<Begin Segment 11>

BS: Sharon Maeda asked me to write her a letter 'cause she was applying for a job at HUD as assistant to the assistant secretary for public affairs. So I wrote Sharon a nice letter, and couple weeks later I get a call from the assistant secretary. "Who's this Sharon Maeda and is good," and all that, and I give her high marks. Sharon's appointed, right? Couple of months after that I get a call -- no, PDA gets a call from Washington. Since we're in the housing business, can we send six resumes to D.C. of people that we think, housing advocates send resumes of directors of these housing organizations to D.C., 'cause they want to pick one of those, someone from the Northwest as regional administrator out here. So my staff calls around, all the city organizations, gets six resumes, but sends mine along with it. Seven.

TI: And did you know that your staff --

BS: No, I was, I wasn't even in the office then. And for a couple days I was off or something. They sent it out, I came back, and they said, we sent your resume along with the, we thought it'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, I says, "You want to see me leave or something?" Anyway, it went. A week later I get a call. "Mr. Santos, the secretary would like to talk to you." Everybody has a secretary. I said, yeah, big deal.

TI: No, it was the secretary. [Laughs]

BS: The secretary, Secretary Cisneros, Henry Cisneros. And I said, oh, okay. And I didn't really know what HUD was about. We'd go down to HUD and we'd fill out applications and write proposals, and we'd get funds for the housing stuff, but I didn't know, really didn't know all the programs. For the first time in my life I get some manuals of HUD programs and try to study. At that time HUD had twenty, two hundred programs under Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I'm saying, oh shit, this is impossible. In the airplane to D.C. I'm studying. I get up at four o'clock in the morning for an eleven o'clock meeting with Cisneros because I got to study 'cause I want, 'cause he's gonna grill me on what I know about HUD. So I got to the HUD office, eleven o'clock appointment, and I say, hi, my name is Bob Santos. I come from Seattle, was invited to -- she says, "Oh yes, Mr. Santos, but could you wait in the waiting room 'cause the Secretary is over at the White House right now in a meeting with the President." And I do one of these things [pulls out watch], I said yeah, I said, "Oh sure, I could wait around." I come six thousand miles, whatever it is, right, so I'm making this big roll. And so that's eleven o'clock. Twelve o'clock appointment comes in. People Magazine. Henry is being nominated as one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. You know that, that issue that they come out? So April 1994, he's on the page before centerfold. He made it, fifty most beautiful people in the world. So they come in and I stand up, and they said, no, we're waiting for Henry. So Henry comes in late. "I'm sorry, Mr. Santos." I said, "You can call me Uncle Bob." "Uncle Bob, I'm sorry. I was over at the White House." I said, "I heard." And he said, "I really wanted to talk to you, but we only have a few minutes, so could you sit down?" And I'm thinking, of all the two hundred programs HUD has, there's only three I really know, so I hope he asks me questions on these three programs, FHA, public housing, and block grant. I know them. I didn't know the hundred ninety-seven other programs. So we sit down, he looks at me and says, "Bob, would you work for me?" And I'm thinking, "I thought I was here for an interview. He's offering me the job." So I started telling him the three programs that I knew about HUD. He said, he says, you don't have to worry about that. He says, "The only thing you have to worry about is we have, your name has to go before a couple of committees, IRS, and the FBI." I said, oh shit. There goes that job, the FBI file. Anyway, said, "You don't have answer me right now, but let me know within the next week whether you're... you're the guy I want. You're the top of the list."

So I come home, tell Sharon Tomiko, and she says, "It's up to you." So I go down to the HUD office, just to check it out. And I asked the secretary, I said, "Can I look in that room?" It's the empty office where the regional administrator would be. And this is the old federal office building, so I go and peek in the office, and here is this real wood furniture. We come from the nonprofit with fold down metal chairs and these kind of tables, and at the PDA I was in an office that didn't have any windows that was next to the boiler. And so I see all these windows, American flag, real wood furniture. I walk in, open up this door, and this big old conference room with matching, matching fluffy chairs, big long conference table. I go around, I open this other door and it's, I said, "It's a bathroom." He says, "Yeah, that's the executive washroom." I says, "You mean the person gets his own bathroom?" I'm thinking, I'm gonna take this job. I could deal with this kind of stuff. And so I told Sharon, I'm really leaning towards it, and she said, "Don't forget now, you'd be, you'd be moving out of your comfort zone to go into a bureaucracy. Is that what you really want?" And I'm thinking, I could sacrifice for a term, or two years, if Clinton gets reelected. And I really asked, I said, "What's the pay? What's the salary?" And when they told me, three times more than I was making, that sort of, I said I could sacrifice. So I took the job, and it was a big deal. The deputy secretary, Ron Sims's position, that guy came into town. A guy named Terry, I forgot who it was, but he swore me in. And I go to the new office, and I have five hundred people in four states working for me. I'm in charge of the HUD office in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. And I have people in all these offices, and the first two weeks I travel all, someone picks me up from the office, brings me to the airport, someone picks me up on the other side, brings me to the hotel, then they pick me up and bring me to the HUD office, and that's in every city people are picking you up, 'cause you're at this level. All of a sudden you're the spokesperson for this, for the cabinet secretary for the region. So I'm thinking I'm a big shot. And I'm sitting here and I'm going off to all these places and I'm doing groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings and kissing babies and all that stuff, and I'm thinking, jeez, anybody can do this. I mean, it's a patronage job. Usually, when you get a job like that you've raised a lot of money for the campaign, the presidential campaign. And I didn't. I didn't raise any money. I maybe sent a, two fifty dollar checks to the Clinton campaign, but it wasn't a patronage thing for me. It was, I think they were, they needed an Asian. They had African Americans -- there are ten regions, ten regional administrators -- they had African Americans, Latinos, women, they had a Native American from Colorado, and they were looking for an Asian, so I fit. So when my name went in, actually, Henry says, "Who is this guy?" to Sharon, who is working there, right, Sharon Maeda. She said, "Oh, that's Uncle Bob," so that's, that really got me in. So I'm sitting there with all this power and all this influence, and I'm thinking, how do you use it? How do I, how will I make my presence here felt in the community?

