The Harvard Graduate School of Design has now completed the Public Housing Operating Cost Study. We invite all interested parties to examine the document as attached to this web page. Let me say just a few words of introduction to the Report.

This work was requested by the U. S. Congress and performed under a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The basic question we were asked was, "What should it cost to administer good quality public housing?" We took this question quite literally. We did not seek to answer the question of what it does cost to run public housing, because that is a circular question and because public housing agencies do not currently keep information in a way that would have allowed us to determine the answer to that question in a useful manner. We similarly did not ask the question of what it costs to run public housing as it exists today, because the question of quality is so complex. We simply took the quality of the assisted housing stock, generally seen to be sound, as our standard. Finally, we did not ask the question of what it costs to run a good public housing agency, because all the rest of the real estate world evaluates its work on a property-by-property basis. So we asked the same question about the public housing stock.

At the same time, we found the narrow question of operating costs implied a number of other questions it was impossible not to think about. As a result, this report includes, especially in Chapter 7, a number of recommendations about mainstreaming the operations of public housing, including moving to a debt-financing and capital reserves model for capital improvements, and decentralizing operations so that individual properties are the relevant unit for budgeting, management and accounting. Our encounters with hundreds of housing organizations of all types during the course of this study has convinced us these changes will improve the quality of public housing for the residents and will put the industry on a sound footing that will enable it to thrive and grow in the future.

Finally, we owe a great debt of thanks to the many people in the public housing, assisted housing and private housing communities who gave so much of their time to make this report as thoughtful, comprehensive and pragmatic as it could possibly be. While very few of the hundreds of individuals who participated will agree with every conclusion we have drawn, their commitment to stay with the discussions right to the end of our work has resulted in a better report and we thank them for their energy and insights.

We hope a wide range of individuals and organizations will read and comment on this study. We believe the combination of this web site and the numerous public forums we have used to speak about our work has made this one of the most publicly accessible studies ever done in this arena. We hope this conversation will not stop now. The web site will stay active for the foreseeable future and the staff will respond to questions and comments to the extent it is possible to do so. The work of public housing is too important to be pushed to the side and not discussed. It is only by applying the most rigorous research and engaging the best minds in serious debate that this effort to serve our citizens of modest means will become as sound a program as its priority warrants.

Final Report