Mayor Ed Lee to Housing Authority: “No one … should feel comfortable”

http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2013/01/10/mayor-ed-lee-to-housing-authority-no-one-should-feel-comfortable/

A new inspection by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds housing authorities, gave San Francisco’s agency a score of 54 out of 100. A score below 60 puts the agency on the “troubled” list. California has 114 housing authorities and only one other — Richmond — is on the troubled list, a regional HUD official said.

Part of the reason for the low score was financial fallout from multimillion dollar legal settlements against the agency, the mayor said. In 2009 the agency finally paid off a $12 million court judgment to the families of a grandmother and five children killed in a 1997 apartment fire in Hunters View, the same complex the mayor was visiting Thursday to mark the first phase of its redevelopment. The agency was found negligent for not installing a smoke detector or fixing a faulty heater.

The current Housing Authority director, Henry Alvarez, was hired in the summer 2008 in part to resolve the agency’s legal problems but now finds himself the subject of three lawsuits brought by authority employees alleging discrimination and retaliation.