By A.C. Thompson

Gregg Fortner, the executive director of the San Francisco Housing Authority, did not look to be a happy man on the afternoon of Nov. 9. In fact, he looked thoroughly stressed out.

And who could blame the guy? Fortner was catching flak from furious public housing tenants (probably 50 of 'em), a politician (Sup. Sophie Maxwell), a city agency (the health department), and two different local TV news crews. The shit had truly hit the fan.

Prompted by a report in the Bay Guardian and numerous complaints from tenants, Maxwell and her colleagues had summoned Fortner to City Hall to discuss the "upkeep and maintenance" of his agency's 6,400 or so apartments.

For more than an hour, grim-faced public housing tenants, one after another, described atrocious living conditions. "Over the weekend we had four incidents of floods," said Tessie Esther, a neighborhood activist and resident of the Hunters View development. "The toilets overflowed ... dirty water and stuff comes up through the bathtubs."

Members of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) – a coalition of Bayview-Hunters Point residents and public housing dwellers – pushed for the hearing, and when they got a chance to speak, they let loose. Stephanie Johnson, who lives in the Oakdale complex, reported an infestation of rats in a unit with "no heat and no hot water."

Jaron Browne, an organizer with POWER, pointed to a color photo of crap, toilet paper, and tampons spewing from a busted pipe in Oakdale. "That sewage," he explained, "was flowing right in front of someone's house."

An elderly woman, a denizen of the Alice Griffith development, said, "The water from my toilet is coming in my kitchen sink. I'm scared to go upstairs, because when I come back down I might be wading in a foot of water. I want you to do something about this sewage water in my kitchen sink."

The horror stories clearly bothered Maxwell, who pelted Fortner with a series of blunt questions. "What's your thinking," the supe asked, "about what you've heard today and what you've read in the papers?"

Fortner was steadfast: The Housing Authority, he said, completes urgent repairs within 24 hours, despite losing 28 maintenance workers to budget cuts. "The fact is, if we find out about something, we take care of it," he said.

But that didn't really square with the findings of Karen Cohn of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Two weeks after our story on Oakdale ran (see "A Place Called Despair," Oct. 19), health department investigators visited the development and identified 27 different health code violations. "There are very clear biohazard conditions" in Oakdale, as well as "safety hazards, electrical hazards, and respiratory hazards," said Cohn, who works in the department's environmental health section.

The health department also contacted the Department of Building Inspection about possible housing code violations at Oakdale.

According to Fortner, the Housing Authority is pouring a ton of money into keeping up its ancient properties – about a third of the units were built in the 1940s and '50s – completing more than 71,000 repairs last year.

While he has consistently downplayed the maintenance problems, Fortner did make some stunning admissions. He acknowledged his agency has a backlog of more than 4,400 unfinished repair jobs, and when the matter of crime came up, he was shockingly candid: "You can read in the newspaper every day about how unsafe our units are," he said.

And in the end, the housing boss lowered his voice a little and struck a conciliatory note: "The Housing Authority needs to get more connected with our residents. We need to build back trust with our residents." E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson@hushmail.com.