The Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board was served with a $4.5 million lawsuit by its former CEO Erik Johnson on Monday.
ARHA’s former board fired Johnson in September after it was revealed that he and his family were living in an ARHA property in Old Town. Johnson’s filing alleges that, with the blessing of the previous board, ARHA staff selected a moving company for his family, chose a hotel for them to stay in and renovated the property.
“We initially held off on serving the lawsuit because we anticipated mediating this matter,” Johnson’s attorney Todd Pilot told ALXnow in an email. “However, the new Board recently indicated that it was not interested in mediation. Accordingly, yesterday we served the lawsuit — originally filed in November — on the new ARHA Board, along with interrogatories and requests for production.”
The previous board had told ALXnow that it was unaware that Johnson had been living in a unit on Cook Street.
Following Johnson’s firing, eight members of the nine-seat ARHA Board of Commissioners resigned in October and interim CEO Rickie Maddox was appointed.
“As stated in our lawsuit, Mr. Johnson paid market rate for the property he occupied for less than two months,” Pilot said. “His occupancy of the property was known to everyone at ARHA — it was neither concealed nor considered improper. Mr. Johnson did not misappropriate any funds or property from ARHA.”
City Council then appointed six new board members, with former City Manager Mark Jinks as chair. Within two months, one board member resigned without public explanation. Currently, there are five ARHA commissioners, although dozens of people applied to be appointed to the board.
Pilot said his client was under scrutiny for increasing the collection of overdue rent from ARHA tenants in order to bring the authority into compliance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“HUD requires a collection rate of approximately 85%,” Pilot said. “At the end of the day, HUD oversees ARHA’s operations, and ARHA must be responsive to HUD’s requirements if it is going to continue to thrive. ARHA’s February Board Book reflects a rent collection rate of just 79%. Without meaningful improvement, HUD has the authority to impose penalties or restrictions on ARHA — further compromising its ability to provide housing and services to Alexandria residents and their families.”
At its Monday meeting, ARHA reported that rent collection for January was 79% complete for public housing, 77% complete for its Moderate Rehabilitation (Mod Rehab) program and 86% complete for market affordable properties.
Pilot maintains that ARHA board members made “misrepresentations to the press and to defame Mr. Johnson.”
“Had the truth been told from the outset, neither Mr. Johnson nor ARHA would be in the situation they are in today,” Pilot said.
ARHA owns and operates more than 1,100 public housing properties in Alexandria and administers the Housing Choice Voucher program to more than 1,600 residents in private properties. As of November, ARHA’s properties are currently at 95% occupancy and nearly 38,000 people were on its waiting list for housing.
ALXnow has reached out to ARHA for comment.
Rebuilding ARHA and extending deadlines
ARHA residents have long protested living conditions, mismanaged rent ledgers, wrongful evictions and being overcharged for rent and utilities.
“We have not run away from anything that has taken place,” Maddox said at Monday night’s ARHA Board of Commissioners meeting. “We’re going to hold ourselves accountable. We know there were mistakes.”
ARHA’s board received a preliminary budget on Monday night, released a month later than intended. In December, former ARHA Chief Financial Officer Sheila White told the board that last fall’s government shutdown made it difficult to prepare a budget, and that she would have it ready in January. Instead, it was prepared and presented by consultant Robert Fetrow.
According to Fetrow’s budget, ARHA’s total revenue increased by $3.8 million, from $60.7 million last year to $64.5 million in Fiscal Year 2026. Tenant revenue also increased by $3.5 million and grant revenues increased $3.8 million.
The board will adopt its calendar year budget at its next meeting on Monday, March 23.
“I appreciate your jumping in kind of late in the process to get a budget done,” Jinks told Fetrow. “I would hope that next year we’d be doing a calendar year budget in late fall … So by the time we get to January 1, the January 1 budget is adopted. That’s what most organizations do, and that’s what we should do.”
Maddox, in December, initiated unit-by-unit inspections of all ARHA and its associated properties by a third party inspector. The goal was to complete all inspections by the end of the first quarter of 2026. At Monday night’s meeting, however, ARHA staff said the inspections will now be completed by the end of the second quarter.
Additionally, the search for a full-time CEO has not yet started. Jinks said the CEO search will start when City Council appoints more board members.
“We’re all new and we’re on a learning curve,” Jinks said. “We understand what the needs of the organization are, then we’ll be able to discuss the situation in regards to recruitment, timetable process and input from residents.”
Last September, Legal Services of Northern Virginia sent ARHA a letter stating that its office has been overwhelmed with calls for legal assistance over stepping up its rent collection and evictions.
“ARHA has serious, unresolved accounting and bookkeeping inconsistencies and errors that put public housing residents at risk of eviction,” LSNV wrote. “On September 18, 2024, after transitioning to a new online payment platform, ARHA issued a notice to residents, acknowledging discrepancies in rental ledgers while vowing to take full responsibility and have these issues resolved by October 2024. To our knowledge, a complete review of ARHA public housing ledgers to ensure accuracy was not implemented as we have continued to see court filings with errors and inaccurate rental balances, putting vulnerable tenants at unnecessary risk of eviction.”
In November, ARHA temporarily halted eviction proceedings against its tenants.
At the time, Jinks said the pause was “because of questions of process raised by tenant advocates as well as city staff.”
Lennin Lopez, a program operations analyst for ARHA, said the housing authority started using new software in early 2024 to process all new annual residential recertifications. Lopez said that the program confused residential profiles living at ARHA sites and properties managed by private landlords with federal rental voucher-holding households.
He also said a former ARHA property director would hold onto recertification packets belonging to families for weeks at a time, creating a large backlog of cases.
“It took six months to fix, because we had to go through each individual family to make sure it was billing correctly,” Lopez said. “The ledgers were messed up. Landlords were not getting paid because of the backlog that was created for a problem that didn’t need fixing, that was created, essentially.”
