After a big bang, HUD dustup lingers

The sequence of rat-a-tats that echoed over Mantua's McAlpin Playground early yesterday morning sounded exactly like gunfire, that familiar soundtrack of a neighborhood being brought low. A chorus of groans followed that first retort. Then came a louder rat-a-tat-tat.

This time, instead of worried sighs, you could hear cheers rippling across the West Philadelphia neighborhood. The hosannas rose up from the small clutches of residents who huddled against the chill spring air on street corners, and from the crowd of muckety-mucks who gathered by the warm tent that had been erected for their convenience the day before. For once, those distinctive small explosions seemed to herald a new beginning for Mantua, rather than another loss.

With the final blast, Mantua Hall, one of the remaining relics of Philadelphia's brief love affair with high-rise public housing, pancaked into a neat heap at the corner of 35th and Fairmount. It was the 21st such tower that the Philadelphia Housing Authority had imploded since 1995. And it is expected to be the last of the city's original 40 from the urban-renewal era to have its existence erased from the skyline.

Such events have become so routine that this one might have passed with little fanfare had it not been for the very public roundhouse that PHA director Carl R. Greene delivered earlier this year to Alphonso Jackson, head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that supplies much of the funding for Philadelphia's ambitious affordable housing program.

On. Feb. 4, Greene, who is widely considered one of the nation's most successful housing authority directors, revealed that he had filed a lawsuit claiming that Jackson had pressured him to transfer valuable townhouse sites to music mogul Kenny Gamble at rock-bottom prices. When Greene balked, the suit alleges that Jackson retaliated by vowing to strip PHA of a key $50 million grant.

So, as the cloud of dust from the imploded 18-story tower wafted swiftly west, a different kind of cloud remained firmly over the Mantua neighborhood.

If HUD carries out the threatened funding cutoff, the flow of money for building low-rise public housing in Philadelphia could stop cold starting tomorrow. And if that happens, the neighbors who cheered the implosion of Mantua Hall may have to spend years with a block-size empty lot in their midst.

Greene says PHA simply won't have the money to build a replacement - 100 garden apartment units and several shops. In fact, he claimed, the agency won't be able to start any more housing projects.

"In the name of retaliating against me, Alphonso would retaliate against the whole city," Greene complained yesterday after the dignitaries and residents had melted back into the city to attend to their respective Sunday activities.

"He doesn't care about working-class people losing their houses. He doesn't care about people in the Northeast being inundated with Section 8 housing."

HUD doesn't deny that it intends to eliminate Philadelphia's $50 million "Move to Work" grant. But it says the cutoff is merely a routine penalty for PHA's failure to ensure that five percent of its 6,000 new units are handicap accessible. Greene disputes that charge, saying that PHA, with 8 percent, exceeds the federal requirement.

Whatever the actual number, members of Philadelphia's congressional delegation complain that HUD's funding cut is extreme. They became especially critical after discovering a glib e-mail exchange between two of Jackson's deputies, in which they sound more like mob enforcers than federal paper-pushers.

After one HUD deputy asked how he could "make life less happy" for Greene, the second replied:

"Take away all his federal dollars?" The answer was punctuated with the smiley-face emoticon, :-D.

Those e-mails alone hardly make an airtight case against Jackson. But the exchange resonated with congressional Democrats. Jackson, a longtime friend of President Bush and Gamble, is under investigation by the Justice Department for similar alleged acts of favoritism involving HUD projects in New Orleans and the Virgin Islands. Jackson has refused to comment.

But U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Democrat who represents West Philadelphia and who attended yesterday's implosion, said he was furious with HUD's behavior.

"It's indisputable that they have not been fair and are punishing Carl Greene. It's revenge," he said in an interview. "But this is a spat they are going to lose."

Ironically, Fattah shared the dais in Mantua yesterday with former Mayor John F. Street and Councilwoman Janine Blackwell. According to Greene, both officials also intervened on Gamble's behalf to get Greene to transfer the development sites. Yesterday they had only praise for the PHA head.

They weren't alone. Even HUD's representative, regional director John G. Bravacos, hailed Greene "for changing the face of public housing," over the last decade. He has systematically replaced high-rises that warehoused the poor with human-scale buildings that look like Philadelphia's traditional rowhouses and house a mix of people from various income levels.

Bravacos, however, would not comment on Greene's record of making those houses accessible to the handicapped.

Although Greene's work often gets high marks in housing circles, he is well known for his lack of diplomatic skills. One of the origins of his poor relationship with Gamble is that he fired Gamble's company, Universal Community Homes, twice from PHA projects for failing to keep up with construction schedules. (Gamble did not return calls seeking comment.)

There's no evidence that Greene has grown any more circumspect since his latest run-in with HUD. Complaining yesterday about Jackson's behavior, he compared the HUD chief to the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

"Did you see The Last King of Scotland, where a power-mad dictator does as he pleases? I call Jackson 'the last king of HUD.' "

See video of the implosion at http://go.philly.com/mantuaEndText