The hole truth is: The place was a dump

FROM A CERTAIN angle in her living room, Barbara Gallagher can see a bedroom on the second floor through a hole in the ceiling.

The hole, about 18 inches wide, has been there for two months, the product of one of several leaks that have plagued her Philadelphia Housing Authority-owned home in Francisville.

On Wednesday, as Gallagher, 49, was patting the living-room ceiling with a rag to soak some of the water leaking from a toilet above, another piece of the ceiling tumbled down.

That day, she was notified that PHA was moving her out of the house on Cambridge Street near 20th Street - where she has lived since she was 7 - because it's unsafe.

The home is one of 136 owned by PHA throughout the city that are slated for renovation. And it may be one of the harshest examples of the difficulty that the housing authority has in keeping its older stock of homes in livable condition.

When it rains, water leaks into one bedroom, although Gallagher's daughter says that the roof was fixed a year ago. Water also has leaked from a lighting fixture in the kitchen - a potential fire hazard.

A couple of steps away, there's a hole in a wall behind the back door. The wall there is so weak that when pushed, it caves in. The second-floor toilet, surrounded by broken tile, rocks when someone sits on it. The wooden subfloor, visible from the hole in the living room, has rotted from the leaks.

Gallagher's daughter, Neoma, 23, said that she called PHA maintenance in June about the first hole and the leaky toilet and a leaky tub. Someone came to look at the hole but it was never fixed, she said. Wednesday morning she called again, this time about the second missing chunk of ceiling.

"We should have been moved [sooner]," Neoma said.

PHA Executive Director Carl Greene said that the family's safety is the highest priority.

"We need to move them to a higher quality, brand-new unit," he said. "Here's an opportunity to give them a better home."

PHA spokesman Kirk Dorn acknowledged that the agency could have arranged to move the Gallaghers earlier.

"I can plead guilty that maybe we didn't do it as quickly, as soon as we should have, but we are being responsive to the situation," Dorn said.

"PHA some years ago was falling behind on service orders, but we've got additional funding and now we're catching up."

A carpenter subcontracted by PHA - who asked not to be identified, for fear of being fired - said that when he began working with PHA, in 2008, he and others were working on service-request slips from as far back as 2004.

He said that they have caught up with the service requests, adding that the oldest slips date to March.

"They are really short-staffed and we're busting our humps to keep up and maintain," he said.

A service-order record for Gallagher's home shows that from 2005 to 2008 it took from a month to 13 months after an order was placed for repairs, including carpentry and plumbing, to be completed. For the last two years, the turnaround rate improved to between a day and a month.

Dorn said that PHA inspects its units annually and that some units receive an additional inspection, but that repairs for some homes became too costly, requiring complete renovation.

The carpenter said that judging from the condition of the home, it would have taken at least a year for it to have become that damaged.

"That house is really [run] down," he said, calling Gallagher's house the worst he has seen on the job. "I'm surprised they let the house go that far. Seeing someone live like that is unacceptable. You expect to see something like that on TV."

Greene said that a quality-control team was established to oversee service orders, which are entered into a central computer system. In addition, the maintenance team operates seven days a week.

Many of the 136 homes scheduled for renovation were turned over by the federal government to PHA in the 1960s and some were never remodeled, Greene said.

He said that families would have an opportunity to return once renovations are complete, as long as their family composition warrants that unit.

After she was told that she had to move, Gallagher broke down in tears in front of her two daughters, brothers and two nephews, ages 3 and 5.

The home, though depressingly deteriorated, is the only home Gallagher knows. She remembers playing dodge ball with her brothers on the block, and when her mother painted Tic Tac Toe and Hopscotch on the sidewalk. She said that she had to be on the steps by 7 p.m., inside the house by 8.

Gallagher raised her daughters and now cares for her nephews in the house, she said.

"She's been here so long, she [doesn't] want a new environment," daughter Neoma said.

"Anything is better than this. I'd rather be safe than sorry. You could be walking down the steps and the steps collapse."

PHA has shown the family three homes for relocation - one in South Philly and another near Barbara Gallagher's 17-year-old daughter's high school. PHA hopes that the family will make a decision this week.