Bradbury Case Draws Call for Review by U.S. Housing Chief

Responding to the disclosure that Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury is using federal money to rent a house to his mother, the nation’s top housing official said Sunday that he may further tighten new regulations to halt such practices by “high-income landlords.”

U.S. Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo made his statements in response to a story in The Times on Sunday about how Bradbury, whose yearly salary is $131,804, is collecting $639 a month in federal rent subsidies to house his mother on his four-acre Ojai ranch.

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.

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

Cuomo said Sunday that he is considering tightening the reforms even further, closing a loophole in the new regulations that would allow “high-income landlords” to continue renting to relatives in the Section 8 program.

“I will review this regulation to determine if it should be tightened further to also bar high-income landlords already in the program from collecting subsidies for renting to relatives,” Cuomo said. “As part of the review, HUD will establish guidelines defining ‘high-income.’ We will not tolerate waste, fraud and abuse in this or any other HUD program.”

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

The district attorney in an earlier interview 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.

Bradbury said the federal subsidy is not important to him and that it would not bother him if it went away. But he said the money is important to his mother because it made her feel that she is not being a burden on his family.

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

Bradbury could not be reached for comment Sunday on Cuomo’s announcement.

Earlier, however, he also made the point that he does not consider himself wealthy despite his six-figure income.

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

In all, about 5,400 tenants in Ventura County receive Section 8 rent subsidies, and about 6,900 more are on waiting lists of three to five years. The county’s Area Housing Authority stopped taking names last August because of the number of poor people waiting for help--and they don’t expect to take any more for at least three years.

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Marie Bradbury’s HUD payment contract states that her current monthly rent is $850. Under the contract, she is supposed to pay her son $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, has declined to discuss Bradbury’s case, citing privacy laws.

But Tapking, a local housing official who does not report to Cuomo, did say Sunday that the housing secretary might be going too far by looking at tightening regulations even further.

“I don’t think [the new regulations] should be reexamined,” Tapking said. “I’m of the opinion that it goes too far. We’re here to provide assistance to low-income people. Who they choose to rent from is part of the free market, and I would tend to think that this just goes too far.”

If the tighter regulations do go through, Tapking said this will be the first time in the history of the 23-year-old program that the landlord’s income will be examined in addition to the tenant’s.

“This now is going to be the first time that a housing authority will be asked not to look at the person who is receiving the assistance, but the person who is being paid rent, the provider,” he said. “That’s going to be an interesting twist upon the entire Section 8 scenario.”

Verifying the income of Section 8 landlords would be time-consuming for the employees in his agency to do, Tapking said.

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“It means that every person that is involved in this would then have to have the landlord’s income verified. That could be a fascinating venture to try to determine what a landlord’s income could be. It’s tough enough many times to get an accurate count on a low-income person’s income, let alone to try to determine what profit and loss statements are and what the IRS says it would be.

“This will be an interesting review. I would want to see what the definition of higher income would be, and then we could determine whether or not there are individuals who fall within that guideline.”