Fact check: Is public housing in Durham getting enough help from the feds?
The issue: Hundreds of people are living in hotels as the Durham Housing Authority investigates a carbon monoxide emergency at the city’s largest public housing development.
But Durham city officials and those that run McDougald Terrace say they’re not getting enough money from the federal government, leading to a backlog of problems in maintaining and upgrading the complex and now the health and safety issues that have led to mass evacuations.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in 2018 that it had an estimated $35 billion in maintenance and repairs that had been put off nationwide and that each year about 10,000 housing units were lost due to disrepair.
The Durham Housing Authority says the figure is now $50 billion.
“For far too long, Congress has failed to adequately invest in our public housing stock, putting vulnerable residents at risk,” said Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on housing and transportation.
Durham Mayor Steve Schewel, other city officials and the DHA have blamed inadequate funding.
“We have been talking about for years, that our public housing communities — and this is not unique to Durham but across the country — our public housing communities have suffered years and years and decades and decades of under funding,” said Anthony Scott, CEO of the Durham Housing Authority.
Federal assistance to DHA has increased in recent years. But HUD has acknowledged a backlog of maintenance, and recent federal budgets have not covered the entirety of ongoing maintenance needs, The News & Observer’s research and reporting has found.
Why we’re checking this.
People’s lives are at stake.
More than 250 households have been moved out of McDougald Terrace into temporary housing for health and safety reasons, including carbon monoxide leaks in the nearly 70-year-old development in Durham.
Hot water heaters, furnaces and stoves are leaking carbon monoxide — an odorless, colorless gas that kills approximately 400 Americans per year and sends another 20,000 to the emergency room — in nearly 40 percent of the units tested so far in the 360-unit development that was built in 1953.
Residents are angry, comparing the situation to Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and killed 1,200 people. The federal government was blamed for its inadequate response, one that some attributed to the victims being largely poor and African-American. McDougald Terrace has failed recent inspections.
“I classify this as an emergency as I did the Flint (Michigan) water crisis,” said U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a Democrat whose House district includes Durham County. “This is a matter of life and death. Poor people living in a unit that is infested with carbon monoxide.”
The issue is not unique to Durham.
Price questioned HUD Sec. Ben Carson on this issue at an April 2019 meeting after several carbon monoxide deaths in South Carolina. NBC News found 11 deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning in public housing since 2003.
What you need to know
Capital needs are identified, in a 2010 HUD study, as “costs of repairs and replacements beyond ordinary maintenance required to make the housing decent and economically sustainable.” The same study found an annual ongoing need for $3.4 billion.
At no time since that study was conducted has HUD’s Public Housing Capital Fund — “designed to modernize public housing developments and reduce the substantial backlog of public housing capital improvement needs” — reached that $3.4 billion figure to deal with ongoing need, thus leading to a bigger and bigger backlog.
The capital fund received $2.4 billion in 2009, plus an additional $4 billion from the American Recovery and Rehabilitation Act (widely known as the federal stimulus). The budget was $2.5 billion in 2010 before dropping to $1.875 billion for a four-year stretch in the middle of the decade. Since Democrats took the House in 2018, the budget has increased.
Below is the budget for the Public Housing Capital Fund:
| Fiscal year | Budget |
| 2020 | $2.869B |
| 2019 | $2.78B |
| 2018 | $2.75B |
| 2017 | $1.941B |
| 2016 | $1.900B |
| 2015 | $1.875B |
| 2014 | $1.875B |
| 2013 | $1.875B |
| 2012 | $1.875B |
| 2011 | $2.04B |
| 2010 | $2.5B |
| 2009 | $2.446B |
Source: HUD budget documents
The money appropriated by Congress to the department is then put through a formula to determine how much is allocated to public housing agencies across the country. In 2018, for example, the Durham Housing Authority was allocated $3.89 million.
It also receives money from tenant rents, property management fees and other fees. The DHA’s Central Office Cost Center charges a 10 percent management fee on capital funds. In 2020, that fee is budgeted at $334,305.
DHA has about 1,386 public housing units in 13 different communities, according to its 2020 budget proposal, and a budget of $42 million. According to its budget proposal, $3 million in revenue and expenses was allocated for McDougald Terrace, including $918,215 for maintenance. Eleven employees work at McDougald Terrace.
The formula also creates a dollar amount for each individual public housing development in the country.
The numbers for McDougald Terrace:
| 2019 | $867,524 |
| 2018 | $829,665 |
| 2017 | $543,902 |
| 2016 | $551,857 |
| 2015 | $516,025 |
Source: HUD budget documents
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREOur process
We check claims that are widely shared or published; are about a topic of concern to many of our readers; can be proven or disproven through facts; and could cause people to act or vote in a certain way. This topic met all the criteria.
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Find out more about our process here. And as always, we abide by our newsroom’s ethical guidelines.
Our sources. Here’s where we found information and research on this topic:
Durham Housing Authority 2020 budget proposal
2018 report from the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
2019 HUD development per unit funding report
2018 HUD per unit funding report
2017 HUD funding formula by development
2016 HUD funding formula by development
2015 HUD funding formula by development
Previous reporting on McDougald Terrace by Durham Herald-Sun
This story was produced by The News & Observer Fact-Checking Project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. Submit a suggestion for what we should check, or a comment or suggestion about our fact-checking, at bit.ly/nandofactcheck.
This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 3:41 PM.
