BOARD GAMES

Last Thursday West Side Neighborhood Housing Services held its annual members meeting at the agency’s Connecticut Street headquarters. On the agenda were two items that, at first blush, seem disconnected: first, elections for board positions; second, a name change for the organization, to Greater Buffalo Neighborhood Housing Sevices.

One of the board members up for re-election was West Side activist Harvey Garrett, whose work with the West Side Community Collaborative and city housing court, as well as his matchmaking between would-be homeowners and desperate West Side properties, have made him a popular and familiar figure among West Side residents. He is not so beloved of his fellow board members and WSNHS executive director Linda Chiarenza, however, and as a result Garrett lost his seat on Thursday night.

There were 17 voting members on hand that night, including the board of directors. There might have been enough support in the room to re-elect Garrett, but someone on the board produced 37 absentee ballots that turned the tally against him.

Those 37 absentee ballots included votes from at least a couple dozen new members of WSNHS, almost all of them city employees who report to Mayor Byron Brown and don’t live in WSNHS’s service area: Peter Cutler, for example, who lives on Linwood Avenue; Jessica Maglietto, who lives on Crescent Avenue in North Buffalo; Brian Reilly, who lives in the Elmwood Village; Allentowner David Granville; and others. (See the whole list as posted on AV Daily) About 30 new members paid the $2 membership fee to join WSNHS just in time to qualify to vote in Thursday’s election, most of them either city employees who report to the mayor or relatives of city employees who report to the mayor.

WSNHS members don’t need to live in the service area, but clearly the mayor’s office helped to stack the membership in order to oust Garrett, a vociferous critic of WSNHS’s executive director, her board, and the Brown administration’s housing policies, especially on the West Side.

This has happened before: In 1995, WSNHS’s then board chairman Modesto Candelario signed up more than 100 new members, most of them employees of the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority—Candelario was chairman of BMHA’s board at the time—in order to maintain control of the agency for the Carl Perla political machine against the insurgent Robert Quintana faction.

At the time, the Buffalo News editorial board wrote of the ensuing imbroglio:

The idea is that non-profit social-service and housing agencies getting public money work better if each has a board of directors drawn from the neighborhood being served.

It makes sense that the grassroots folks would have insight into what their community’s greatest needs are. Let them call some of the shots.

So far, so good.

But sometimes these agencies get tied up in the politics of the day. Their boards are taken over by political figures, public officials and people from a particular political faction. The attraction is the jobs and money involved. Isn’t it always?

…Housing in Buffalo isn’t in such good shape that the city can stand a heavy load of factional politics in what is supposed to be a grassroots organization serving the whole neighborhood. A community loses when a [community based organization] becomes just one more political clubhouse. That fate for this one would be bad news for the West Side.

WSNHS receives substantial financial support from NeighborWorks, a national grantmaking agency. NeighborWorks currently has five chartered partners in Buffalo, but would like to reduce that number to two. One of those is likely to be Neighborhood Housing Services of South Buffalo. Chiarenza would like WSNHS to be the other. However, WSNHS has often failed to translate the grants it receives into securely homeowner-occupied rehabs or new-builds west of Richmond. The relatively few project houses it completes often end in foreclosure. NeighborWorks reportedly has begun to pressure Chiarenza to show better results for its money. So Chiarenza has been pushing to extend WSNHS’s service area east of Richmond, into the Elmwood Village and clear over to Main Street, where she can peddle the agency’s loan programs to a more savvy and less risky pool of borrowers.

These borrowers, Garrett argues, live in houses and neighborhoods that do not beg for investment as much as the neighborhoods west of Richmond that WSNHS was founded to serve. But WSNHS under Chiarenza either finds it difficult or is unwilling to run housing redevelopment programs in its defined service area.

“NeighborWorks is finally putting pressure on the WSNHS to spend money,” Garrett says, “and [Chiarenza] is trying to convince them that the best way to do that is to expand the boundaries east of Richmond, rather than actually rolling up their sleeves and investing the money on the West Side…I don’t think NeighborWorks has any idea that the WSNHS’s reputation is so bad in the neighborhood.”

A spokesperson for NeighborWorks would only say that WSNHS was “compliant,” and would not share its performance reviews of the agency.

A great deal of WSNHS’s grant money sits in the bank, untapped. Since 2004, WSNHS has ended each year with well over $1 million in cash reserves, some years closer to $2 million. It has about $1.3 million in unspent cash right now. Chiarenza has from time to time used those deposits to leverage financial support from local banks with which WSNHS does business, but her track record for investing money in West Side housing is spotty. Instead, WSNHS has focused on lower-impact programs such as homebuyer education. Garrett asked Chiarenza for numbers on those education programs, so he could determine if the programs were benefitting West Side homebuyers—or if those programs were in fact educating West Siders on how to buy houses in Cheektowaga, for example, to the detriment of WSNHS’s service area.

“I had heard rumblings that there were factions within the organization that wanted him gone,” says Anthony Armstrong, a WSNHS member and a program officer at Local Initiatives Support Corporation. “He was calling a number of questions that certain people would prefer not have called.”

LISC’s director, Michael Clarke, says that when his organization cast about for partners with whom to collaborate on West Side projects, he quickly learned that WSNHS was not regarded as responsive to the needs of most residents. It seemed, instead, a sort of club.

For his part, Garrett says that WSNHS has in fact improved its operations in the past year. He says a handful of good staff are getting some of the agency’s grant money onto the streets. The continued politicization of WSNHS won’t help them to continue their work.

“As long as City Hall continues to think that political control over the neighborhoods is more important than neighborhood self-empowerment, our neighborhoods will continue to struggle,” Garrett says. “When is City Hall going to stop working against the neighborhoods?”

—geoff kelly