D.A. Collects Subsidy as Mother’s Landlord

As a landlord in a controversial low-income federal housing program, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury receives $639 per month of taxpayer money to rent a house to his 77-year-old mother on his Ojai ranch property.

Bradbury’s mother, Marie, receives rent subsidies through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 housing voucher program, designed to provide affordable housing to those who would otherwise be unable to secure decent accommodations.

However, the nationwide program in which Marie Bradbury participates is now under attack in Washington, and reforms due to take effect in September zero in on those landlords who rent to family members on government assistance.

Bradbury’s mother has lived since July 1995 in a manufactured house on her son’s four-acre Hang ‘Em High ranch, assessed last year at $558,000. The dwelling sits next to Bradbury’s five-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot main house.

The district attorney said he sees no personal conflict in taking the rent subsidy because his mother has been receiving it for more than 20 years, long before she began renting from him in 1995. He said it allows her to feel like she contributes to the family and is not being a burden on them.

“That’s a major consideration for this woman because she has a great deal of pride and has worked hard all of her life,” Bradbury said.

“This money is not important to us,” added Bradbury, who earns an annual salary of $131,804. “It’s important to my mother. If the money is not there tomorrow, that wouldn’t cause us any concern because we would continue to keep my mother here.”

But Bradbury’s participation in the federal housing subsidy program drew mixed reactions last week from housing officials and taxpayer advocates in Ventura County, as well as from the county’s two local congressmen.

In all, there are about 5,400 tenants in Ventura County who receive Section 8 rent subsidies, and about 6,900 more are on waiting lists that are three to five years long. So many poor people are waiting for help, in fact, that the county’s Area Housing Authority was forced to close its waiting list last August. And officials don’t see it reopening for another three years.

“I don’t think that family members making that kind of money should make use of public funds to assist family members,” said Sal Gonzalez, executive director of the Oxnard Housing Authority, which administers Section 8 funds. “We have such a tremendous housing need that the money needs to go to those who can least afford housing.”

Gonzalez noted that he takes care of his 87-year-old mother-in-law, whose only income is her Social Security benefits and her savings, without any government help.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) said he doesn’t know a lot about HUD’s housing subsidy program, but he defended Marie Bradbury’s right to receive rental help and said her son’s income should not be an issue.

“I don’t know what Mike Bradbury’s balance sheet looks like, and quite frankly I don’t care,” he said. “I have great respect for this man’s ethics. . . . I don’t know if it’s my role or anybody’s role to question what he should do to support his mother.”

Gallegly said Marie Bradbury worked hard all her life and had earned her place in the federal Section 8 housing program. He said he believes the district attorney could make substantially more money by renting the extra house on his property to someone else.

“Here’s a case where an individual is subsidizing his mother,” Gallegly said. “If he didn’t care about her, he could rent the house out for several hundred dollars more than he is getting.”

But according to HUD records, Bradbury previously rented the same dwelling to another tenant for $600. That is $250 less than listed on the current federal housing contract for his mother. The “last tenant made up the difference in rent by helping with ranch animals (feeding, cleaning, training, doctoring),” according to documents filed to support Marie Bradbury’s housing application.

To qualify for the rental subsidy, Marie Bradbury cannot live under the same roof with her son, his wife and their 1-year-old son.

The rental subsidy program works like this: Low-income tenants rent dwellings from participating landlords, paying no more than 30% of their income for housing. The government pays the rest of the rent.

Marie Bradbury’s HUD payment contract states that her current monthly rent is $850. Under her contract agreement, she is supposed to pay her son landlord $211 toward the monthly rent, while HUD picks up the remaining $639.

But Bradbury said his mother does not pay the tenant portion of the rent.

Doug Tapking, executive director of the Ventura County Area Housing Authority, declined to discuss Bradbury’s case, citing privacy laws. But he said there is nothing in the regulations that specifically deals with landlords being required to collect the tenant portion of the rent.

“The agreement is between the landlord and the tenant,” Tapking said. “We are simply supplementing their rent.”

Critics of the Section 8 program’s current rules say that landlords who rent to relatives should shoulder that burden without government help.

“You want to create and foster a culture that says welfare is for those who need it,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Woodland Hills). “Where people are closely related and get along well together, everything should be done by the family to prevent one of them from needing Section 8 or any other welfare programs.”

Speaking specifically of Bradbury’s case, however, Sherman said: “If there is fault here, the fault is not with the Bradbury family. It is with HUD regulators who haven’t quite got around to amending their regulations.”

Jere Robings, president of the Ventura County Taxpayers Alliance, questioned the circumstances under which Bradbury has been collecting benefits.

“It’s legal,” he said. “But whether this is the use for which the program is intended is another question.”

Robings noted that he took care of his own mother, who was temporarily blinded by cataracts, for three years without government assistance.

“I think children should assume responsibility for their parents if they have the means,” he said. “I would think children have an obligation to take care of their parents.”

Despite the rental subsidy his mother receives, Bradbury said he and his wife, Heidi Bradbury, pick up most of her living expenses. He said he buys her groceries, paid to furnish her house and recently purchased a car for her.

“We contribute substantially to support her,” he said.

Although Bradbury said he does not need the HUD funds to take care of his mother, he also said that “it’s a big leap, a big assumption” to view him as wealthy.

“I live from paycheck to paycheck, the only assets I have are my home and my retirement,” he said.

