Lack of transparency on housing deal concerning
Thursday, when the council’s housing and budget committees held a joint meeting to discuss recent drama involving the city’s housing and community development department.
“I knew this was going to be a train wreck,” said Mayor Pro Tem Dave Martin, the councilman for District E, at one point. “I should have screamed. We all should have screamed.”
He was talking about the agency’s finances, but could well have been describing the discussion itself, which went on for nearly three hours and left everyone puzzled — and displeased.
The session was supposedly convened to discuss former housing director Tom McCasland’s recent allegations that political favoritism had influenced city decisions on a proposed affordable-housing project in Clear Lake.
McCasland described the project — Huntington at Bay Area — as a turning point in his relationship with Mayor Sylvester Turner, who tapped him to lead the department in 2016.
“Unfortunately, I’ve reached a point where I can no longer do the bidding of this administration, as it relates to this development,” McCasland said, accusing the administration of asking his staff to participate in a “charade” and “bankrolling a certain developer to the detriment of working families.”
The Huntington at Bay Area project would use $15 million in city funds to create 88 affordable housing units for senior citizens in District E, he explained. His team had ranked it eighth out of 12 proposals submitted, and instead recommended that the city use $16 million to support four projects that would create 362 affordable housing units.
Turner nonetheless decided to opt for the Clear Lake project, which is backed by a group of developers that includes his
longtime law partner. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is investigating the deal.
And, again, the deal is what city council members were expected to discuss Thursday. Instead, officials for the housing department — Interim Housing Director Keith Bynam and Chief Financial Officer Temika Jones — focused on cost overruns incurred by the city’s Hurricane Harvey home repair program. Those overruns could leave Houston looking at a $23.5 million budget hole, they explained, unless the General Land Office decides to reimburse the city for some of the spending.
This is notable information, of course, and it seemed to come as news to those some of those on the dais. But it’s not clear what the Harvey home repair program has to do with the Clear Lake project. Turner has suggested that McCasland pounced on the latter as “a diversion,” to distract from financial problems in his own agency. But that’s at odds with most of what we know about both the department and McCasland — a well-regarded official who had never been involved in any previous controversy, and who has said little since Turner fired him after he went public.
For that matter, wondered District G Council Member Greg Travis, would city council have even heard about the financial woes facing the Harvey home repair program if not for McCasland’s actions last month?
“Probably not,” said Bynum. “Because Director McCasland would still be in place.”
The testimony he and Jones offered raised some interesting questions about the Harvey home repair program, and the department more generally. But perhaps the most confounding question was why city council was talking about Harvey-related funds in the first place?
“I'm more interested in the project-selecting criteria and why we're all here,” said AtLarge Council Member Sallie Alcorn.
Indeed.
Council Member Tiffany Thomas, who represents District F and chairs the housing committee, pointed to a few pieces of information that have gotten lost in the headlines about the Huntington at Bay Area deal. All 12 of the projects rated in this case, for example, met the threshold for city funding; in other words, Turner’s project was being prioritized over the four alternatives that McCasland’s team had recommended, rather than displacing them from consideration entirely.
And it’s salient, Thomas told me Friday, that the Huntington at Bay Area project would provide housing for seniors in need. Affordable-housing projects focused on seniors tend to elicit less pushback from community members than those designed for working families, which city policy officially prioritizes.
“It’s just easier,” Thomas said. “They don’t want to see Grandma on the street.”
That might help explain why a politician would take a different view of the Huntington at Bay Area project than an agency head would.
However, it’s not a point that Turner himself has made. He’s just said that he wants to put a project in District E, which is all well and good, but not a bulletproof case for this particular project.
And Turner’s criticisms of McCasland ultimately have no bearing on legitimate concerns about Huntington at Bay Area, the process by which it emerged as the top choice, or the mayor’s involvement in that process.
It would be overly simplistic to suggest that the top-ranked projects, according to city employees, should just win the bid every time. The mayor and city council members, as elected officials, are directly accountable to voters; they rightfully have a role to play.
But Houston residents are entitled to more answers about the Huntington at Bay Area project than we have received, to date.
McCasland raised important questions about this project. It may be that Turner has persuasive answers. But they definitely can’t be addressed by throwing McCasland under the bus — or by muddying the water and raising seemingly unrelated issues about the department he used to lead.