor HUD`s progress, says she doubts that a board appointed by the mayor can right the housing authority.
But Sister Julia, who came to East St. Louis in 1985 to work with public housing residents after 18 years in Chicago, doesn`t think HUD and Quadel have solved many problems. ”They have become real interested in rent collection and eviction, but they haven`t kept their end up on the daily maintenance,”
she said. ”They have to understand that they need to be a little more human.”
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Since last summer, Sister Julia has helped organize a tenant council and runs day-camp and after-school programs for children at the East St. Louis Villa Griffin Homes complex. She said she doesn`t have to look far from the development to find an example of insensitivity by HUD and Quadel.
The old local housing authority built Villa Griffin next to a bog that routinely floods and is a breeding ground for mosquitoes and rats. Sister Julia said she complained about the bog a year ago, and Quadel officials proposed spending $39,000 to study how to remove it, a solution she said wouldn`t give the immediate relief the tenants needed.
Quadel officials recently agreed to spray the area with insecticide, cut grass and remove garbage stuck in the mire. They also have begun talking with city officials to determine who owns the bog and whether it can be filled.
If local officials and Quadel could learn to cooperate on such issues, Sister Julia said, they could start resolving the housing authority`s larger problems. If Quadel doesn`t succeed, she said, the East St. Louis Housing Authority may have lost its last chance.
”I want them to succeed,” Sister Julia says. ”For the sake of the tenants, I want them to succeed.”
Monday: Who gets the contracts?