☆ Long time comin': State Auditor blisters SJ Housing department for ineffectiveness and unaccountability, validating 10+ years of critique from former CM Johnny Khamis
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The California State Auditor has delivered a deeply critical report on San Jose's Housing Department (HD), finding that the HD "failed to adequately track $300 million in homelessness spending" (Merc headline). But did the failures of San Jose's housing department start in 2020 or did they begin much earlier? We exclusively interview former San Jose council member and financial watchdog Johnny Khamis about his experiences with overt San Jose Housing Dept mismanagement during his years in office (2013 to 2020).
Opportunity Now: The audit, which came at the request of Senator Dave Cortese, didn't pull any punches. It found that “San Jose lacks the information necessary to easily assess the effectiveness of its homelessness spending.” And that SJ and SD spend tens of millions of dollars on agreements with providers, such as nonprofits, to provide homelessness programs and services without establishing “clear performance measures to assess whether these efforts are an effective use of funds." Ouch. Did the findings come as a surprise to you?
Johnny Khamis: No. During my eight years in office, I found my interactions with the Housing Department extremely frustrating because they were never able to answer many financial questions I posed to them. In fact, I had proposed several audits of the department from the city auditor, one of which went forward on the housing department’s loan Portfolio. Even that small audit found many problems regarding collecting loan payments, authorizing loans for ineligible recipients and more.
ON: What did you think of the finding that external vendors--such as non profits--received funds to provide programs to homeless people without measures to assess whether those programs were effective?
JK: In my time on the council, we directed the director of the housing department (Jacky Morales-Ferrand at the time) to create measures to gauge the success of the programs we were funding through nonprofits. Frankly speaking, the response was incomplete, evasive, and not useful. What we received were a bunch of numbers on how many people were supposedly “served” but no other information on what services or the successes of the services. Nor did we receive information on whether these were unique individuals or were they people coming in several times and being counted as several people. Many of us were frustrated with the lack of accountability back then and it is a shame that the housing department is still having these issues now.
ON: Given that the state audit essentially busted the HD, what should council and the City Manager be doing to get the HD back on track and start delivering accountable programs that actually work, instead of blithely burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with nary a thought re: effectiveness?
JK: I must say that the State Auditor should not stop at cities, but also audit the county, which receives a lot more money to deal with drug addiction and mental health, as well as housing. If those programs worked better much of our homelessness issues would be solved. That said, I hope that the new housing director looks at some of the suggestions I made while on council like creating outcome-oriented measurements to judge whether or not a nonprofit is worth funding, and using some of our tax dollars to buy buildings instead of spending a million per unit and waiting years to see results.
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