Change Agent
Such drastic transformations don’t happen overnight, particularly at an agency with such severe problems. After all, here’s what it was like at PHA in 1998: Fulfilling a resident’s work order request could take nearly a year. The number of phone lines were limited at PHA offices (don’t even think about e-mail; each department had just a handful of computers). Many employees failed to work an eight-hour day, and different departments rarely communicated with each other.
Greene quickly learned just that when he arrived in 1998, recruited by then-Mayor Ed Rendell and then-City Council President John F. Street. (Rendell is now governor of Pennsylvania; Street is now Philly’s mayor.)
“The first day I got to work [at PHA], it was 6:30 a.m. and no one showed up until 9:30 a.m.,” Greene recalls. “The next day, I got to work at 7:30 a.m. and nobody showed up until 10 a.m. I had a meeting at 7:30 a.m. every day for the next six months in order to change the organizational values.”
Greene’s hiring represented a change of values itself. In the past, the top PHA spot tended to go to political power brokers; in contrast, Greene brought both public and private real estate experience to the job. (A former executive director of the Detroit Housing Commission, Greene has also worked at the Atlanta and D.C. housing authorities and as a real estate agent.)
“The organization was made up of mostly patronage employees who didn’t really have the right work ethic or the right education or the right training,” says the executive director, who’s known as “Mr. Greene” to his employees. “It was a matter of flushing out the old organizational values and work ethics. The biggest challenge was for the staff and the people in the community to understand that the rules had changed.”
Greene promptly implemented a nine-goal strategic plan, which is posted in all offices and frequently discussed at training and other agency meetings. “Carl expects a lot from his employees,” says Bernie Husser, managing director of acquisitions for Boston-based MMA Financial, an affordable housing debt and equity provider which works with PHA. “He is very demanding, and that is because he has a place that he wants the organization to get to, and he wants to get there as quick as he can.”
His employees don’t disagree. “Mr. Greene is a performance-driven person,” says Faisal Hassan, the chief information technology officer at PHA. “He is a workaholic, and he doesn’t expect anything less than that from anybody else. But he doesn’t demand things that aren’t available or not within your reach.”
New Directions
With new people and attitudes in place, Greene focused the agency on real estate management basics. His first initiatives included improving the maintenance system and adding curb appeal to PHA properties. Since then, “Mr. Greene” has implemented a host of other operational improvements that enforce compliance, accountability, and reporting. One of the largest: the adoption of PeopleSoft, a powerful software program that tracks everything from financial and human resources information to project-based performance measures.
Another major operational initiative has been an overhaul of the agency’s Section 8 housing voucher program. Seeking greater flexibility from the government, PHA joined HUD’s Moving to Work initiative, becoming the first major urban housing authority to impose a seven-year time limit on the benefit. But the agency isn’t abandoning its residents. PHA has also launched the Community Partners Program, where 14 agencies citywide offer education, life skills, and job counseling to voucher holders to help them become self-sufficient before their housing benefits expire.
PHA also implemented new quality-control initiatives for the program and now redirects the funds for approximately 2,000 vouchers a year toward other areas such as the construction of new housing units and residential training programs. “Before, everyone was blaming problems [with housing vouchers] on another branch of the government,” says Greene. “We came in and took accountability for making some changes and reforms.”
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson applauds Greene’s private sector approach to enforce accountability. “He is carrying the principle that I believe in,” says Jackson, who hired Greene to work in Washington, D.C. “Housing authorities are a business. They are not social agencies. They might house people, but the important thing is that you house people in decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and you begin to make a profit out of what you do.”
Thanks to Greene’s determination and seven-day workweek, PHA’s image has done a 180-degree turnaround. “I remember when I first started working here [in 1992], if someone asked you if you worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority, you looked the other way,” says tech exec Hassan. “Today I see people with [PHA] uniforms in the stores, and if somebody asks you, ‘Do you work for the housing authority?’, you will smile and say, ‘Yes.'”