Part of the mission of OHA is to help people transition from public housing to market housing. In fact, we just completed our annual strategy meeting where we decided to review our programs to see how OHA can become more effective in helping people.

Greg Hartwig

Statistics like an approximately $500,0000,000 budget and 1 out of 6 rental units in Oakland subsidized by OHA are mind-boggling. Even more amazing is this stat I found in a PDF (http://www.oakha.org/OhaNews/OHAFactSheet.pdf) on the OHA website “9.5% of Oakland Families, Elderly and Disabled live in housing subsidized by OHA.” That’s almost 1 out of 10 or 37,000 residents living in subsidized housing!

That seems to be a tremendous amount to me. Instead of a board and council members who only can look to expand public housing even further, maybe we need people who can figure out ways to give subsidized housing residents the means to move to market rate housing.

However you cut it, the fiduciary responsibility is substantial and can go far beyond the OHA budget. For all development projects such as Mandela and Lions Creek we bring in a number of partners along with a rather complex financing structure consisting of private tax credit equity and various types of debt and other financial interest. That means, with such developments substantial funds are brought into the project from outside OHA.

The decisions we made at the last board meeting provide a window into the type and magnitude of financial decisions the board makes. OHA, for the first time ever, has taken on full responsibility as property developer for the $77M Tassafaronga project. At our last meeting, the board was asked to approve $30M of tax exempt bond funding, a direct investment of $17M and project guarantees to clear the way for 4% tax credit investments of $20M+. So, you can immediately see that in one meeting we made about $70M of financial commitments with most of it leveraged from other sources, but, for which, OHA is on the hook. Because of that, some effort would need to be made to determine just how large a fiduciary responsibility the board actually has.

Your question is a good one because the public should be aware of what our various boards and commissions are actually doing and how much risk and complexity they are responsible for managing. For OHA, complexity is certainly another issue. I still don’t understand these development projects as well as I feel I should. Anyone who thinks this is simple need only look around at the number of housing authorities that are in receivership or in otherwise terrible difficulty. I had no idea how important and challenging this board position was going to be when I was appointed. I think we need to do a much better job of educating the public. This interchange is making this shortcoming very apparent, and it is also helping me understand what kind of information the public might want.

If anyone is aware of other sites with OHA dialogue, please let me know.

Greg Hartwig

i don’t know whether to laugh or cry after reading your description of board powers. most people i knew had the impression that it was advisory.

so basically the oha board members probably control at least as much discretionary expenditures as city council members do, considering all the contract mandated expenditures they face.

is there a formal training procedure for new board members? maybe one developed by the feds as a template?

who evaluates the performance of board members? is there a specific evaluator out of the mayor’s office?

and thank you for serving.

-len raphael
temescal

Thanks for this post. It is very elucidating.

And thanks for you leadership on the OHA board. The past three years have been some of the best in recent times for OHA, in terms of innovating and implementing new approaches and ideas. Kudos to the commissioners, Mr. Gresley,and the hard-working employees at OHA.

I’m hopeful you, and the other commissioners and general OHA leadership, will be able to bring the new appointees up to speed quickly–for the good of Oakland.

Carlos