Exit interview: St. Louis public housing director stressed by ‘doom and gloom’ of the job (2024)

ST. LOUIS — Alana C. Green compared her run as executive director of the St. Louis Housing Authority to that person at home who is willing to identify the messiest closet, dump all the clutter onto the floor, and reorganize the boxes.

“So someone else can put it where it needs to go,” Green said Tuesday.

But the leader meant to finish the job at the public housing agency hasn’t yet been officially named.

“I didn’t dislike my job,” said Green, 45, who was executive director from November 2018 until December 2023. “I just couldn’t work 80 hours a week anymore and be strong enough to do so.”

In a wide-ranging interview, she described a particularly stressful tenure, given fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and $202 million in unmet preventive maintenance and other needs to the public housing system. The agency heavily relies on funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“HUD doesn’t provide the amount of money you need — I should say Congress — to take care of the maintenance needs and the capital needs of the properties,” Green said.

She left during a historic time. The agency has ramped up and hired dozens of employees to take over property management responsibilities for 1,748 of the 2,809 public housing units in St. Louis that The Habitat Co., a Chicago firm, used to be paid to handle. There is a plan in place to revamp Clinton-Peabody, the 358-unit complex in the Near Southside neighborhood that previously garnered a lot of headlines over living conditions.

Meanwhile, residents have been complaining for months about water leaks, security, broken elevators, and other concerns at West Pine Apartments and Parkview Apartments in the Central West End. At least one small business owner claims he still hasn’t been paid for over $300,000 of work he did at various public housing properties.

All the while, many people are trying get into the fold of the overwhelmed public housing system.

Green said she received hundreds of desperate calls and emails a week from people who weren’t even involved in the agency’s programs.

“It’s a lot of doom and gloom,” she said. “You deal with a lot of people in crisis, and a lot of times it landed at my door, instead of people it should have.”

She said she first notified the Board of Commissioners in June, around the time her law school loans were being erased upon completion of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, that she would be leaving the agency in December.

“I needed balance,” she said. “For my family, I wasn’t fun to deal with.”

Still, she said, she stayed on at the agency as an adviser, partly to help guide the major property management transition and the national search for her replacement as executive director. She left that position last Thursday.

“I got to feeling like I felt when I was there — overwhelmed,” she said.

Green confirmed that she ended the part-time position the same day a Post-Dispatch reporter was denied access to view meeting minutes at the agency’s central office at 3520 Page Boulevard. She said in the interview that the public records should have been released without rigamarole.

“I don’t think the team is trying to do anything inappropriate, I think there is a fear of the media,” Green said.

Sal Martinez, chairman of the Board of Commissioners, hasn’t responded to requests for comment for recent stories about the agency. Regina Fowler, another commissioner, forwarded questions to Val Joyner, a spokesperson for the agency. Joyner said Tuesday by text that she’ll address questions electronically; she refused to speak by phone. Asked for salary information, Joyner said by email that the agency paid Green $134 an hour in 2024 for about 20 hours of work per week. Joyner didn’t provide Green’s full-time salary in 2023 by press time on Tuesday night.

Even though others left, Green said: “The staff is probably the best I’ve seen at the agency.”

Latasha Barnes is the interim director while the agency does a national search, an effort that Green participated in until last week. Green said she suspects the new executive director will be formally announced by July. A recruitment brochure for the position doesn’t provide a salary range.

“There are some good applicants,” she said.

Despite many challenges, Green said she’s proud of the progress that the agency made under her leadership, like boosting residence confidence, security deposit assistance for families in need and getting a plan in place to redevelop Clinton-Peabody.

“At this point, we are just looking for funding,” she said of historic complexes.

Before running the housing authority, Green, a St. Louis native, was executive director of the city’s Community Development Administration and assistant director of the DeSales Community Housing Corporation. She currently works at Community Development Solutions LLC, a consultancy firm she founded that goes beyond housing.

“It’s fun to help organizations to get on the paths they want to get on,” she said.

As for her own home, she still lives in a small, tidy brick house that she bought in her mid-20s on the city’s far south side near Carondelet Park. There are chairs and pots of colorful flowers on the front porch.

She said it’s a nice and quiet neighborhood, one she hopes to enjoy more. She said she’ll be in better shape to help low-income families if she prioritizes her own life.

“Everybody should take time for themselves,” she said.