By the end of the month, Freetown Village residents will have spruced up units to come home to, complete with updated kitchens and bathrooms, newly-installed windows and flooring and energy-efficient HVAC and hot water systems.
It cost the Housing Commission of Anne Arundel County about $41 million dollars to renovate all 154 townhouses and apartments at the Pasadena property — an investment made possible when the former public housing community changed its funding streams under the Rental Assistance Demonstration program.
Freetown is now a project-based, Section 8 community, meaning Anne Arundel’s housing authority could have partnered with a private developer to draw money from private investors to make renovations — except it didn’t, carving a different path from the City of Annapolis’ housing authority.
And Freetown’s conversion isn’t a one-off project: all public housing communities overseen by the county and by the City of Annapolis are planned to make the switch in the next few years, if they haven’t already.
“We saw an opportunity . . . to use the RAD conversion to really bring our communities into the 21st century and do a good bit of renovation and modernization to make them more comfortable, much more energy efficient and much more appealing as affordable housing,” said Clifton Martin, CEO of the Housing Commission of Anne Arundel County.
Over the last two decades, the Section 8 program has avoided the cuts that have slowly eaten away at public housing budgets. Transitioning communities to project-based systems opens up a more sustainable funding stream, Martin said.
Furthermore, switching to Section 8 allows housing authorities to leverage properties and attract private investors with tax credits — something that isn’t allowed with public housing, which is solely funded by government entities. Freetown’s renovations were funded by low income housing tax credits, tax exempt bonds and federal grants.
And in Annapolis, the authority is moving forward with a plan to redevelop Newtowne 20 through a patchwork of bond funding, tax credits, grants, state and federal programs.
The ultimate goal of the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis and the county housing authority’s RAD conversions is the same, but the way the two groups plan on getting there is different.
To renovate Freetown, HCAAC created an LLC so it could act as the project’s developer, rather than hire a private company. Martin said this gave the county’s housing authority complete control over design and financial decisions, and permitted it to collect the developer fees involved — allowing this money to stay in the county, where it will be directed to developing future affordable housing and sustaining existing resources.
HCAAC will also continue managing its converted public housing, Martin said.
On the other hand, HACA is partnering with private developers and private management companies in its transition. For Obery Court & College Creek — a housing community that used to be Obery Court One and Three — HACA brought on Pennrose Properties as the developer, and Pennrose Management as the management company.
HACA was not able to respond for comment before time of publication.
David Prater, managing attorney at Disability Rights Maryland, didn’t want to condemn or promote either housing authority’s strategy without knowing all the details of their RAD conversions. Still, he said the more housing authorities are involved in this transition, the better it is for transparency and oversight.
Watching the fallout of RAD transitions in Baltimore City made Prater a bit wary of the program. There, private developers were evicting residents prematurely in failure to pay rent cases, not providing them with the required 14-day notice before going to court, he said.
Disability Rights Maryland reported these developers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which Prater said offered “technical assistance and reminders” of tenant rights to the city’s public housing authority and RAD owners.
This seemed to address many of the issues the group had brought up in its complaint, but Prater said the frequent turnover of management at properties makes him wonder if the improvement will be sustained.
Furthermore, even though HUD ensured residents that the rights they enjoyed while living in public housing would carry over under RAD, Prater said the enforcing mechanisms for these rights become less clear when private developers are involved.
When private developers are misbehaving, Prater said the leverage housing authorities and HUD has to make sure tenants’ rights are being respected is severing the contract they have with the developer — the contract that subsidizes everyone’s rents.
Doing that just wouldn’t be good for anybody, Prater said.
So, Disability Rights Maryland and other advocacy organizations have “sort of been going to HUD, housing authorities, making a bunch of noise about, ‘These guys aren’t following the rules that they said they would,’ trying to get ahead of it, just to make sure that it doesn’t totally collapse and everyone’s rights are trampled over,” Prater said.
Federally subsidized, privately owned and managed properties existed in the county and the city long before HUD established the RAD program in 2012. Currently, there are about 20 properties with project-based vouchers in Anne Arundel and Annapolis.
Over the summer, residents at two of these properties raised concerns over opaque management and bookkeeping practices. People living in Woodside Gardens aired grievances over surprise fees and debilitating maintenance issues at a town hall in June, and the community manager at Claiborne Place circulated letters to residents in July, threatening them with eviction if they participated in meetings for their “non-existent” council.
When private developers come into play, Prater said there’s a shift in the philosophy surrounding housing.
“It’s not a public good, it’s not a public asset,” he said. “It’s a commodity.”
