Minneapolis housing chief McCorvey to leave after 25 years as agency's only director

Cora McCorvey, the only director the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) has ever known, plans to retire after 25 years and a career that raised the city's public housing from disarray to an agency considered exemplary nationwide.

McCorvey leaves a legacy that includes that turnaround, a redevelopment of the former North Side projects with effects that rippled cross the Twin Cities metro area, and an economic-stimulus-funded renovation of housing units.

She's the landlord for more than 6,000 public housing units, and her agency administers another 4,600 rental vouchers.

"My decision to retire was difficult," she said in a letter to the Housing Authority board. "My sense of loss for a position and an agency that I love and for which I continue to have great passion is profound."

McCorvey, 67, of Plymouth, is a grandmother 12 times over — one reason she spurned offers to lead other big housing agencies. While she said her retirement will be effective Feb. 10, the agency's board plans to employ a search firm and have a new executive director hired by the end of the year.

"I've always had a job doing something or another," she said Wednesday. "I think it's time for me to sit back."

McCorvey started working for public housing as a receptionist to support her ailing husband and their two children. She worked her way up, helping to manage the Glendale housing project in southeast Minneapolis. She inherited a newly independent agency that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) scored so low that some feared a federal takeover. Units sat vacant for months while thousands of poor people languished on waiting lists.

When the MPHA was created in 1991, newly appointed board chairman Richard Brustad approached McCorvey. "I interviewed her and said, 'Cora, do you think you can do this job?' She said, 'Yes, I think I can,' " Brustad recalled.

Within six years, tutored by Brustad, she had turned the agency around enough that HUD rated it one of the nation's highest-performing public housing operations.

One early accomplishment came when she worked with the late U.S. Rep. Martin Olav Sabo to return 12 high-rise buildings to senior-only status after elderly residents said mixing their units with those of younger mentally disabled residents was disruptive. She also managed to persuade HUD to allow the MPHA extra flexibility for using scarce federal funds among its programs.

But the authority wasn't without challenges during her tenure. A 1992 lawsuit alleged that the largely minority residents of the four housing projects along Olson Hwy. were concentrated in discriminatory fashion in those units.

A 1995 settlement opened the door to a major undertaking in which residents were moved out to other housing units owned by the authority or to private landlords who accepted vouchers. Some 770 publicly owned row-house units were razed and replaced with a mixed-income development known as Heritage Park that offered more amenities. New public housing units were created across the metro area from Carver to Washington counties, but the agency was never able to offer a full accounting for where displaced residents ended up.

McCorvey cited the creation of the nation's first memory-care unit for public housing residents with dementia as one of her most satisfying accomplishments. But she said she failed on her goal of reducing waiting lists, limited by federal funding.

"The waiting lists are longer," she said. "People seem to be more desperate."

Federal stimulus money in 2009 allowed the authority to refurbish many units. But a more recent proposal from McCorvey to redevelop Glendale into a mixed-income housing development, bolstered by private money, has prompted pushback from residents there. She'd like to settle that issue before she leaves.

A private person, poised and reserved in public, McCorvey said she's known among those who count — her tenants and people at City Hall. As part of that, she early on set up a tracking system for complaints relayed by council members about the condition of the agency's units or the behavior of their tenants.

"It's going to be hard to find a replacement for her because she's so special," Brustad said.

On Wednesday, McCorvey said, "I love this work. I've had passion for this work. I identify with this work. I've had an extraordinary opportunity for a quarter of a century."

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438

Twitter: @brandtmpls