BMHA is a monster that feeds on Buffalo’s ever-expanding poverty. I have watched in dismay for a dozen years as City hall’s major welfare program ‘launders’ massive HUD-funding for Buffalo’s poor into patronage jobs & developer profits.

The housing authority is anti-democratic. Instead of striving for “the greatest good for the greatest number” it creates a few ‘select poor’ (BMHA houses far less than 10% of Buffalo’s poor) and houses them at incredible taxpayer cost in permanent dependency. It creates a booming “poverty industry” which creates hundreds of good paying jobs, that “service” the poor, without reducing poverty. BMHA gets the overwhelming preponderance of city hall’s poverty housing funding, while the majority of Buffalo’s poor live in declining neighborhoods, which get minimal help from the city.

The 7 member Board of Commissioners mocks accountability, while being paid up to $50/hour (by city taxpayers; HUD refuses to pay them) stipend & heath insurance benefits to rubber-stamp a political agenda. The meetings are held in virtual secrecy, with tenants or citizens rarely attending. The Mayoral-appointees seldom have any qualifications to advocate for the poor. One spot has been vacant since August , as the previous Commissioner Stuart Alexander moved to Florida after fueling the $105 million HOPE VI bonanza (as a controversial $52,000/year city consultant) which is demolishing 666 just-remodeled units (costing $16 million over a decade) at Lakeview to rebuild poverty apartments costing up to $1/4 million each in a neighborhood having the lowest rate of home ownership in Buffalo. Being “top down” planning at its worst, nobody in City Hall will talk about what will be remembered as BMHA’s biggest-ever rip-off of the poor.

Another appointee, Modesto Candelario, who is board Vice Chair, is a Mayoral patronage affirmative action ‘poverty professional’, an obvious conflict-of-interest. Worse still, he represents BMHA to the Marine Drive board, where secret talks are proceeding to dispose of the BMHA-owned 616 waterfront units when the powerful tenant cooperative’s lease expires in 2004. Marine Drive has long been viewed as both corrupt & racist, so powerful (tenants paying as little as $240/month incl. all utilities on the Waterfront. Many live in Florida winters) that nobody will talk about Buffalo’s biggest fair housing violator.

BMHA operates as a Federal Plantation, while ‘corrupting the morals of the poor’. The two tenant elected commissioners are out-gunned on the board by the five political appointees. It is difficult to find low-income tenants knowledgeable enough to deal with multimillion projects swirling around them. Frequently they are ‘bought off’ with jobs or perks, causing deep cynicism among other tenants. Several years ago. I campaigned for a “progressive”, who won with the largest vote in BMHA history. But he was bought off with a $30,000 city hall job by then-Housing Commissioner & BMHA Commissioner Marconi. And tenant-elected Commissioner Mary Rogers, a tenant for over 35 years, now on the board 22 years, is perceived as an insider nobody could beat.

Mary Rogers began as a reformer, but now is viewed as ‘sold-out’. She spent $24,000 over two years to fly to HUD-funded conferences in exotic cities. Preparing supper weekly for close friend, BMHA Executive Sharon West, last August she served an $800 dinner for two, paid with funds from a deeply-compromised RCC (Resident Advisory Board), which she controls. Incredibly, as the RCC has been repeatedly charged with financial irregularities, instead of an investigation, Rogers hand selected a new executive with a history of financial irregularities. A promised new election with Rogers removed from leadership has never occurred.

Sincere committed tenant representatives struggle with corrupting pressure to divisively advocate for BMHA’s ‘select poor’ while ignoring how unjust BMHA is to the other 90% of Buffalo’s poor denied their fair share of city resources. That corrupting influence is most dramatic in the plantation structure of public housing. Most tenant families are poor & black, making them particularly susceptible to the vestiges of slavery. BMHA even has a very predominantly white “plantation police” costly (one of only 11 housing authorities nationally) heavily staffed by Buffalo-cop-wannabes, who have little interest in public housing. Common sense would dictate walking security heavily made up of tenant leaders themselves. But outside ‘masters’, not powerless tenants, decide what is good for tenants.

