A year and a half after HUD issued a scathing report on the D.C. Housing Authority, 1 in 3 mandated fixes remain unresolved, and the agency’s leader says DCHA’s predicament is worse than many imagined.
“It is not enough to change a process here or hire additional staff there,” Pettigrew said, explaining that the agency’s organization and entire culture need to be overhauled.
Pettigrew says he will address the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s remaining concerns by its latest deadline, May 31 — a list that includes a dismally low public housing occupancy rate, now at about 76 percent, and occupied units that remain in unsafe or unsanitary conditions.
He says he will also release in May a three-year recovery plan to fully rebuild the authority.
“It’ll be a transparent document, a public document,” Pettigrew told the council committee on Feb. 22. “It will actually be a public scorecard for the agency itself, for everybody to follow.”
“You’re laying a lot on this recovery plan,” council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) observed during the hearing, in what appeared to be a friendly chiding, after Pettigrew mentioned it several times.
“I am, yes, because that’s what it is; it’s a recovery plan. Yeah, I got you,” Pettigrew replied, nodding. “This is not my first rodeo with that one.”
Pettigrew’s background with public housing agency turnarounds distinguished him among candidates to replace Executive Director Brenda Donald, who helmed the agency for two years until mid-2023. Donald, hailed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser as “a reformer and a passionate advocate for DC children and families,” often played down the agency’s troubles, conceding they were serious but insisting she was turning things around after the previous administration’s failures.
Most of the issues raised in the 2022 HUD report did predate Donald’s tenure. HUD assailed the authority for having among the lowest public housing occupancy rates in the nation, along with dangerous and unsanitary conditions, a faulty low-income voucher distribution system, and a variety of other problems the report attributed to faulty governance and failed leadership.
After the HUD report became public, Bowser (D) successfully pushed legislation to reconstitute the authority’s board, which now consists of her appointees and two city officials. The December 2022 shake-up left Donald, in addition to several board members, in place. But Donald departed over the summer, months ahead of the end of her contract.
Pettigrew, who was CEO of Alexandria’s housing authority before taking on his current role in D.C., has had much experience repairing troubled agencies. In the 1990s, a federal judge found the D.C. agency in such terrible shape that he stripped authority from the mayor and appointed a federal receiver to take over. The receiver, David I. Gilmore, brought Pettigrew on board to assist. Later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Pettigrew served as Gilmore’s deputy general manager for operations at the Housing Authority of New Orleans during another federal receivership.
Since returning to D.C., Pettigrew has replaced many of the authority’s top staffers, substantially wiping away something Donald claimed as one of her signature achievements: “rebuilding the agency’s organizational infrastructure.”
Henderson asked Pettigrew how he would keep D.C.’s authority out of another receivership.
“Performance,” Pettigrew replied. “People cannot argue with performance, and that’s my goal.”
One issue that has infuriated public housing residents, low-income voucher holders, landlords and aid organizations in recent years is the authority’s lack of responsiveness. People have frequently complained at public meetings that it can seem nearly impossible to get someone to respond to an email or pick up the phone.
Pettigrew said that’s about to change as he brings the agency’s staff, which has been working largely remotely since the pandemic, back to the office four days a week beginning in April.
“I need to give at least 30 days’ notice, so people can get their affairs in order,” he told the committee. “But I need to get staff back in the office so they can be more accountable and more productive.”
Pettigrew said he plans to revamp a customer-service culture “that’s been very poor for a while: Let’s be frank about it.”
“Obviously, if people can come find us where they know the staff are, and come in and walk in and see us,” that will reduce people’s frustration with responsiveness, he told council members. “And also having landlines, at desks, with extensions where people have to now answer their phones, as opposed to this remote cellphone nonsense — forgive me — stuff.”
Another hurdle is full implementation of real estate management software by Yardi Systems, for which the agency signed a $4.35 million contract in 2018. The software still can’t be used effectively because staffers were never properly trained, according to the HUD report and other records.
Pettigrew said he hoped to have a plan in March to get staff members trained and fully implement the software.
“These projects, man, they’re very labor-intensive, and they’re very detail-oriented,” he said. “… You need a strong project manager to be able to lead it, and from what I’ve gathered, there was no strong project manager. The departments were left to fend for themselves. Nobody was really in charge of anything.”
The improvements would allow the agency to run more efficiently and, alongside stepped-up repairs, help raise the authority’s public housing occupancy rate, which Donald pointed to as her top priority. In early 2022, as the rate stood at 79 percent; she pledged to raise it 10 percentage points by the end of that year. Instead, it fell to about 73 percent by the end of her tenure, even as many thousands of names languished on a frozen waiting list for units.
The occupancy rate has ticked up a couple of percentage points in recent months, and Pettigrew said he expects to bring it up to 80 or 85 percent by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, he said, increased extermination efforts will help alleviate infestations of mice and roaches.
“We only have six pest control staff for 8,000 units, which … didn’t make any sense to me at all,” Pettigrew said. “So I hired immediately another pest control company, and we have a couple more that are going to be submitting to us applications to bring on more.”
DCHA will have to think creatively and move aggressively to make changes that will include redeveloping properties, he said. “In our housing portfolio, some communities will need to be redeveloped into mixed-income, mixed-use communities, some will be renovated to quality housing standards, and others that have been previously renovated will be better maintained,” he said.
Pettigrew promised robust community engagement with tenants as projects proceed, decrying a culture of “poor communication” he said he inherited.
“I need residents involved,” he said. “This is their community, too.”
