A pattern of HUD projects stalled or abandoned - The Washington Post

A pattern of HUD projects stalled or abandoned - The Washington Post:

"Even when HUD learns of a bungled deal, federal law does not give the agency the ability to compel local authorities to repay. HUD can only ask agencies to voluntarily return money by replenishing their federal accounts from local funds, essentially moving their own money around."

Unfortunately HUD gets blamed for deals gone wrong and poor oversight when the agency itself isn't allowed full regulatory oversight of the deals and is basically required to give money to inexperienced agencies. It seems we are so concerned about government oversight and intervention that it is hard for the government to do its job.

"Federal law mandates that housing agencies give 15 percent of their funding to community-based nonprofit groups, which are often undercapitalized and lack experience."

"Even when HUD learns of a bungled deal, federal law does not give the agency the ability to compel local authorities to repay. HUD can only ask agencies to voluntarily return money by replenishing their federal accounts from local funds, essentially moving their own money around. "

Grout Expectations

I wrote this my senior year of college as I was thinking about what to expect after graduation.

When I was in high school I used to write my English research papers in the Georgetown University Library. Most of my other classmates would travel to American University, only 10 minutes down the street, but I preferred Georgetown. I enjoyed the antiquity, the history, and the intimidating buildings. Maybe I thought that if I did my research at Georgetown I would be able to absorb some of the history and knowledge of the location. Maybe it was because the students in my class had checked out all the books I needed at American University.

Regardless of my reasons, the Georgetown library shaped my expectations for college. Before the library, what I heard and what I observed formed my expectations. And I heard a lot of things. My teachers told me “you won’t get away with this in college”. From my friends I heard, “I spent the weekend with my brother at Maryland and I don’t remember a thing!” My parents put me off with “finish your application and then we will talk about it.”

Until I started visiting the Georgetown library, what I observed was equally useless in forming expectations of college. All I could determine was that in college you run toward blue lights when you are in trouble, you meet at the campus center or campus commons, and you live in large buildings and share bathrooms.

But what kind of people was I going to meet? What were we going to talk about? How were we going to spend out time?

Researching in the Georgetown library gave me the chance to sit and form my own opinions. I loved to walk through the books. I loved finding a small desk in the corner, and I especially enjoyed people-watching. The students all seemed busy and focused, but still seem to enjoy what they were doing.

But my real understanding of college came where I least expected it, the bathroom.

Public bathrooms tend to tell a lot about an establishment. My father says bathrooms reveal what the owner really thinks about his customers. There are the nice bathrooms in nice establishments. The employees clean the bathroom four times a day and there is no graffiti on the wall, and there are the grungy bathrooms that you need a key for. The gas station attendant only cleans the bathroom once a week and the graffiti on the wall consists of “someone waz here” scratched with a knife in the side of the stall.

The grungy bathrooms are covered in swear words and crude sexual comments. The nice bathrooms have aspirin dispensers and toilets that automatically flush themselves. There is no graffiti in a nice bathroom. The Georgetown library bathroom didn’t fit into either of these categories.

The Georgetown library bathrooms are small and old. The walls are covered in tile and the lights are dim. The tile on the wall made it impossible to create any graffiti. You can’t scratch “Jonny is a D%*k” on tile with a knife because you can’t really scratch anything in tile.

When I looked closer though I realized that the bathroom was not completely void of graffiti. Scratched or scrawled in between the square tiles all around the bathroom were small phrases written in the grout - “The Grout American Story”, “Grout Balls of Fire”, and “The Grout Gatsby”.

This was no ordinary graffiti, this was college graffiti. Granted they were not all clever, but neither is “Jonny wz hur”. These at least were intelligent. Their authors knew about books and songs; and they were not afraid to show it off in a place you would never expect. It wasn’t just one bathroom either. This graffiti existed on each floor in each men’s bathroom (my research did not extend to the women’s bathroom).

I concluded that college was going to be a place where education would permeate everything that I did. Maybe it was full of parties and drinking, but it was going to be clever and smart. We were going to toast to great American authors and create drinking songs about American politics.

So how did Tufts live up to my “Grout Expectations”? It was slow in the beginning. I wondered when running naked was going to become academic and intellectual. I pondered whether bonding electrons would ever enter into my daily life. And let me tell you that there is no bathroom on campus that has anything clever to say about grout. Not one.

But things started to change. My junior year was when the pieces started to fit. My classes seemed to reach beyond the classroom. I knew enough about civil engineering that I could walk through Boston with my friends and I offer something about the buildings and the architecture and that darn tunnel. My friends had things to say about politics and the world. We were able to talk as if we knew something. It was cool, or it was what I want cool to be.

