Paul Giorgio: Moving Backward with HUD

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Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Paul Giorgio, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

The Worcester Housing Authority under the leadership of Executive Director, Ray Mariano has made great strides in both improving public housing in Worcester and in the life of its tenants. Mariano, the former Worcester Mayor and former public housing authority resident takes his job seriously. His priority is to make public housing the envy of the private sector. But, Mariano has a secondary goal and that is to get people out of public housing and into the private rental market or home ownership.

It appears that Mairiano is at odds with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) over the program. First HUD told the Worcester Housing Authority it could proceed with its Moving to Work Program, then later that day they told the WHA it could not.

As a full disclosure, I must inform you that I was the former Chairman of the Board of the Worcester Housing Authority and am very aware of the countless hours and hard work that has gone into the Moving to Work program. Mariano has crafted alliances with the Worcester Health Foundation, with the Chamber of Commerce and various other stakeholders including the tenant association.

There is a Crisis

We have a crisis in Federal subsidized housing in this country. The housing stock of our public housing projects is aging beyond use. Most of it was built as veterans’ housing at the end of World War II. This makes it 68 years old. Almost 50% of the residents in Worcester have been in public housing for over 5 years. The problem is not the length of stay, but now the number of generations that stay. Mariano claims that some families have been in public housing for five generations. Public housing was conceived as a stopgap measure and a hand up. Unfortunately for many it has become a way of life.

For a long time Great Brook Valley, the city’s largest “project” was predominantly Latino; that is changing, which is a good thing. It is no longer an ethnic ghetto.

HUD is Wrong on This

So why the squishiness on the part of HUD? The MTW program is sound, with lots of support for the residents who want to take part. The Toward a Better Life Program is completely voluntary. Each resident who opts in is given a case worker and every kind of support from finding a job, to learning how to balance a checkbook to working toward an education goal of either a high school or college degree.

Currently, according to reports 71% of the WHA residents receive Welfare.  The Moving to Work Program or as the WHA has named it Toward a Better Life program’s goal is to get people off of Welfare and into a job and home ownership if possible. There is nothing wrong with those goals.

The program that they gave the WHA permission to undertake and then told them that no such program existed is the same program that the Cambridge Housing Authority has undertaken with success. It is the very same program that Congress approved during the Clinton Administration.

As a good progressive, I know that we have more demand than capacity, when it comes to social service programs.  If we can give someone a hand up and a hand out of the “Welfare” system we should. We owe it to them.

Remember how proud you were the first time, as a teenager, you came home with a paycheck.  Let’s make people proud. Let’s help them get a job, an education and eventually a home. Let’s break the cycle of poverty in Worcester by allowing public housing tenants to move to work and toward a better life.

HUD needs to get its act together, so that the people they serve can get theirs together.

Paul Giorgio is a longtime Democratic Party Activist who has worked on numerous campaigns. He was a Lead Advance Person for President Clinton & Vice President Gore. He was Deputy Director of Special Events for President Clinton’s first Inauguration. He has been elected a delegate to numerous Democratic National Conventions and recently served as one of President Obama’s representatives on the Platform Committee. In 2013 he was chosen as a Presidential Elector. He is the President of Pagio, Inc., publishers of Pulse Magazine, Vitality Magazine and Worcester Medicine.

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