The Insider's Guide to Management Public Housing

The Insider's Guide to Managing Public Housing can be used by PHA executive directors and their staffs in several ways. The Guide's two volumes are a trouble shooter's diagnostic manual for PHAs searching for remedies in problem areas. For PHAs interested in periodic self evaluation as a means of heading off problems and improving management systems, they provide an analytic road map. And they can be used as a common starting point for formal and informal efforts by PHAs to share practical management experience.

The guides have uses in addition to self-assessment. They can serve as training documents for new employees or as texts for in service training of current staff. Newly appointed commissioners of local authority boards unacquainted with the public housing system and with the daily management of sites will also find them informative. They can assist an authority to prepare an application under the Comprehensive Improvement Assistance Program and anticipate the ongoing problems of maintenance and modernization once it is completed. Similarly, they should be of help in developing requests for Community Development Block Grant funds and other types of grants-in-aid. For financially troubled PHAs, they may be an aid in the development of a Financial Workout Plan.