DN Editorial: Time for PHA to finish cleaning house

ON THURSDAY, the Philadelphia Housing Authority board voted 4-1 to fire Executive Director Carl Greene.

But the job of restoring order to the agency is only half done. Now it's the board's turn to go.

The PHA board has admitted to being blinded by the work of Carl Greene in transforming public housing in the city, and failed to provide proper oversight of the agency, or impose any checks and balances on a multimillion-dollar publicly funded agency.

Board members - including Jannie Blackwell, who voted to keep Greene -have claimed that they didn't want to "micromanage" the director, and that they had little defense against a director who was telling them outright lies.

But given the scope of Greene's transgressions - a pattern of harassments, with claims settled in secret being the most egregious, plus questionable policies for employees, and many complaints of a tyrannical and hostile management style - that's not good enough. Especially since the board approved raises and bonuses for Greene.

Greene is now out. An interim director may be named, but beyond that, we see no fundamental changes on the horizon for the agency.

How can this be? For one thing, the board is essentially accountable to no one. PHA is a state agency, run with federal funds. That creates a vacuum when it comes to who has the authority to make significant changes. Except, that is, for the board.

So far, for example, no one in Harrisburg has offered a plan or proposal for restructuring the governance of the agency. The governor says he'll support changes, but he can do nothing on his own. HUD is conducting an investigation, but we doubt it's investigating how its own oversight failed.

The mayor has two board appointments; one of those is occupied by Blackwell, whose term has expired. The other, board chairman John Street, appointed himself to the board on his way out of office; his seat doesn't expire for a year.

Street is the first person who should step down. As chairman, the buck should stop at his seat: The woeful oversight of the board rests with him. As chairman, he was right to sing Greene's praises, but he should have had a wider perspective: He should have known that the changes Greene made in knocking down high-rise public housing in favor of smaller scattered sites and mixed use was in fact a federal HUD inititaitive called Hope VI. Greene made it happen, here, for sure, but so did other housing heads throughout the country. This lack of perspective probably contributed to a dangerous mythologizing of Greene.

Plus, Street's recent sniping of the current mayor on a range of charges, from not being black enough to mangling the budget, is, for a former mayor, unprofessional. But to do so as head of the board that manages the city's public housing qualifies as a firing offense. Not that any board member can be fired. And that's the problem.

PHA must be made more accountable. The only way to do that is to have a board that is accountable to the mayor. . . not a federal agency, not "the state," and not the controller, who just reappointed one board member and controls another.

The buck has to stop, not with an entity, but with an individual, like the mayor, who can stand up and say, "This problem is my responsibility."

The board hasn't done that. But sooner or later, someone is going to have to.

PHA can't clean house while each board member is protected by his or her appointments and term of office. That's why the board must step down.

It could turn out to be the most effective PHA action it'll ever take. *