Panic attacks, dread and burnout: DHC staffers are barely hanging on

Asia Pratt worked as a call center representative last year at the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC) through a temporary staffing agency. During her five months there, she said she would field calls every day from people who hadn’t had their complaints resolved, sometimes for years, despite multiple requests to the city’s largest provider of affordable housing .

These issues needed to be fixed as soon as possible because they involved residents’ health and safety: moldy walls, holes in the roof, units infested with roaches and unpaid landlords threatening evictions. But the DHC wasn’t taking care of the problems.

Pratt said she felt helpless as the pleas got increasingly desperate.

“I actually built relationships with some of the people over the phone because they would call so frequently,” Pratt said. “It was really heart-wrenching. It was almost worse than when I worked in a nursing home and watched the people I took care of die.”

The head of the DHC for the past five years, Sandra Henriquez, suddenly resigned less than two weeks before her last day on April 19. Chief Operating Officer Irene Tucker took her place as CEO on an interim basis.

The new permanent CEO will have several crises to deal with, like deteriorating conditions at properties owned by the commission and a mismanaged Section 8 voucher program .

At the core of these issues is reforming a workplace that multiple current and former DHC workers say is broken.

Employees who spoke with Outlier Media say the agency’s leadership has failed to address persistently inadequate staffing and training, and that managers treat staff with disrespect and don’t take their concerns seriously.

None of the employees who spoke to Outlier agreed to be identified by name. One still works at the DHC and didn’t want to lose their job. Five former employees still work or are looking for work in the housing industry and didn’t want to jeopardize their job prospects. Only Pratt, the temporary worker, agreed to be named.

Running a public housing authority like the DHC is immensely challenging. Budgets are typically not large enough to undertake major capital improvements to their properties. Its tenants are some of the most vulnerable and difficult to house. Federal guidelines require compliance by completing highly technical paperwork for every voucher, inspection and work order.

But staff mismanagement has made these already difficult tasks substantially more difficult.

All the workers who spoke with Outlier reported that the demanding, unsupportive workplace has led to poor service to the thousands of tenants and voucher holders who rely on the DHC to keep them safely and consistently housed. Continual short-staffing has resulted in incomplete or delayed work, with employees feeling overwhelmed by the backlog of unfinished tasks. All the workers said they either never received adequate training — or even any training — for their jobs.

“I experienced culture shock so to speak when I started at the DHC,” one former employee said. “It got to a point where I would dread going into work every day.”

A current employee said they have panic attacks almost every day before work.

Several employees said they submitted complaints to human resources. None resulted in change, they said.

“Complaints from employees to HR are taken very seriously,” DHC spokesperson Mark Lane said by email. “DHC has personnel policies and complaint procedures and is committed to addressing them in a timely and thorough manner.”

The DHC declined a request by Outlier to interview a non-executive employee who could speak positively about workplace culture at the commission.

Unresponsive agency

Pratt said her job was to take down the caller’s name, contact information and their issue, then log it into DHC’s client management system. A specialist was supposed to follow up.

But she said the backlog of work orders made it impossible for staff to respond in a timely way. She could elevate a request if it was an emergency, but only a couple of specialists would consistently respond.

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“I took so many calls from people whose documents were properly submitted and forwarded,” Pratt said. “I have sent something to a specialist or even someone higher up. And they’re calling back every day just to check in because they’re living with mold in their house and their dog is going blind.”

Pratt said she got no help from managers. She said, on multiple occasions, she took a caller’s complaint directly to her supervisor, who told the caller she would personally deal with the issue. To her knowledge, the supervisor never did.

The dozens of residents and landlords who have spoken to Outlier over the last year said they often receive slow or no response from the DHC and have lived with the same issues for months or even years.

Nearly every property owned by the commission failed inspections the last time they were made public in 2021.

“The DHC says they are underfunded and understaffed but have not advocated for additional resources to help the people they serve,” said Kea Mathis, a community organizer with Detroit People’s Platform who has worked with the agency’s residents to advocate for their needs. “In all my time organizing tenants at the DHC, it has never acted with urgency.”

Paperwork pileup

Staff turnover within DHC’s Rental Assistance Department has been particularly problematic.

The department manages the commission’s Section 8 program, which provides vouchers to tenants to subsidize a significant portion of their rent. According to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data from December , the DHC has the capacity to provide more than 6,400 vouchers . However, it has consistently used about 1,500 less than that — in part because it doesn’t employ enough people to process the paperwork.

Public housing authorities like the DHC need to verify every voucher holder’s income annually and set the subsidy amount for their rent. But the commission is woefully behind in this process, called recertification, because it hasn’t hired, retained and trained enough people to do the work.

In June last year, the agency had just 12 housing specialists to complete paperwork for all its voucher holders, creating a backlog of more than 2,000 delinquent recertifications. Specialists interviewed for this story said this put them under intense pressure.

“The burnout is palpable,” a former DHC employee told Outlier last year. “It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we can’t care.”

The employee added that resignations were frequent because the work was too demanding and they couldn’t get the support they needed from managers.

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The DHC has increased the number of staff in the department to 19, according to documents from its most recent board meeting , and hired a third-party contractor to help catch up. It hasn’t made much of a difference. The commission has renewed the contract three times over the past nine months but still reported a backlog of 1,747 delinquent recertifications — out of around 5,000 — at its most recent board meeting on April 4.

Lane acknowledged staff shortages “following COVID,” but says the Rental Assistance Department is now “fully staffed.”

Recertifying delays have created serious problems for the agency and its clients. Multiple landlords told Outlier they no longer take DHC vouchers because payments don’t start for months after a tenant moves in, and they take just as long to adjust when a tenant needs an increase in subsidy.

It also means the DHC can’t issue as many vouchers to the more than 4,000 households on the waitlist as of November because it’s paying more than it should per household. The tenants most likely to voluntarily update their income are the ones who need more money from the commission.

The agency issued an average of about 644 new vouchers every year from 2020-2022. Last year it issued just 79. The number is 21 so far this year.

When the number of delinquent recertifications was at its height, a spokesperson for HUD told Outlier it was “very concerned with (the DHC’s) poor trend with annual recertifications.”

HUD did not respond in time for publication about the minimal progress that’s been made in recertifications over the past year.

Fired and looking for a home

Pratt said she started to get more pointed in the reports she would log into the client management system, including notes about how many times someone had called and whether she had elevated the request in the past.

“I wouldn’t sugarcoat anything and I knew management would see it,” she said. “I feel like I saw a lot of attitude once I started doing that.”

Pratt, fed up with the stress of the job, put in her two weeks’ notice in late October.

She ended up leaving earlier than that. She said the person who staffed the front desk quit. Managers asked the call center representatives to answer the door, she said, but Pratt refused. She felt unsafe: Many angry people called or visited the office, and it didn’t have any security.

She quit that day. She wasn’t too upset because the job was “terrible.”

But Pratt was worried for another reason. She was able to secure an emergency housing voucher for herself and her son in October, just before she was fired, and she wondered if her outspokenness could make it hard to use.

“I saw how the building operated,” she said. “I see how things are delayed. And it does not bring me comfort at all.”

Five months later, Pratt’s voucher is now expired. She was never able to use it, and she suspects a DHC manager put it on hold. A former colleague told Outlier that her suspicions are correct.

Pratt is currently living with family and hoping to save enough to get a place of her own.

Outlier Media · Panic attacks, dread and burnout: DHC staffers are barely hanging on