Left: Kendall Pelling, left, Rising Tide Partners’s executive director, and Dee Levy, one of the organization’s Section 8 clients, stand outside of Levy’s Hazelwood home on Saturday, April 1. Top: A house at 5127 Lytle Street in Hazelwood. Bottom: A house at 224 Johnston Avenue in Hazelwood. Both top and bottom are several properties in the Hazelwood area where tenants haven’t received their Section 8 voucher payments for rent through the the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh for more than a year. (Photos by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
“Not only is [HACP] not effectively housing people, it’s contributing to people becoming unhoused and I couldn’t be complicit in that anymore,” said Tammy Thompson, a former housing authority board member.
by Eric Jankiewicz, PublicSource
As Pittsburgh’s housing authority prioritizes building and investing in a mixture of public and private redevelopment, housing advocates and others say the cost is a diminished and largely ignored Housing Choice Voucher program that leaves thousands on waiting lists.
While tenants and landlords have long grumbled about the program, people recently associated with the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh [HACP] are also coming forward to decry its ineffectiveness.
On Feb. 2, a former HACP staffer filed a complaint against the authority to the Pennsylvania Department of State. DeAnna Vaughn, the former primary administrator of the authority’s Homeownership Program, is now a real estate agent and landlord. She wrote in an email to the department that HACP “does not adhere to basic business standards, which places vulnerable populations at risk of homelessness” including when it failed to pay one of her tenants’ rent through the voucher program, also known as Section 8.
“The gross negligence and misconduct of this agency in regards to the administration of this federally funded program and others has fueled the affordable housing crises that the City of Pittsburgh faces,” she wrote in an email to the department.
The Office of State Inspector General responded, saying that they did not have “investigative authority over the issues” and that they were referring her complaint to the HACP board.
While some would blame the city’s housing problems on a low stock of affordable housing or stigma against accepting Section 8 voucher-holders, several landlords, tenants and former housing authority personnel are pointing to the authority’s management.
With its high staff turnover, the housing authority has a pattern of not returning calls or emails and failing to pay rent to landlords who have accepted Section 8 vouchers, they say.
For years, housing advocates have questioned how HACP runs its voucher program. As part of HACP’s special designation as one of HUD’s Moving to Work [MTW] agencies, the authority is able to reallocate federal funds from vouchers to housing development. The agency has argued that construction of new housing is more effective than issuing more vouchers.
“Unfortunately, our condition in this city is such that if I release 100 vouchers, only 33% will get filled,” said Caster Binion, HACP’s executive director. In a recent interview, he acknowledged that staff turnover had compromised efforts to improve the voucher program, but said recent hires and training should help.