At its meeting July 16, the Travis County Commissioners Court considered six applicants to fill two vacancies on the board of the Housing Authority of Travis County (HATC). Commissioners will make a final decision this coming Tuesday.
Candidates focused on the importance of transparency with the community, especially since HATC lost some trust during the Rosemont debacle in 2021. After Winter Storm Uri, more than 80 families were threatened with eviction from the county-owned Rosemont apartments at Oak Valley, after storm damage exacerbated existing maintenance issues. Tenants formed a union after a monthslong organizing campaign with Building and Strengthening Tenant Action (BASTA), and the Commissioners Court adopted tenant-focused revisions to the bylaws of the Strategic Housing Finance Corporation, then a subsidiary of the HATC, that partners with private developers to boost affordable housing stock.
As of six months ago, however, SHFC and HATC separated, ending a long-standing relationship between the organizations, including a shared funding structure. In a press release Thursday, July 18, SHFC announced its new Executive Director Dianna Grey, former homeless strategy officer for the city and SHFC’s interim director since January, and wrote that since the split, “SHFC has initiated a comprehensive review of its portfolio, which consists of 3,700 completed units plus nearly 2,000 units under construction, all while building a robust pipeline of future affordable housing.” Shoshana Krieger, project director at BASTA, who was instrumental in organizing Rosemont tenants, said, “already in (Grey’s) time as interim executive director, we have seen SHFC take positive steps towards being more responsive to tenant and community concerns.”
Commissioners want HATC’s two new board members to steer that organization in a similar direction, taking into account “this new reality that SHFC is no longer connected,” Commissioner Ann Howard said Tuesday. “There’s a real place for leadership in this arena because there’s a lot going on. How does HATC play in the affordable housing ecosystem? We really need to get all these entities together and map out how we are going to build out affordable housing in our region.”
Commissioner Brigid Shea added that HATC “still has a big, bad black eye from Rosemont. There’s still a need to improve relations and trust with the tenants. I’m really looking for someone who’s going to primarily be an advocate for low-income people and accountability with the operations. With Rosemont, there was just a huge breakdown in management and operations of that facility, and then accountability for who was responsible and needed to take actions to improve the situation.”
In their interviews, many of the six board candidates – each with differing backgrounds in community organizing, criminal justice and affordable housing development – stressed the importance of lived experience matching those that HATC serves. Applicants Joseph McCormick, member of the Lyons Gardens Senior Housing Board of Directors and former chair of the Planning Commission, and Mayra Lopez Lucio, national organizing manager at the Center for Popular Democracy and former campaign manager with the Workers Defense Project, have personally experienced homelessness in the past. After the Rosemont situation, SHFC’s bylaws changed to require two current or former tenants at SHFC-owned properties serve on the board, and that a tenants’ bill of rights be included in all future leases, guaranteeing timely repairs. At the time, a member of the tenants’ union said in a press release that “current board members don’t know what it is like to live in one of their properties and be disrespected by property managers on a daily basis.”
Still, if HATC can rebuild community trust like SHFC is aiming to do, “there’s a lot of housing being built right now,” Howard said. “It’s a hot opportunity.”
Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Travis County Commissioners Court: The legislative body for Travis County. It includes representatives from the four Travis County Precincts, as well as the County Judge. The County Judge serves as the chair of the Court.
