New Haven Independent

Miller gave a three-month report on his progress and his plans for the housing authority to three dozen listeners at a breakfast meeting at the Graduate Club of the Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund. Miller, a veteran of New York and Newark’s authorities, took over New Haven’s agency in November. He follows in a line of directors (including, among others, Linda Evans, David Echols, Marsha Cayford) who came to town determined to overcome the incompetence, slum conditions, bureaucratic indifference, and patronage that have plagued the scandal-plagued authority and its low-income tenants for decades.

Miller, who’s 54 and upbeat, didn’t seem to have succumbed to hopelessness yet. Not by any means. He indeed spoke of serious problems he’s encountered in the job so far. He also spoke of three broad ideas for tackling them.

Like slaying the bureaucracy monster. Including rules that tie up all those staffers he has processing forms to recertify tenants. Because of endless bureaucratic requirements from the feds, Miller said, he has 25 people working full-time just recertifying that the system’s 6,000 tenants (2,000 in public-housing complexes, 4,000 renting apartments subsidized by the Section 8 program) still qualify.

“There are manuals upon manuals,” he said. “Regulations upon regulations. There are manuals hundreds of pages long… forms no one can figure out.” Because no one can remember all those rules and forms, he needs quality control people to monitor employees processing forms. “Then we do quality control on the people who do quality control. Then we have HUD [the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development]” checking up on the quality-control controllers.

“There are only two people who have a grasp on all the regulations,” Miller concluded, pausing with a stand-up comic’s timing. “One is myself.” Pause again. “The other is myself. It’s that complicated.”

Part of the reason for all the bureaucracy, he said, is an ever-growing list of information the feds want verified each year, from income to immigration status. The process includes notifying people to show up for interviews, then re-notifying them to show up for interviews, then sending them eviction letters to force them to show up. Staffers interview the tenants once each year, then go about investigating their financial information and who lives in their homes. The process takes 120 days per tenant.

Of course it makes sense to try to catch fraud, to make sure tenants are indeed poor enough for their subsidized rents, Miller said. But this is overkill. His average tenant earns $12,000 a year; he questioned the “marginal rate of return” in devoting so much money and staff time to such in-depth scrutiny of each one every year.

He offered a solution: more “flat-rate” rents. Right now only tenants earning more than a certain amount of money per year pay a flat rent; others have rents calculated to 30 percent of their annual income. People who pay flat rent have to be recertified only every three years, not every year. Miller suggested setting up a series of flat rents based on certain income levels, the way the federal tax system does; then doing all recertifications triannually.

That way, Miller said, he could free up some of the 25 full-timers to actually work with people in the projects.

Ideas Two & Three

He has lots of work for them to do, especially in two areas.

• “Behavior.” That’s the word Miller kept using to describe the problems caused by rules putting younger disabled people in senior housing complexes. That groups people in their 20s, 30s or 40s who wrestle with mental illness or drug and alcohol problems in with the aged. “This is public housing, not institutionalized housing,” he said. “We need people to be able to live independently.” But many disabled tenants can’t, and the authority hasn’t had the people or programs in place to help most of them.

Miller said he wants to put those programs in place. The authority is consulting with mental-health experts on a plan. He’d like see people on site at projects helping people remember, for instance, to take their medication each day, and not to mix it with drugs or alcohol. A pilot has begun at Ruoppolo Manor; Miller wants to expand it to other senior-dominated facilities.

• “Dysfunctional families.” At the root of many problems in the projects, Miller argued, is the simple fact that so many poor people live together in such a small space. Part of the authority’s mission, he said, must include helping families make more money. The authority spends a lot of money. It can spend more of that money hiring its own tenants, he said.

The authority has a program requiring that, but “we’ve done a lousy job,” he said. So he has hired a coordinator to compile a list of tenants eligible to work on rehab projects, from carpenters and bricklayers to asbestos removers and basic laborers. The coordinator will also gauge tenants’ interest in training for jobs. Miller said he’s also working on developing a pre-apprenticeship program with local unions, similar to ones he worked on in New York and Newark.

The authority will spend $300 million on renovating projects over the next two and a half years, Miller noted. Half of that will go toward labor. That’s a huge opportunity to hire people.

Faith in Tenants

One member of the Grad Club audience questioned whether Miller’s idea will succeed. “If they’re living in public housing,” said Normand Methot (pictured), a local Section 8 landlord, “they don’t have the skills you want, do they?”

“I disagree with that,” Miller responded. “I lived in public housing… [Now] I’m running the agency. I’m from a single-headed household myself.”

He did say that helping young people in the projects succeed is tougher now than when he was growing up in Alabama, because of the breakdown in family and community values.

Brack Poitier (pictured), a local builder who has worked with the housing authority, seconded Miller’s confidence.

“Over 32 years, I’ve never had a problem bringing in” and training tenants as workers, Poitier said. “If I can do it as a minority contractor, anybody can do the same thing. If they [contractors] have the spirit to take your money, they should follow” the rules.