The Housing Hustle

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Dean, who presided over the award of Section 8 grants, had little background in housing but plenty of ambition and family connections. A cousin of Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Dean variously referred to Mitchell as her father or stepfather after he began living with her widowed mother Mary Gore Dean. At HUD, Deborah Dean served as a sort of gatekeeper, controlling access to Pierce and enjoying wide powers to block projects. She told the Wall Street Journal that the rent-subsidies program was "set up and designed to be a political program ((and)) we ran it in a political manner." At a congressional hearing last week, she invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination.

How could such a scandal remain uncovered for so long? The answer lies partly in the fact that no one was looking. During the Reagan years, Congress was more interested in blocking budget cutbacks than in examining how Pierce ran his department. Since housing was an unglamorous beat, few journalists paused to investigate what was going on under Silent Sam.

The new HUD Secretary, Jack Kemp, promises to clean up the mess that Pierce and his cohort left behind. Kemp has canceled all 1989 Moderate Rehabilitation programs, called for an audit of 300 housing projects that have already received rent subsidies and demanded that 53 HUD field officers explain what happened to the funds that appear to be missing. "There's much work to do here, and I enjoy it," says Kemp. "President Bush has charged me with the responsibility to reform the agency from stem to stern, and that's what I intend to do." He has his task cut out for him.