Public Housing

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is responsible for ensuring that the 3,000 independent, state-chartered public housing authorities provide safe and decent housing and protect the federal investment in their properties. However, the public housing management assessment program--HUD's primary tool for measuring the performance of housing authorities--has been criticized as unreliable, inaccurate, and at times conflicting with good property management practices. Nevertheless, because no other measurement tool exists, Congress and HUD have proposed using the program as a basis for deregulating or rewarding high-scoring housing authorities. This report reviews HUD's implementation of the program. GAO discusses whether (1) HUD's field offices are using the program and complying with the program's statutory and regulatory requirements to monitor and provide technical assistance to housing authorities; (2) program scores have increased and how HUD uses the program to inform HUD's Secretary and Congress about the performance of housing authorities; and (3) program scores are consistently accurate and can be considered a generally accepted measure of good property management.

GAO found that: (1) most of HUD's field offices are using PHMAP to identify troubled housing authorities and target HUD's limited technical assistance resources; (2) however, the field offices have not been systematically using the assessment program, as required by statutes and regulations, to monitor housing authorities' progress in improving their performance and target technical assistance to them; (3) the impact of a 1995 reorganization of the field offices' functions and current departmental downsizing continue to influence some offices' ability to provide technical assistance; (4) performance scores generally have increased during the first 4 full years of the program; (5) with average scores increasing, the total number of troubled housing authorities has decreased, and the greatest proportion of those that are troubled are the smallest authorities, those managing fewer than 100 units; (6) the proportion of high-performing authorities has increased steadily from about 33 percent in 1992 to over 50 percent in 1995; (7) high-performing authorities manage nearly 50 percent of all public housing units; (8) periodically, HUD officials provide the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Congress information on the performance of all housing authorities as well as the number of troubled authorities; (9) HUD's confirmatory reviews of the information underlying assessment scores have shown the scores to be inaccurate in half the instances when such reviews were performed; (10) regardless of the scores' accuracy, HUD and public housing industry officials do not believe that the management assessment program comprehensively assesses how well local housing authorities manage their properties; and (11) this is because the assessment program does not include indicators to specifically measure overall housing quality or the quality of maintenance.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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