'The clock is ticking': Milwaukee Housing Authority complaints could overwhelm city building inspectors
'The clock is ticking': Milwaukee Housing Authority complaints could overwhelm city building inspectors
Genevieve Redsten - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 9/26/2023
City officials want to send building inspectors to housing authority properties, after fielding complaints from their constituents about bed bugs, mold and broken heat.
Before code enforcement can respond, however, the Department of Neighborhood Services will likely need additional funding to hire more inspectors, DNS Commissioner Erica Roberts said at a Common Council committee meeting Monday. With budget season underway, they'll have to find those dollars soon.
"Time is of the essence. The clock is ticking. We know that," Roberts said.
City Hall is under pressure to regulate the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee (HACM) after months of public outcry from tenants and community organizers. Some are now calling for new agency leadership after a recent Journal Sentinel investigation revealed that federal regulators warned of serious lapses inside the housing authority last year.
HACM owns and manages about 4,000 units across the city. Each month, HACM receives between 1,600 and 2,000 work orders, Roberts said. Roberts didn't get that information until hours before the council meeting, and the number of orders was "significantly higher" than DNS had anticipated, she said.
It's unclear how many of those work orders would rise to the level of a code violation. But given the sheer volume of tenant complaints HACM is fielding every month, the housing authority's code-enforcement demands could rival those of notorious Milwaukee landlord Youssef "Joe" Berrada, said Ald. Robert Bauman.
Alderman apologizes to housing authority residents
HACM has been under fire since March, when local nonprofit Common Ground began calling on city and federal leaders to keep the agency in check. Common Ground organizers and tenants have accused HACM of neglecting maintenance and losing track of tenant paperwork.
The mayor and HACM leadership were warned by federal regulators in December that haphazard bookkeeping put the agency "at risk for serious fraud, waste, and abuse." Members of the Common Council, along with Common Ground, were in the dark about those warnings until about two weeks ago, when the Journal Sentinel obtained two federal audit reports through a public records request.
"We should never have gotten to this stage in the first place," Ald. Mark Borkowski said Monday, before calling out the officials who received the report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in December.
"Why has it taken taken 10 months?" Borkowski said. "Shame on us for allowing it to [take] this long. And on behalf of the city, I apologize. This is absolutely terrible, and it should never have happened."
City officials have limited authority over the housing authority. Though the city appoints HACM's board of commissioners, the agency is largely independent. That's left members of the Common Council confused about what they can — or should — be doing to oversee the agency.
The city's code enforcement has been confused, too. DNS had a decades-long policy of referring code complaints back to HACM, operating under the assumption that the city couldn't police an independent public agency. When HACM building managers neglect maintenance, Common Ground said, tenants have nowhere to turn.
Last week, Common Council President José Pérez announced a proposal to change that DNS policy and make DNS responsible for investigating tenant complaints about HACM housing. Later that day, Mayor Cavalier Johnson said he would use his executive authority to make that change directly.
The proposed ordinance passed a committee vote Monday afternoon and will move to a full council vote in October.
The audience inside the committee room Monday was standing-room only. More than 100 tenants and Common Ground volunteers came to watch, cheering and booing throughout. Dozens of people watched from an overflow room down the hall.
Several tenants, speaking directly to the committee, described harrowing conditions inside their buildings: water leaks, a broken heating system, bed bug infestations.
"How many more residents like me will pay the price for HACM's incompetence?" asked Teddi Minor, a Becher Court resident who said she found black mold in her apartment after HACM neglected to fix a water leak.
DNS needs additional details from housing authority
Monday's vote was just the beginning, council members said. It's now incumbent upon HACM, DNS and other city leaders to hammer out the details. Roberts said DNS still needs more information about the severity of HACM's work orders.
"Once we receive that additional information from HACM and other city departments, we look forward to being part of the solution to help these residents," DNS spokesperson Jeremy McGovern said in a statement Monday.
The code enforcement agency has recently struggled with vacancies, turnover and budget constraints.
In the meantime, Pérez is also seeking more accountability from the federal government. He wrote a letter to HACM's federal regulators on September 15, after the Journal Sentinel made the two recent HUD audit reports public. He wants to know what consequences HACM might face if the agency remains out of compliance with federal regulations.
"The amount of detail and dysfunction is difficult to process," Pérez wrote to HUD, adding: "It is unlikely that structural problems of this type and size began recently."
Speaking to the committee Monday, HACM's top official Willie Hines expressed support for the DNS oversight.
"HACM acknowledges that there have been significant issues in terms of processes, procedures and services to residents," Hines said.
He reiterated that HACM has been placed on two corrective action plans by HUD and also asked the Common Council for "understanding" — a request that elicited boos from the crowd.
After the meeting, Bauman told the Journal Sentinel that the biggest questions — how HACM got here, and how the agency plans to solve the problem — are still unanswered. Bauman said he has four HACM buildings in his district and about 600 constituents living in HACM properties.
"I see a disconnect between the housing authority's pronouncements and what the customers are telling us," Bauman told Hines, adding, "I'll be blunt about it: HUD [officials] are not voters. These people are voters."