It is my senior year now and I think college has finally met my expectations. All I need now is something to explain what the real world is going to be like. I have to make sure I check the bathrooms when I start interviewing.

Wouldn't it be cool to know you are unquestionably right?

It’s a conversation that I've had in some form a couple times now. The most successful leaders and organizations seem to lead and inspire with an unquestioned faith in themselves and in everything they do, so wouldn't it be cool to have that? To KNOW that you personally have found the answer to all of life's most persistent questions; you are Guy Noir and you can retire. Because, I want that.

I want to stand in front of a group and give immediate and satisfying responses that calm the anxieties of everyone looking for direction. I will explain with such conviction that questioning my answer will be the same as questioning my integrity as a person. The only pause in my response will be the moment I take to formulate the first sentence, and everything after will flow easily from my lips, because I will KNOW.

Unfortunately, I have some personal obstacles to overcome before I come to unquestioned confidence. The biggest obstacle might be my amazing ability to not know - to question, to doubt, and to caveat. Even the simplest questions unleash a rush of tangential thoughts. For example, "What time do we stop work?" was a daily (sometimes hourly) question this past summer. So simple! There were really only a couple of times of the day I could pick, but in the beginning of the summer I still hesitated. I was thinking, "We have to fill 80 hours of work in the next ten days. The crew wants to leave early at the end of the hitch, the supervisor has scheduled a hike on the third day, and we don't want to be so tired by the 4^th day that we can't accomplish anything. Three crew members are exhausted from working all morning and one member hasn’t lifted a shovel all day because she has been updating Facebook on her cell phone. I want to finish the day with the crew feeling accomplished, but I don't want to push so hard that they're discouraged. . ."

Answer: "let's wait until lunch and see"

If you value understanding, knowledge, and teaching, how can you possibly justify allowing yourself to simplify answers? Don’t people need to know the multitude of factors governing the answer so they can make their own personal and educated responses? Even better, I should provide the response my father gave me last week when I asked about the Wobblies: “You don’t know? Well I have a book for you to read.”

The reality though is that they didn't need to know, nor did they usually want to know, why we are quitting at 4:30 instead of 5:00, and they most likely didn't want to read a book to find out. The crew just wanted to be able to set a pace for themselves and trust that the decision in the end was close to the right one.

Leading for me has to be a balance. I am not going to be able to, nor do I want to, banish uncertainty from my mind. Like Socrates said, "all I know is that I know nothing" and so my confidence and conviction needs to be derived not from why I KNOW, but from what I am trying to accomplish, my goals. On the Conservation Corps I needed to finish projects efficiently while keeping the crew safe, happy, and healthy. Each decision is therefore supported by the confidence in those goals; “we are working today to finish the project but we are not working tomorrow because the crew is exhausted and needs the rest.” On Bike & Build I needed to safely transport 31 bike riders across the country while keeping them safe, happy, and healthy and at the same time helping to spread information about affordable housing. My decisions were based on my confidence and commitments to those goals.

So I may never know that I am without question providing the right answers, but I do know that I am without question headed in the right direction.

Learning to telemark ski

Recently I landed an amazing deal on a pair of Telemark Skis which are kind of like really fancy cross-country skis or broken alpine skis. Ed has been pushing me to learn, and even if he hadn't the offer was to good a deal to refuse, so now I own some more equipment for a new sport that will likely cause me to buy more stuff!

I gather that most people learn to tele-ski with some basic knowledge of skiing in general, but I haven't had the chance to barrel down the mtn. on anything but a sled in the past 3 years and I haven't been on a pair of skis since my sister taught me when I was in elementary school. The only advice that I can remember, and I have my sister to thank for it, is "Stop for Pizza" and "Go for French Fries". Basically this means that you make the skis parallel to go fast and if you want to stop you cross your skis in the shape of a pizza slice so that you then trip over yourself and slide on your back until you come to a stop. Tele-skis add to the already challenging sport by allowing you to release your heal so that when you want to turn you have to put one knee to the ground, while keeping your back straight and chest up, pushing your downhill ski in front-of your trailing uphill ski, and usually someone is yelling at you to tell you that you're not doing any of those things even remotely close, at which point you try to correct any one of your mistakes by shifting your weight which causes you to loose balance fall on your butt and slide on your back until you're lucky enough to come to a stop.

