I'm sure it doesn't matter much to him, in the grand scheme of things, but the more I think about it, I must admit that I, too, have a serious issue with Carl Greene.
Why?
A mainstream contractor, last week, stepped forward to tell a Daily News reporter that, in Carl Greene’s Philadelphia Housing Authority, if a large contractor was having difficulty meeting the authority’s published, Power-Pointed and highly promoted minority participation guidelines, the contractor could simply contribute some cash to the “Carl Greene Scholarship Fund” and the PHA would make the mainstream contractor’s minority participation “hassle” go away.
That piece of hypocrisy – that the PHA has simply “winked” at white contractors and dismissed minority inclusion requirements in exchange for a few bucks contributed to a questionably established not-for-profit organization--is absolutely outrageous.
Where else are we in the African-American community supposed to turn to achieve fair levels of inclusion, finally, in the local construction industry, other than to entities that have substantial budgets, that do a great deal of work in our very own communities, whose majority clientele is African- American and that are headed by a black executive? If even those institutions and their leadership are “gaming us,” too, what’s left for us to believe?
The initial reaction to the Inquirer's "mortgage foreclosure story," on August 13, probably went like this: “Wow, how ironic! A guy who makes more than $300,000 a year and who has already invested nearly $230,000 in his $615,000 property, has gotten into a "beef” with his bank about payments due on his …house."
Many Philadelphians thought that Carl Greene was too big to lose a personal mortgage dispute, that he knew too much about the housing industry not to have done his homework on this issue and that it would only be a matter of time before he would mobilize his $300,000+ salary, his $44,000+ one-year bonus and his cadre of lawyers and high-ranking friends to bring the impudent Wells Fargo Bank to its knees
That, of course, was before all the other shoes began to drop, before there was full recognition of the extent of the sexual harassment allegations, before we learned of the $50,000+ in IRS tax liens, before the stunning revelation of the $33 million in fees paid to outside legal counsel since 2007, before the disclosure that, even as we were reading about the mortgage foreclosure debacle, there was, yet, another personal sexual harassment case in the process of being settled.
Right after that, the Inquirer carried an editorial page cartoon depicting Greene as the “Dirty Old Man who lived in a (Gucci) shoe.”
The paper’s editorial went on record as saying that the “PHA board seems out of the loop,” and reminded us all, in that early Wednesday edition, that “Mayor Nutter has had nothing to say … ditto for City Controller Alan Butkovitz,” each of whom, by the way, have two appointments to the PHA’s five-person board.
Finally, the Inquirer said it was time for the Mayor to “step up and exert his power.” Michael Nutter must have read it.
Shortly thereafter, and right on schedule, the Mayor released copies of a letter in which he condemned his longtime nemesis and the incumbent chairman of the PHA board, John Street, by saying, “Sadly (PHA) may be suffering from a lack of appropriate oversight," and “I am baffled, like most Philadelphians, to learn of your contention that you, as board chairman, had no knowledge of the sexual harassment cases brought against Mr. Greene.”
In the same letter, the Mayor suggested that Street and his fellow PHA board members should terminate Greene if the allegations of sexual harassment are "accurate" and if payments were made without the Board’s knowledge.
And, knowing just how much Nutter and Street “love and respect" each other, I’m sure that Mayor Nutter enjoyed adding, as part of his letter, that it appears that “the very leadership of PHA is in doubt.”
Responding to Nutter’s letter, Street was predictably dismissive. “He’s just talking,” he said.” He has to say something.”
Ouch! If you were standing close enough, you, too, might have gotten hit with a pie.
The Daily News editorial page also joined the fun, asserting that the PHA board “has been asleep at the switch” and that "it’s clear that no one has really been in control of PHA for a long time.”
After saying all of that, the editors added: “Carl Greene should do the right thing, and resign.”
Despite all of that, what has been uncovered about the PHA and its leadership is not the fault of the media, at all. It clearly is the fault of elected and appointed officials and the people who work with and for them, who grew entirely too comfortable in believing that there were no rules that couldn’t be ignored, bent or broken, no person who couldn’t be disrespected..
Even worse, in my opinion, even though most of the agency’s work was done in historically black communities and involved a largely African-American tenant base, there was a curious belief, somehow, that the economic benefits – the jobs and the contracts – should be reserved for the same, privileged, non-minority segment of the population that controls economic benefits in every other part of the city.
With the hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds he used to change the landscape of neighborhoods across the city, Greene also had a substantial opportunity, and a commensurate obligation, to impact the rules of economic engagement and to ensure, finally, that African Americans and other minorities would gain meaningful, legal access to the dollars that were spent over the 12 years of his tenure.
He chose, instead, to play the same game that his predecessors played, but with noble-sounding, largely hollow, inclusion statements, and misleading Power Point presentations that raised hopes, but delivered well below the agency’s potential.
According to a Tribune story at the time, by Larry Miller, Schenecqua Butts, a PHA tenant, and union carpenter, testified on June 27, 2008, at a public hearing on the Mayor’s Commission on Construction Industry Diversity that, “I went to school for four years and I’ve faced constant discrimination on job sites.”
When she was laid off at one site after just one day of work, she said the safety inspector on the site told her “Well, you know how it is, we have to take care of our own first.”
“If I had known how it really is," said a highly qualified but underutilized Ms. Butts, "I would never have gotten into this industry, in the first place.”
At the same public hearing, Pierce Keating, whose firm, Daniel J. Keating Company, is a listed PHA contractor, told the Commission that he was aware that minorities didn’t get a lot of opportunities in the construction industry and that the reason why was that contractors like him preferred dealing with the “old guard” (meaning people of European descent, he later admitted) as workers and sub-contractors.
I don’t know if Carl Greene can somehow survive the current media and political frenzy surrounding him and the PHA, but the sad fact is that if Mr. Greene finally does have to “get his hat,” it, sadly, won’t be seen as that great a loss to the African-American business community, to black construction workers or to black-owned construction companies.
The work done by PHA, over all those years of Carl Greene's tenure, could have and should have been a launching pad for a new generation of emerging black and minority contractors, who could have grown their portfolios and expanded their size, their capacity and their work forces.
Maybe the next PHA executive director will understand that.
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