So I said, we got a lot of homeless people out there. How much money does HUD allocate to the state for homeless programs? Boom, "Twenty-six million a year, Mr. Santos, and it goes from the state to the cities to the nonprofits that serve the homeless people." I said, "But there's still homeless people on the street. I walk here every morning and at lunchtime there's, along the waterfront and all that." So I said, "Why don't we, why don't we open up the federal building as a homeless shelter? We have light, we have heat, we have bathrooms, we have showers, and it's a public facility. It's owned by the people. It closes at seven o'clock and nothing happening; we could open up the doors for the homeless people and no one would know." "Oh, Mr. Santos, we can't do that. We have other government offices in the old federal building and we have the neighbors that we have to deal with." And so driving home that night I said, well, I'm not gonna give up. You come from the community, you're always hustling, and I'm gonna use that kind of strategy with the bureaucracy. So I called up Jay Pierson, my counterpart at GSA. They're the landlords of all the HUD, all the federal buildings. I said, "Jay, what if you and I get together and open up the federal building as a homeless shelter?" And he went down the litany. "We can't do that, Bob. We have tenants in the building. Oklahoma City, the bombing at Oklahoma City happened. We just can't do that. It's just too much." And I said, "Jay, come over and let's, check out the building and let's find a place." He came over. We found a, we found a spot on the lower level that was next to the dock. It was a receiving area, and it was open, and Jay said, "Bob, what about this?" I said, we could do that. We could put up these mattresses out there for, we could house at least twenty people. And what we did was we opened up the only, first and only federal homeless shelter, homeless shelter in any federal office building in the country. Never been done before 'cause most people in our position don't think to, think that low, right, to worry about homeless people. So Jay and I opened it up, and it was the same floor access to the bathrooms and the showers, and the folks from the homeless community would come in at eight o'clock. All the federal office workers were out by then. I think it was nine o'clock we came in, and all the federal office workers were out. They could sleep overnight until 5:30, they're awakened and they're out the door at six. No one in the building ever saw a homeless person in that building, so after six months of the operation, other agencies in the building says, "Bob, when are we gonna have this so-called homeless shelter?" I said, "We've been running it for six months and it hasn't impacted us at all." So we were able to keep that going until 9/11. Then they closed up all federal facilities for that type of activity. But it's something that we always get a kick out because it's so easy to think of something like that. All public buildings, school buildings, office buildings, they're owned by the public, and why are they only used eight to ten hours a day, you know? And so I got that sort of in my mind to make stuff different.

TI: That's a great story.

BS: And the other one was migrant, migrant farm worker housing was not part of the HUD program. It was, if you, if you're gonna build housing for migrant workers, that's in the Department of Agriculture responsibility because they work with the farm owners. So I said, well, it's not working. Too many people are, were living in tents and cars on the riverbanks of the Columbia River. So I petitioned the deputy secretary at that time, I said, "Saul Ramirez, I'm gonna go to these meetings in Central Washington with the migrant worker issue and I want to put something on the table." And this is another thing I said I'm just gonna, just try. So he says, "Okay, Bob, I can give you two hundred fifty thousand to put on the table." I said cool, and so I go to these meetings and we're talking about housing migrant workers during the harvest season, and the money goes through the HUD system and it gets stopped at a, at a senate committee in New York. That money gets stopped by a guy named Senator D'Amato from New York, who's no longer senator, but it was stopped at his committee. And so they called me and said, "Bob, we can't get that money." I said, "That's cool, I'll get it somewhere else." So I find out that Gary Locke has not allocated all his money, HUD money to the communities yet. It's still, so we recaptured seven hundred thousand and we worked with a mayor in Mattawa, Washington, and she said she'd allow us several acres out there, and we worked with a company that donated twenty-three forty foot cargo containers that go on the ships. They're well insulated and all that, so twenty-three of them were sent to Yakima. We had a company that used prison labor, the bikers, liked to work with machines and all that kind of, tools and stuff, they retrofitted the containers, and we built twenty-three containers for twenty-three families of migrant workers that were living off the riverbanks then and moved them into housing. So these are other creative kinds of things that you can do when you have to work in the community. You had to be innovative and using what's ever available out there, so I had fun when I worked at HUD, and the staff never had so much fun. They work in cylinders, and when they find out this crazy Filipino has all these ideas they put extra effort there to help, to help me and our staff pull off these ideas.

TI: Because you're actually helping real people with their issues.

BS: Yeah, that was really a lot of fun.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.