The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which provides public housing to about 10,000 Richmond residents, faces a $150 million backlog in repairs for its 4,000 housing units, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “At some point you’re going to have very serious health and safety problems,” agency CEO T.K. Somanath told the authority’s board last week.
The authority is considering converting its six public housing projects from traditional federally funded public housing into the Section 8 housing choice voucher program, which would net the agency $7.5 million a year to apply toward property maintenance and large-scale redevelopment.
The authority has about $750 per unit annually for repairs and upkeep, reports the Times-Dispatch. A May 2016 physical needs assessment found the agency needed nearly $19,000 per unit to make all necessary fixes.
One obvious question is, why did the RRHA short-change maintenance so severely over the years? Were administrative costs bloated? Were other costs out of control? Did the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) cut financial support? Could RRHA have charged tenants more rent? The reasons are not clear, either from the T-D‘s reporting or from RDHA documents.
But there’s an even more fundamental question. The entire justification of having the government build and administer public housing is that government can do the job more inexpensively than the private sector. But can it?
RRHA’s budget is about $65 million a year, and it operates 4,000 housing units per year — housing units built decades ago, the original cost of which is almost fully amortized. That averages out to $16,250 per unit per year — $1,350 per month.
Think about that: You can rent new, two-bedroom apartments between 900 and 1,000 square feet in the Manchester neighborhood south of the James River for between $1,100 and $1,300 a month. They come equipped with hardwood floors, microwaves, washer-dryers, and some look like the photo at right:
Here’s the really amazing thing: The private-sector rental units are not fully amortized. Landlords have to pay the financing costs! Yet somehow they can provide quality apartments for less than it costs RRHA just to operate and maintain its disastrous public housing projects.
I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out — the RRHA pays utilities, and I expect that Manchester landlords do not — and I’m sure a fair comparison wouldn’t be as devastatingly bad as the numbers I have presented. This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and I would need to vet the figures with RRHA officials before drawing authoritative conclusions. But I suspect that no tweaking of the numbers would change the fact that public housing is a catastrophically failed financial model — and that doesn’t even include the social cost of packing poor people together in isolated, crime-ridden communities.
Surely it would be far better, as the RRHA requests, to convert all public housing to Section 8 vouchers. Going one step further, it likewise would be better to empty the projects, tear them down, let the private sector redevelop them, and get government out of the rental housing business altogether.
Update: Somaneth informs me that only $30 million of the RRHA’s $65 million budget goes to managing public housing. The rest goes to real-estate and community development programs. Thirty million dollars translate into an average expenditure of $625 per unit, which paints a very different picture than the one I describe above. I will have more to say about this in a future post.
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