The Boston Housing Authority violated federal and local requirements by allowing residents to live in unsafe units, according to a report released Thursday.
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development inspected apartments and the buildings in which they were located in 2023, as well as audited BHA records from 2019-2023. They found the authority did not consistently perform the required inspections of its properties or correct problems in a timely manner.
Inspectors randomly selected 36 units for their audit, and found 86% of them had deficiencies that needed to be addressed. Some of those problems were considered potentially life-threatening, like non-working fire alarms and blocked exits. Other issues identified included damaged windows and mice infestations.
“HUD relies on public housing agencies to ensure that public housing units funded by HUD are decent, safe, and sanitary,” said HUD acting Inspector General Stephen M. Begg in a statement.
Dawn Oates, a disability advocate and community organizer, said that she has seen the “substandard conditions” first-hand, including elevator outages that left residents stranded and unable to get to medical appointments and social events.
“It’s a lack of respect for human life, when you have a resident who opens their oven to prepare their Thanksgiving meal and mice run out of the oven … That’s not OK,” Oates said. “It’s not OK that residents have missed chemotherapy multiple times because the elevator’s [down.]”
She said it’s a community that often feels ignored. Many residents are people of color, elderly or are disabled.
“It’s not just a public health/public safety issue, it is a civil rights issue … this is a BIPOC, marginalized community, they are, in many cases … I would say, one click away from either being unhoused or in a shelter.”
HUD recommended that the BHA come up with a corrective action plan. In a statement to GBH News, the housing authority said it has already taken corrective actions. Those include changing inspection processes and transitioning its work order system from paper to digital to better track maintenance.
The report said BHA’s problems during the review period partly were due to insufficient staffing, and it did not communicate those staffing challenges to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. After inspections had ceased during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health precaution, BHA struggled to catch up on deferred maintenance while operating with a depleted staff.
The authority’s policy is to correct life-threatening problems within 24 hours. But HUD’s review of BHA’s work order system found that it took the authority an average of four days to close work orders for serious deficiencies in 2022, which rose to 14 days in 2024.
The inspector general also said BHA inspectors miscategorized some problems as being less serious than they truly were, adding to the delayed response times.
BHA policies say less serious health and safety deficiencies should be addressed within 20 days, and problems listed as “other” should be fixed within 25 days. For less serious maintenance needs, the authority’s work order system shows the average response was 36 days in 2022, and that increased to 92 days in 2024.
The authority said the work order statistics included in the report did not accurately represent the speed at which issues were addressed, but rather reflected their outdated paper tracking system. A spokesperson also said they’ve decreased the backlog from 17,000 work orders at the end of the report period in Mach 2023 to less than 3,100 today.
“Since Administrator [Kenzie] Bok took office in August 2023, BHA has completely overhauled its maintenance system, with major positive results in overcoming the work order backlog that built up over the Covid-19 pandemic,” BHA said in a statement to GBH News. “BHA is proud that through its new Chief of Maintenance & Inspections, new modern work order tracking system, and new annual inspection protocols, we have already radically reduced the public housing maintenance backlog and taken exactly the types of corrective actions called for in the OIG report to ensure quality housing for all our residents,” the authority said.
Oates said that she hopes the report can lead to changes to a complicated problem.
“The system’s not moving fast enough to correct it for the people having to live it,” she said. “There isn’t one issue. There’s a lot of issues. And I don’t think they can be solved by one person, and they certainly can’t be solved overnight.”
