Housing authority chief puts own house in order

08:33 AM CST on Sunday, November 18, 2007

The original purpose of the Dallas Housing Authority, created in 1938 by the Dallas City Council, was to replace slums with decent, affordable housing.

For the decades that followed, DHA's housing was affordable but not so decent - and, for that matter, not so integrated either. Public housing was centered on ethnicity and systematically tethered to the most impoverished regions of Dallas.

Although its core mission remains providing quality, affordable housing to Dallas' poorest, the DHA now helps its clients evolve to private homeownership. Borrowing from the Chinese proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," the DHA provides financial education and career support. Thus the term housing is more holistic than simply sticks, bricks and mortar.

The leader of this effort is Ann Lott, DHA's president and chief executive.

With operating revenue of $242 million in 2006, DHA houses an ethnically diverse population of nearly 60,000 residents. To put this in perspective, the population of Galveston is smaller.

With a degree in social work and a heart as big as all outdoors, Ms. Lott started her career at DHA in 1985 as a low-level management clerk. She was on the front lines, qualifying families for subsidized housing. Over the next 15 years, she migrated from clerk to counselor to supervisor to director to senior vice president to interim chief executive in 2000 and CEO in March 2001.

This background prepared her for one of the most challenging public sector jobs in the U.S. - CEO of a plodding bureaucracy that was hampered by a seemingly never-ending desegregation order.

Servant-leader

Ms. Lott is a pure servant-leader who leads by example. "Rank has responsibilities, not privileges," she says.

For example, as chief executive, she was offered a car by the DHA. Disdaining such regal treatment, she declined. Similarly, Ms. Lott arrives to work on time or earlier and expects the same from all employees. These are small points on the surface, but people take notice as actions always speak so loudly.

After she was named chief executive, Ms. Lott personally inspected DHA housing. What she found were horribly dilapidated units with brownish/yellow water in the taps and mice scurrying up the walls.

What amazed her most was that no one flinched. Apathy had descended on the residents as well as the DHA staff. Ms. Lott asked herself, "What do you do when everyone has resigned themselves to live like that?" Her response was twofold: change the DHA's thinking and better engage the community.

Ms. Lott feared that the DHA had become so bureaucratic that it had stopped focusing on its clients' basic needs. To recommit the agency to its customer, the DHA hired a consultant to retrain its hundreds of employees.

Working Better Together

A culture statement, Working Better Together, was developed. It embraced 10 essential habits for every employee, including "provide quality customer service in everything we do," "each of us is responsible and accountable for our own actions," "get others involved in problem-solving," "practice active listening" and "we will either succeed or fail as a team."

The point is to ensure that employees understand the struggles and needs of the people they serve.

Ms. Lott stresses open, thoughtful communication between the DHA and its constituents, making sure that the residents get plenty of buy-in. "The DHA's culture changed from bureaucratic to caring customer service," she says.

Ms. Lott personally involves herself in the DHA's neighborhoods, asking and challenging residents: "How do you want to live?" She does this to put a face with the DHA, inspire the community to reach higher and elicit their input.

She also asks what people in the communities will do for themselves: "Are you willing to implement and enforce curfews, tell drug dealers to stay out, let the police check everyone's driver's license, etc.?"

Today the DHA and its clients have worked to eliminate rats (rodents and drug dealers), and the water is clean.

"When you change the environment about where people live, their attitude changes," Ms. Lott says. "You get what you measure."

Adding accountability

In 1985, Debra Walker and six other black women brought a class-action suit against the DHA for discrimination and inferior housing. In a blistering landmark opinion, Judge Jerry Buchmeyer found that the DHA had systematically discriminated since its inception. Housing projects had been separated by race and isolated in poor Dallas ghettos.

The DHA was ordered to replace many existing units with modern ones, build housing in predominantly nonminority areas of Dallas and provide vouchers so families in need could afford apartments throughout the city.

Most of the staff had arrived at the DHA while the desegregation order was in place, so it had become part of their status quo. Ms. Lott's challenge "was to get people to stop looking at Walker as permanent and never-ending."

To overcome institutional paralysis, she made getting out of the desegregation order part of each employee's performance evaluation. As Ms. Lott preaches, "a leader must figure out how to make goals and objectives personal."

Each employee was assigned to rush to satisfy the desegregation order. As a result, people got creative. It took just two years to eliminate the Walker oversight when conventional wisdom had said that the DHA would never comply.

Once the desegregation order was dismissed, Ms. Lott says she and the agency renewed their commitment to serve their mission through public and private partnerships, homeownership and expansion of affordable housing.

Through these and other initiatives, Ms. Lott and the DHA are changing the face of Dallas.

Pauline Graivier is president of Dallas-based Verbal Communications Inc. Rob Hoffman is a partner with Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP.