HOUSING
U.S. easing grip on Dade HUD
The U.S. takeover of the Miami-Dade Housing Agency appears to be ending, but a private firm must oversee some work.
Federal grants had been squandered, the bureaucracy was in disarray and some developers were taking county money without building promised homes. Two developers pleaded guilty -- one received jail time, the other probation -- and charges are still pending against a third. No government employee was charged.
In some ways, the takeover has lost steam in recent months. With five months left in President Bush's term, everyone involved was keenly aware that a new team in Washington would have its own priorities.
The county's most visible housing-activist group, the Miami Workers Center, was surprised by the new deal. The group has largely sided with the county against HUD -- especially after Alvarez promised to build dramatically more public housing in Liberty City -- but a spokeswoman attacked the idea of hiring a contractor to oversee vouchers.
''We have a multiple-choice question where the options are no good,'' said spokeswoman Shushma Sheth. ``On one hand we have a broken county bureaucracy that allowed the robbing of low-income families, and on the other we could have the history of private corporate interests robbing from low-income families.''
The group has consistently pushed for giving residents and their organizations a direct role in fixing and running the public-housing system.
Privatizing the rental-assistance program would be a shift for Miami-Dade, which has generally opposed outsourcing any of the housing agency's major projects. Cabrera said he was largely rebuffed when he suggested the same thing last year.
''If HUD feels this is the best way, then so be it,'' Alvarez said.
The program, known as Section 8, provides vouchers for low-income people to live in private apartments. More than 14,000 vouchers are used in Miami-Dade, and their value depends on the family's size and income.
In Miami-Dade, it has been plagued by haphazard oversight and poor record-keeping. Some tenants went years without undergoing the mandatory annual reviews of their income. By the time HUD took over, hundreds of landlords said they were underpaid and others were almost certainly overpaid.
''It has been a complete disaster in administration,'' said Cabrera, now CEO of a nonprofit housing development organization in California. ``The capacity to get it where it needs to be is just not there.''
Many landlords have stopped accepting tenants who pay with county-managed vouchers, refusing to deal with the delays, wrong payments and endless bureaucracy.
''I spend day after day after day calling numbers that are disconnected and voicemails that are full,'' said Lance Paskewich, managing partner of a company that owns 34 apartments and has voucher-holders in 27 of them. ``I don't think a private contractor could get away with that.''
That closes even more doors in a county where up to 100,000 people are expected to join a new government waiting list for affordable housing.
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