Champion of Poor Selected as L.A.’s New HUD Director

Charles Ming, regional director of HUD in Oklahoma, has been named to take over the massive Los Angeles district office of the federal housing agency from longtime director Benjamin Bobo.

Known in Oklahoma as an outspoken advocate for fair housing and improved living conditions for the poor, Ming will arrive in Los Angeles in February, according to Robert J. De Monte, Western regional director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in San Francisco.

Ming’s appointment comes at a time when the federal agency is attempting to clean up a wide-ranging scandal involving misuse of funds and the awarding of scarce federal funds to developers who used well-connected Republican lobbyists. The scandal has focused attention on many East Coast cities, and California has figured less prominently.

“It’s more a career move than tied to any initiatives of Secretary Jack Kemp to (reform HUD), but Ming is definitely committed to the initiatives of the secretary and we are happy to have him,” De Monte said. “He has dealt well with troubled properties in Oklahoma.”

Ming will face many challenges in Los Angeles, where 21 run-down, World War II-era public housing projects shelter 31,000 of the city’s poorest residents. The two-story projects, sprinkled from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley but concentrated largely in minority inner-city areas, are in need of costly modernization and many are overrun by crack cocaine dealers.

In a telephone interview, Ming, a lawyer and former Municipal Court judge who joined HUD six years ago, said he has read Los Angeles newspapers and was moved by the severe homelessness here, which he said was “unlike anything we have ever seen in Oklahoma.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do in ending the tragedy of homelessness, as Secretary Kemp says. That’s a major priority of mine in this new position,” he said.

Ming said he also intends to attack drug dealing in the city’s housing projects and in privately owned low-income rental housing subsidized by HUD.

“After homelessness, the one thing that is most important is making public and subsidized housing drug-free, and that may be easier to say than to do in Los Angeles,” Ming said. “I think there are some people in L.A. who won’t want me to do that, like the Crips and the Bloods.”

Bobo, who has been with HUD since 1981, was offered a reassignment in October to run operations for HUD in New Orleans, but he has turned it down, according to Scott Reed, HUD spokesman in Los Angeles. Reed said Bobo “has announced no formal plans at this time.” Bobo could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Unlike the low-profile Bobo who rarely granted interviews, Ming’s hands-on style in Oklahoma often landed him coverage in the newspapers as he cracked down on slumlords and spoke out against drug dealing.

In one widely publicized move last July, Ming seized two Tulsa apartment complexes controlled by Associated Financial Corp., a Santa Monica firm that has interests in 45,000 HUD-subsidized rental units for the poor nationwide but has recently run into trouble at some of its projects.

In foreclosing on Associated Financial’s Tulsa holdings, Ming decried the “unlivable” conditions at the two long-neglected apartment complexes, calling the private partnership created by Associated Financial to buy and own the properties “nameless, faceless slumlords.”

However, Ming said Tuesday “there is no hidden” agenda in his being named director in Los Angeles--in the back yard of Associated Financial.

“They probably aren’t happy that I am coming to town, but I have absolutely no hidden agenda on that; nobody has said to me, ‘Be involved with (Associated Financial),’ ” he said. “I will work with all projects exactly the same. Whoever owns them makes no difference to me. Housing quality is major, in my opinion, and I will enforce it whether it’s in Oklahoma, Tulsa or Los Angeles.”

Associated Financial officials could not be reached for comment.