Eight months after the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a scathing audit of D.C.’s public housing authority, the parent agency has closed out just 42 of 103 findings it mandated the DC Housing Authority address. 

DCHA faced a May 30 deadline to correct the federal housing agency’s findings of poor performance, which were outlined in a Sept. 2022 report on the housing authority’s practices. Across dozens of observations and findings, the report accused DCHA of failing to properly manage its public housing and voucher programs in compliance with federal regulations. 

Corrective actions outlined in HUD’s report ranged from creating consistent procedures for tenant selection in public housing to addressing violent crime across its portfolio and remediating mold- and sewage-ridden apartments. With an occupancy rate in the low 70s, DCHA was also the poorest performing major housing authority in the country, HUD said. 

But board members and agency leadership urged the public in a May 10 meeting to temper their expectations about how quickly DCHA might meet the deadline – which effectively required them to overhaul many of their core functions in a span of roughly eight months – or hear from HUD about whether DCHA had satisfied its demands. 

“A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, well, at the end of May, you’re going to give ‘em a report and they’re going to respond.’ And it’s an iterative process,” outgoing DCHA Director Brenda Donald said at the meeting. “So when we satisfy a finding based on our response to the corrective action requirements, we submit it and then HUD clears it, or they come back to us and say, ‘no, we need a little bit more.’ And that’s a process we’ve been undergoing for the last several months.”

Of the 103 items HUD asked DCHA to remediate, 54 – more than half – are currently under review from HUD, DCHA Chief Operating Officer Rachel Joseph told WAMU/DCist. Another three items are “in progress,” and four “will not be completed” because of time constraints.

Joseph declined to share the substance of the outstanding items HUD has yet to clear and that DCHA will not complete, saying only that this “is an iterative process, and we need to wait for HUD to finish its review in the next two weeks.” During the May 10 board meeting, Donald said that some yet-to-be-completed items include training staff on new administrative protocols and updating Yardi Systems, the agency’s $4.3 million central database and information system.

A HUD spokesperson said it could not respond by deadline to DCist/WAMU’s questions about the agency’s progress on its corrective actions or whether it plans on continuing oversight of DCHA. The two agencies will meet again next week to discuss DCHA’s progress, a source with knowledge of the meeting tells DCist/WAMU.

Among the most significant changes HUD asked DCHA to make was implementing a metric for rent reasonableness, a formula for calculating how much rent DCHA should pay to landlords who accept subsidies through the housing choice voucher program. DCHA has historically overpaid some landlords in the program – to the tune of an estimated $12 million annually in overpayments, one Washington Post analysis found – because it does not verify that the rent it is paying for certain units is consistent with comparable apartments in the same building and neighborhood.

As a result, a spokesperson for HUD told DCist/WAMU in March that it will require DCHA to repay from local funds any money it has spent in violation of federal regulations – meaning that DCHA might be on the hook for the rents it has overpaid.

Donald said in mid-May that DCHA would select a vendor by the end of the month to implement its rent reasonableness formula. In response to DCist/WAMU’s question about whether it has in fact selected a vendor, Jenna Cevasco, the agency’s chief of staff, said only that DCHA “[expects] to send a communication out to stakeholders next week and to follow that communication with public meeting later this month.” Of the possibility that HUD might claw back rent expended, Joseph said that the agency is “still in negotiation with HUD as to what, if anything, will need to be repaid.”

Agency leaders faced a mad dash to meet the HUD deadline or be found in “substantial default” by its parent agency. A spokesperson for HUD declined to specify to DCist/WAMU in March what specific actions it might pursue if DCHA fails to alter its practices. But declaring a public housing authority in substantial default of HUD policies gives HUD a wide array of authority over it, ranging from providing administrators with technical assistance to taking over operations of the agency entirely, a process known as receivership. (An iteration of the DC Housing Authority was placed into federal receivership in the mid-1990s.)

DCHA leadership has, consequently, felt pressure to move quickly – in the roughly eight months since HUD issued the audit, DCHA staff has rewritten the agency’s thousand-page-long administrative and operating plans, initiated a complete overhaul of its public housing waiting lists, and launched a staff-wide training on new protocols. 

Donald recently said she would not seek to renew her contract when it expires later this summer, and the agency’s board of commissioners has initiated a search to replace her.