Rick Lazio: “I wish every public housing authority throughout the Nation was a high performing, competent housing authority that…”

“I wish every public housing authority throughout the Nation was a high performing, competent housing authority that performed to levels of excellence, and if that were the case, as the saying goes, if men were angels, we would not need such a thing as an accreditation board. But in fact there are some housing authorities throughout the country that are not doing a very good job. Some have been dismal failures and some need more help, some need more encouragement. In the academic world accreditation is used in order to ensure minimum levels of excellence in terms of colleges and universities, and it is a stamp of approval for people when they look at colleges and universities or law schools or graduate schools. It gives people a comfort level that they know that these institutions are performing at these minimal levels. And they are staffed and developed by a system of peers. The same is true with hospitals throughout the Nation. But with housing that monitoring takes place in-house in HUD. HUD itself monitors the housing authorities, and they have been doing an exceptionally mediocre, some would say a quite poor, job of that evaluation.”