(December 8, 2009) The following is
Howard Husack's introduction of Renee Glover during Tuesday morning's
Urban Innovator Award ceremony in New York City.
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Good morning. I'm Howard Husock, vice-president for research at the Manhattan Institute. Welcome to the presentation of the Institute's Center for Civic Innovation 2009 Urban Innovator award. This bipartisan award has been presented annually for the past decade. Past recipients have included Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, New Orleans school superintendent Paul Vallas and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
Our award this morning goes to someone who has brought innovation—and clear improvement—to a big city public housing system. That combined description is so seldom applied to public housing that it bears repeating. Innovation and improvement.
Of course, long ago and far away, it was thought that public housing was, by definition, a great innovation—an improvement over the slum housing it was replacing, a system that would provide safe and sanitary housing to working families, and a system whose rents would pay for its maintenance. Today, public housing has a much different meaning for most Americans—as "projects" known for high crime and concentrations of our very poorest households.
New Yorkers can be proud that Sonia Sotomayor has moved from public housing in the Bronx to the U.S Supreme Court—but that story of upward mobility from public housing has more often than not been the exception. Not always but far too frequently, public housing projects can be bleak, isolated places, where the law-abiding are cowed by the criminal, where intact families are few and children see few role models for success.
When she left behind her career as a successful corporate finance attorney—she practiced both in Atlanta and here in New York-- to become chief executive officer of the Atlanta Housing Authority, Renee Glover did not try to gloss over the failings of that system of 14,000 apartment units. Public housing, conceived as reform, had become, she dared to say, a toxic environment. And she embarked on a program of what can only be called radical change. So dramatic has that change been that today, virtually none—that's zero-- of the Atlanta public housing projects the Atlanta Authority owned and operated 20 years ago are still standing.
It is important to understand, what's more, that Renee Glover deserves this award not just for having the courage to demolish aging public housing—but for the courage and imagination to envision and implement an alternative. Too often we think of management as something that is important in the private sector—and policy as what's important in the public sector. But, as the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky once observed, implementation is 90 percent of public policy. In Atlanta, Renee Glover has really implemented-- And she's done it while running the Atlanta Housing Authority very much as a business, contracting out for management services while reducing the Authority's own payroll from 1400 to 300. So resourceful has the Authority been under her leadership that it's not only demolished public housing—it's charged Hollywood producers for the right to shoot the demolition She is the leading example, but not the only one, of a new generation of public housing authority managers not just waiting for new money from Washington but willing to experiment—replacing apartments with housing vouchers, attaching work requirements or time limits to those vouchers, replacing poorhouse public housing with privately-owned and managed mixed-income apartment complexes, even selling land for non-housing purposes and using the proceeds to further their housing mission.
In Atlanta, during Ms. Glover's tenure, the employment rate among public housing tenants, as low as 13 percent of in some projects, has risen above 60. And her success in implementation is influencing policy. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, New York's own Shaun Donovan, has signaled his desire to give dozens of America's thousands of public housing authorities the same flexibility to experiment in the ways Atlanta has. He can do so credibly because of the courage—and success—of Renee Lewis Glover, chief executive officer of the Atlanta Housing Authority and our 2009 Urban Innovator, Renee Lewis Glover.