Once you start to feel a little comfortable with the turning though, you start to challenge muscles instead of the padding on your butt. Since you have to turn in order to not hit children, trees, or speeds above 10 mph, you may have to practice a turn, in both directions, pretty often on the way down the mountain. The problem arises though when you realize that your legs aren't actually made of steel like you previously thought. After only two turns where you fully lunge with one leg forward and hold it as your skis slowly move you in the direction you intend to go, you will find that your legs are in fact made of jello. There is no muscle there at all! Unfortunately after the second turn you are in desperate need of any muscle fibers in your leg and so if you're lucky you can slow to a stop and rest for 2 hours until your legs stop burning, or you can kind of cling to the poles, tense up, bend you back incorrectly, and fall on your butt until you come to a stop or loose your skis.

In a day of skiing you can repeat this procedure pretty much about three times before you can barely stand and you think that the black diamond routes seem like a good idea if only so that you can slide uncontrollably on your butt to the bottom that much faster. Luckily in the times that you are trying to regain feeling in your legs or collecting your skis after tossing them across the hill, your friends can usually get 13 or 14 runs in before you start moving again. This way everyone is having fun on the mountain together!

Try not to talk to much your first month here . . .

When I first decided to move to WY, I got a lot of advice on how to survive. In addition to a brutal winter and completely different landscape, I needed to adjust to a little bit of a cultural change. As one friend, and former Colorado resident, said, I'll need to adjust to the rugged individualism of Wyoming. "Try not to share your feelings to early". I feel like I also maybe should have a bigger car or at least more articles of flannel . . . but my favorite advice came from one of the WCC program directors. He said "You're probably going to have a lot of trouble here in the beginning. You are from the East coast, you're liberal, and you think about things . . . try not to talk for at least your first month."

Well it has been more than a few months, and I'm starting to adjust. Really there isn't much difference when you surround yourself with the kind of people you enjoy. I don't talk to much to the neighboring apartment with 3 Ford F350 Trucks that wake me up on occasion because the diesel fumes start to seep into my 1st level apartment. I also don't talk to much to the girls with bleached blond hair, fake tan, and wearing high heals in the dead of winter - although truth be told they probably don't spend much of their day worrying about me talking to them. I do have a blast with the 11 other crew leaders though. These are people who are ready to devote a summer to working and living outside, so they have to be cool.

I don't know if I'll move back to WY after the summer, but I'm certainly not ruling it out.

So much time on my hands!

In my first week back in WY, I have been relatively bored. Not the angsty teenager bored because you're angry that mom didn't let you go to the party and you don't want to act like you're actually enjoying yourself, but the kind of bored that exists when you're an only child on vacation at the beach - you're happy that you're at the beach, not at school, and that you get to pick the marshmallow sugar cereal for breakfast, but there are only so many sand castles that you can build by yourself. Most of it is to be expected because I just moved to a completely new place where I am friends with all of three people within 4 hour driving distance, but I am also used to occupying my time working on some sort of project or toward some sort of goal.

One project I am eager to start is remodeling Ed's house. Although he was gone all week I painted his ceiling, mopped and cleaned the kitchen, fed his dog, and cleaned all the dirty dishes. He finally got back home yesterday and we started to hang kitchen cabinets and install light fixtures today. Unfortunately Ed has to work every once in a while, so I spend my time waiting with his dog Keegan for him to return so we can play.

It just seems that with ample amount of time and even other crew leaders to help out, I should be able to think of some sort of project or business idea. My current plan is to touch base with some of the local service organizations and non-profits in Laramie this week to see if I can start to make connections, and continue to brainstorm ideas with friends. Hopefully at some point it will turn into some reasonable ideas. In the mean time I will continue to apply to Applebees and pizza restaurants in the hopes of finding some money to pay for my thermodynamics book I just bought.

Summer Goals

This summer I will be working for the Wyoming Conservation Corps. I'll be leading a group of 6 crew members with a co-leader on 10-day hitches doing work for the State Parks and conservations groups of Wyoming. In preparation, all of the leaders attend a class at the University of Wyoming in Laramie once a week to cover topics like leadership, conservation, natural resource management, volunteerism, group dynamics, and communication.

Our first assignment is to state our intentions and goals for the summer. Here is what I've come up with:

I want to give ownership of the experience to the crew members by allowing them to make decisions. On the same note, I don't want to allow myself to be concerned with small details.

It needs to be my priority to get to know the people I'm working with.

I should be able to raise at least $1000 in donations for the WCC

I don't ever want to feel like I could have worked harder at something, planning/working/whatever

I want to understand the administration of the program so that I can feel comfortable running a non-profit in the future. This includes grant writing and general logistics.

Most importantly I want to figure out how this whole experience is relevant to my life goals.