HUD E-Mails Refer to Retaliation

Philadelphia housing director Carl Greene says federal housing officials threatened his agency's funding. (By Matt Rourke -- Associated Press)

HUD spokesman Jereon Brown declined to comment on the e-mails. "The judge presiding in the lawsuit has asked the parties not to speak to the news media," Brown said.

The dispute between Jackson and the Philadelphia Housing Authority revolves around a city-led revitalization of the once-blighted Martin Luther King Jr. housing project in South Philadelphia.

In 1999, Universal Community Homes, a nonprofit urban-development company founded by Gamble, and a for-profit developer won the first of a series of contracts from the city to develop 236 affordable, below-market units and provide marketing and counseling services to incoming residents. If they met the contract terms, they were to receive a nearby vacant property.

Gamble complained to Jackson in 2006 that Greene would not give him the property, according to participants in a meeting. Jackson asked then-Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street to get Greene to turn over the land, but Greene said Universal failed to deliver on many of its promises, and he refused to hand over the land.

In the following months, Jackson's deputies, including Kendrick, assistant secretary for fair housing, repeatedly threatened in calls and in writing to find the authority in violation of both federal accessibility law and HUD's redevelopment grant, according to the lawsuit. They said the authority would be in default on the King project unless it transferred the vacant land to Gamble.

HUD agreed last fall to let the authority keep the property but found the agency in violation of the accessibility law and the larger funding contract.

The authority recently told a federal judge in Philadelphia that HUD's "capricious" decision would cost the authority $50 million, raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people. The judge agreed to temporarily stay HUD's finding of a violation. The judge has said the authority can question some key HUD leaders under oath but not Jackson.

Jackson's office last week said in a written statement that he could not comment on Greene's allegations because they are a subject of litigation. Jackson, who ran the District's housing authority in the 1980s, joined HUD as a deputy secretary in 2001 and was named secretary of the agency in 2004.