Director of state's anti-poverty agency is moved to help others

from The Statesman Journal

His own family faced hard times financially when he was a child

THELMA GUERRERO

Victor Merced knows poverty.

The new executive director of Housing and Community Services grew up on welfare for much of his boyhood in the Bronx.

The oldest of six children, he migrated to the United States from Puerto Rico with his parents during the 1950s as a 1-year-old.

A former second baseman for the Buffalo Bisons in New York, a minor league team affiliated with the Cleveland Indians, Merced recently spoke about his passions, family, hardships, diversity, and professional challenges during a sit-down interview with the Statesman Journal.

Question: When did you become executive director of Housing and Community Services?

Answer: I was appointed by Governor (Ted) Kulongoski in September. I started the job on Sept. 5.

Q: Is it true that you're the first Hispanic to hold this post?

A: Yes.

Q: How do you feel about that?

A: Well, I feel proud. I know my mother appreciates it. She's been on me to send her a picture of the governor and me. I don't think she believes it yet.

Q: Are there other Hispanics who hold similar posts in state government?

A: I believe I'm the only Latino at this executive level right now. I think I'm also the only person of color at this level. But I'm hopeful that will change.

Q: Have you come up against any real challenges in the agency yet?

A: Making sure that we're clear in our communications. This is a fairly complex agency. We operate like a bank. We're the state's housing finance agency, and so we're the ones that put out all the bonds and indentures. We're basically self-financed. We have very little general-fund money. Most of our revenue is self-generated. It's very technical banking language that makes most folks' eyes roll, so it's a challenge that we have in terms of our communications with the public.

Q: Who benefits from this agency?

A: We're considered the state's anti-poverty agency. People we help are low-income people. We provide rental assistance and down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers who are below a certain income level. We also serve the homeless indirectly through grants and resources we provide to community action agencies across the state.

Q: What's the draw to public service?

A: My religious beliefs, instilled in me by my parents, who were devout Roman Catholics. They taught me, and I still believe, that we benefit from helping each other more than we benefit from fighting against each other. My whole approach has been to help as many people as I can, to try to accommodate concerns or needs in the community.

Q: Were your parents a big influence in your life?

A: Yes, both were great role models. My father not only owned a small grocery store, he also had a small moving business. Here was a guy with no skills, who didn't speak English, yet he went out one day and bought a store and later a moving truck. He was very entrepreneurial. He may have been uneducated, but he was a hard worker and that was instilled in us early on.

Q: Did you and your siblings help out around the store?

A: Yes. After my father would finish putting in a 12-hour day at the store, he'd pack us kids in the moving truck so we could help him move a family from one apartment to the next. We'd all help load a family's belongings into our dad's truck and then unload them at that family's new home. We also moved people on weekends.

Q: Did your mother work outside the home?

A: Yes. My mother worked in the garment industry, but she finally quit to take care of us kids. I saw the sacrifices my parents made and I did not want to be poor because, as hard as we worked, we were still poor, I mean, we were a family of eight.

Q: Did your family's poverty have an impact on you?

A: Yes. When the grocery store wasn't doing well, my father sold it. He later had to sell the truck, too. We ended up on public assistance for a long time, so we were very poor. I remember going to school with holes in my shoes, my socks hanging out of the holes, in the cold winter weather in New York City. It was humiliating. I was made fun of. Kids would laugh at us because we'd wear pants that were either worn out or we wore the same pants the entire month. I remember many of our dinners consisted of rice and milk only.

Q: How much of that fuels your passion for public service?

A: Every bit. When you grow up that poor, you don't forget. But my mother always said the way not to be poor was to get an education, so that's what I did.

Q: Are your parents still alive?

A: My mother is. My father died when I was 15 and since I was the oldest, I had to help take care of the family.

Q: How did you do that?

A: Well, when we went on public assistance, my father was humiliated. He vowed to never again be on welfare, so he saved his money and eventually bought himself another grocery store, and we went off welfare. After he died, I helped my mother with the store while also attending high school.