Managing organizational change: The experience of the District of Columbia Public Housing Authority

For nearly two decades, the agency responsible for providing public housing in the District of Columbia was ranked by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as the worst performing public housing agency in the country, and maintained this ranking through 1995. Three years later, in 1998, it was removed from this list of poorly performing public housing authorities altogether. The intervening factor was the imposition of a court-appointed receivership, with extraordinary powers to conduct wide-ranging organization and operational reforms. This case study investigates how the District of Columbia's Public Housing Authority reformed so rapidly, compares the methods to criteria for organizational change management, and determines if the lessons learned from this experience provide any lessons for other troubled public agencies and managers of organizational reform.