Through our Strategic Vision and Capital Plan, MPHA is committed to a long-term plan to preserve all our 42 high-rise public housing buildings. Most of these buildings are 50 or more years old, and require expensive upgrades of their building systems (heat, electrical, water, etc.) as well as major improvements to apartments and common areas that MPHA residents deserve. These are often multi-million dollar projects, and getting there will require efforts far beyond the level of annual capital funding currently provided by the federal government.

One tool we will use is the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a bipartisan program created under the Obama administration and run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Under RAD, HUD changes how it provides rental assistance in a way that will be more stable in the long-term and makes it possible for MPHA to access money to repair and improve the property now or in the future.

RAD was created to help housing authorities preserve and improve our public housing.

Housing authorities around the country have already used RAD to preserve more than 140,000 units of public housing, and attract more than $10 billion of new investment in public housing. MPHA has so far converted one property using RAD, enabling the $26 million renovation of the Elliot Twins.

MPHA has used a different HUD program to secure more than $3 million a year in additional federal housing subsidy, which we will use to make much-needed repairs to the more than 700 family homes we own! This is a large portfolio of single-family, duplex, and fourplex houses, spread all across the city, and we estimate it will take three to five years to do this work. MPHA is also committed to seeking new sources of funding to expand our portfolio of these essential homes for families with children.