Incredibly, on July 1 BMHA will finally correct the most dramatic vestiges of ‘plantation rule’ . . . long-standing lack of choice to applicants of where they can live. In HUD ‘civil rights’ logic, predominantly black tenants have been denied the choice whites demand, steadily increasing segregation at BMHA, while spending $10’s of millions (Comer-Vs-Kemp class action lawsuit) to allegedly deconcentrate race & poverty at BMHA. Troublingly, BMHA refuses to release “race ethnicity data” needed to evaluate its costly failed class action settlement, which is sowing the seeds of a new costly set of remedies. What could be a more dramatic violation of civil rights than for mostly black applicants to BMHA bring told they could not CHOOSE a vacant apartment exactly where they prefer to live. Instead they were OFFERED a vacancy in up to five housing projects having the GREATEST PERCENTAGE OF VACANCIES. Whites, demanding choice, have avoided BMHA except as a last resort, making BMHA ever blacker (more segregated). A new challenge will be BMHA’s notoriously slow rate of preparing vacant apartments. The usual many months required will effectively continue to deny choice.

UB’s urban economist Dr. Henry Taylor has emphatically stated: “Public housing does not work”. Yet in a near-bankrupt city, one of the poorest & most segregated in the United States, we continue spending most of our low income housing funding on a program that does not work while fostering segregation & concentration of poverty.. It will cost an incredible $82 million next year to purportedly benefit less than 10% of Buffalo’s poor. It is an incredible injustice. And it is destructive.

Every urban expert defines one of Buffalo’s major problems to be serving as a warehouse for the poor, as wealth & taxbase flee to ever-expanding suburbs. But BMHA’s top attorney Gillian Brown insists that the Assistant Executive Thomas A. Williams, appointed by a Mayor promising residency enforcement on city workers, does not have to live in the city. But he has lied about living on Thompson Road in Clarence since 1995, but votes on the West Side (even listing a phone 881-1949 at his mother-in-law’s house at 1258 West Ave.) in violation of election law, which clearly states on his voter registration: “the above information is true. I understand that if it is not true I can be convicted & fined up to $5,000 and/or jailed for up to four years” . He is paid $76,000 annually with a mere GED certificate. It exquisitely illustrates how little BMHA has to do with providing “safe affordable housing for the poor”. What could be more cynical than to permit a dubiously qualified, highly paid patronage appointee to take his taxpayer check to one of our richest suburbs, concentrating the very race & poverty the courts have ordered BMHA to correct ..while everybody knows it . . and winks. It is called political corruption.

Logic would dictate a METROPOLITAN Housing Authority, enabling the poor to enjoy Clarence too, instead of a MUNICIPAL authority enabling Williams to take his big pay check far away from the poor he is so generously paid to ‘service’.

Expanding the cynicism & corruption, I have been prosecuted an 11th time by the District Attorney for criticizing failure of one appointed BMHA Commissioner to enforce residency while he was Residency Officer 2# (now- fired, of four under Masiello, the current one, Frank Rossi convicted of securities fraud & fined $65,000 in Jan. 2000). The Commissioner was really angry that I exposed his selling a HUD-FHA scam house on Zittel. He was following the lead of his friend & Independence Party operative Frank Parlato Jr., who sold 1,000 HUD-FHA-scam houses profiting over $10 million, while speeding the destruction of scores of poor neighborhoods. Flynn is an appointee to BMHA’s board primarily because he chairs the Erie County Independence Party. He has run it as a virtual criminal enterprise & is currently being charged with major federal civil rights violations seeking millions in damages by a faction of his own party

In a dying city BMHA is incredibly costly & destructive. If the mayor indeed has a “new vision” he would convene a blue ribbon panel to revamp a swollen bureaucracy costing well over $1,500 monthly to house a family of two. Next year with a budget of $82 million that cost will rise sharply. All this in a city with 24,000 housing vacancies, steadily falling home ownership, and plummeting values in low-income neighborhoods. Low income owners are losing life savings in their homes, adding to Buffalo’s expanding ranks of the poor, as we cannot even learn how much money the US Department of Housing & Urban Development pumps annually into Buffalo. Much of HUD’s funding makes things worse, especially at BMHA. But the local HUD office is virtually silent as poor neighborhoods citywide are in precipitous decline.

Few places is “new vision” more needed than at BMHA. “Public housing does not work” . . And it does not work at incredible cost, as Buffalo becomes an ever more concentrated warehouse for the poor. As endless, unaccountable HUD millions continue to pour into BMHA.

Richard Kern, MSW, April 3, 2002; cc. community groups

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