Last week I blogged on President Obama’s “stimulus” rally prop Henrietta Hughes — a.k.a. “the face of the economic crisis.” Ms. Hughes and her son, who were homeless, asked our messianic president to help them since they’ve been stuck on a two-year waiting list at the Fort Myers, Fl., public housing authority. Using the government’s own numbers, I was able to determine that Fort Myers and surrounding Lee County received almost $70 million in U.S. Housing & Urban Development (HUD) money in the past three years. Some $41 million — or $600 per man, woman, and child in Fort Myers — went to the city’s public housing authority alone.


I concluded that HUD’s inspector general should investigate what the housing authority is doing with all that taxpayer change. And if a story coming out of Las Vegas about its public housing authority is any indicator, there’s a good chance a lack of federal funding wasn’t the problem in Fort Myers. According to the Las Vegas Sun,

The North Las Vegas Housing Authority failed to spend up to $2 million on federal housing programs even as thousands of people were on lists awaiting that help, a recent audit has found… The total amount won’t be known until the city audit and a federal investigation are finished, but so far auditors have determined that at least $800,000 was misused, [North Las Vegas City Manager Gregory] Rose said. Still unclear is how the money was spent, who is responsible, and whether any crimes were committed, he added.

I keep hearing the Obama administration say the “stimulus” bill, which will be funding a plethora of notorious HUD programs, will come with transparency and accountability. The odds of accountability at HUD are somewhere around the odds of me taking off and flying after running really, really fast down the street.


In other HUD news this week:

  • A city in Ohio plans on using HUD Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to purchase ball field back stops.
  • Tulsa’s city council wants to know more about the $1.5 million in CDBG money the city inappropriately used to pay for employee salaries. The city was to pay it back, but “In December, the city announced that HUD would allow the city to reapply for the $1.5 million to fund two projects it has deemed meet the required use of the funds.”
  • In New Jersey, “The [Franklin] township’s former housing coordinator and her plumber husband have been indicted on a variety of charges — including official misconduct, forgery and witness tampering — in connection with what authorities are calling a conspiracy to misappropriate more than $100,000 in federal housing rehabilitation funds.”
  • And in West Virginia, the Wheeling city council “voted 6–0 to spend $42,000 in CDBG money to install an outdoor modular floor at the Pulaski Playground tennis courts in South Wheeling.”