Asked directly if his reputation as a conservative, law-and-order Republican clashes with his involvement in the HUD Section 8 subsidy program, Bradbury said:

“It’s always a big assumption that I’m conservative on issues other than law and order. People tend to make that mental jump without knowing where I stand on a lot of issues.”

So far, Bradbury has been paid about $15,000 from the HUD voucher program. He is one of thousands of family members nationwide who receive an estimated $200 million a year to provide dwellings for relatives.

Under new federal regulations, which take effect next month, tenants renting from relatives who are already in the subsidy program will be allowed to continue. But new tenants will have to verify that they are not related to their landlords, unless the tenant is physically or mentally disabled.

“We are committed to eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in all HUD programs,” said Kevin Marchman, HUD’s acting assistant secretary for public housing. “Given the constraints of our budget and the great need for affordable housing and housing assistance in this country, we haven’t a dollar to waste.”

“Housing assistance should be provided to those who are truly in need--those who are poor, or those who are elderly or disabled with limited ability to pay the rent,” Marchman said. “Housing assistance ought not go to those who don’t truly have that kind of need. That is why HUD has moved to ban the practice of allowing relatives to rent to relatives under Section 8--it’s a potential abuse of the program and could allow Section 8 to be used by those who don’t truly need it.”

Asked what he would do once the new regulations take effect, Bradbury said it is up to his mother to decide if she will continue in the program.

“It’s her decision whether she accepts the money,” Bradbury said. “I can’t speak for her. If it was our decision, the money is not important to us.”

His mother was unavailable for comment, Bradbury said.

Bradbury’s involvement in HUD’s Section 8 program surfaced during a review by The Times of Ventura County Area Housing Authority records. The authority, the largest disburser of Section 8 funds in the county, covers Camarillo, Fillmore, Moorpark, Ojai, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. The records revealed no other names of local elected officials.

Area housing officials said they could not estimate how many families in the county are paid to house their relatives.

The change in regulations is “a good idea because I think the door is open too wide and the potential for abuse is there,” said Tapking, the Area Housing Authority chief.

But Tapking also said that if someone is eligible to receive assistance that “it makes no difference who she is renting from.”

Unlike most other participants, records show that Bradbury’s mother did not have to work her way up a waiting list in Ventura County, because she transferred her federal housing voucher from Lassen County. Housing officials say such transfers are common.

The wife of former Susanville Police Chief Floyd Bradbury, Marie Bradbury raised her three sons in rural Lassen County in Northern California.

All of her children went into law enforcement--Michael as a prosecutor, Stephen as a Superior Court judge, and Ron as a police chief who recently started teaching college in Washington state.

When her husband died in 1969, Marie Bradbury went to work as a nurse at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles because the police pension she received was not enough for her to live on.

But shortly after her husband passed away, she was injured on the job. She moved back to Susanville and into an apartment where she first began receiving housing assistance.

“On one of my visits to see my mom, I just realized that she had been getting so old and her ability to care for herself was deteriorating,” Bradbury said. “They have some pretty harsh winters up there, and I decided I wanted to bring her back to live with me.”

Bradbury said that his mother probably wouldn’t have made the move from Lassen to Ventura County without the Section 8 benefits.

“She couldn’t afford to live without the subsidy and would have just stayed in that miserable little upstairs apartment where she was living in Susanville,” Bradbury said.

Marie Bradbury transferred her housing subsidy to Ventura County two years ago. In June, when she was recertified for eligibility, her income was listed at $11,376 a year from Social Security and pension benefits, about half of the $21,400 allowed for a single person in the program.

“She certainly is not a woman of means,” Bradbury said. “But if the underlying philosophy for this program should be that if there are family members that are in a position to take care of her so that the money can go to other people, I’m very comfortable with that.”

In Washington, Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) has led the call for reform. He introduced the Housing Fraud Prevention Act in 1996, which he said was intended to close the relative-as-landlord loophole in an otherwise valuable Section 8 program.

English said officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development “freely conceded that this was not what Section 8 was for,” but still initially balked at changing their policies.

But after reviewing its Section 8 regulations and under continuing pressure from English and others, HUD officials agreed to change its policies beginning next month.

“Under the [old] regulations, it was found to be OK,” said HUD spokesman Alex Sachs in Washington. “However, there was a great concern within the department that the housing dollars would be going toward assisting people who otherwise may be able to be assisted by their relatives.”

But English said that HUD officials have dragged their feet in reforming the Section 8 program and that the new regulations should have been in effect much sooner.

“The problem with this delay is that every day means that more taxpayer dollars are wasted on this scam,” English said. “If this had been the Washington bureaucrats’ own money, you can bet they would have passed this rule months ago.”

The problem of landlords renting to relatives first came to the attention of federal officials in early 1996, when a county controller in Pittsburg, Pa., found that about 12% of his county’s Section 8 landlords rented to a relative.

“At a time when the wait for affordable, decent housing for the truly needy can take years, it seems unimaginable that tax money is used to pay for families to live in property owned by their relatives,” Allegheny County Controller Frank Lucchino wrote to former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Lucchino urged Cisneros to tighten HUD regulations because “it is a cruel distortion of the concept of family responsibility to allow owners of property to charge the taxpayers for housing their parents and children.”

Times staff writers Carlos V. Lozano and Daryl Kelley contributed to this story from Ventura and Melissa Healy reported from Washington.