Monica Yant Kinney: Street upstages Nutter in PHA circus

John Street wore a cotton-candy-pink tie and matching pocket square to Thursday's meeting of the Philadelphia Housing Authority board, looking like a man dressed to impress.

The session started late and lasted only a few minutes, not that Chairman Street had any intention of calling it a day. He's having way too much fun being back onstage.

The former mayor, so often described as "prickly," seems energized, almost giddy, in his latest gig: ringmaster of the Cirque du PHA, starring exiled housing czar Carl Greene as a crafty contortionist and Mayor Nutter as a mime.

Perhaps you, too, noticed that it's Street, not Nutter, directing the city's response to the saga, which began with Greene's facing foreclosure on his $615,000 townhouse and morphed into sordid tales of secret sexual-harassment settlements and publicly funded spying.

Greene remains under medical care in Maryland. Last week, he sued formerly fawning PHA board members, saying that as he reads his contract, he's allowed to sexually harass whomever he wants.

"Even assuming these allegations could be proven true (which they cannot)," his federal lawsuit contends, "they cannot form the basis for terminating Mr. Greene."

My dealings with Street in City Hall generally involved combative news conferences or indecipherable policy briefings. Mayor Snuggle Puppy he was not. I once covered a public meeting set up in his honor, only to watch Street storm out of a packed Kensington church because he felt disrespected.

Fast-forward a decade, and Street is sounding like a protective father standing up for women allegedly terrorized by Greene at work.

"He could have built a billion houses," Street declared, "but if he sexually harassed one woman on his staff, he's gone."

Overnight, Street turned himself into the go-to confidant for previously petrified PHA employees, Philly's own unlicensed Dr. Phil.

"There are other women who, after years of holding this stuff in, are saying, 'It happened to me,' " Street marveled. "If a woman wants to come to talk to us about this, I would be very supportive. In fact, I would encourage it."

The Cirque du PHA took a dramatic turn when Street summoned reporters on short notice to a sidewalk smackdown where he accused Greene of a "full-blown cover-up" and lamented that the board had "ceded too much power to him."

The former mayor has cut such a familiar figure of late, I strained to recall what the current mayor has been up to. Try, if you can, to remember the last time the Nutter administration made news.

Fining a church for ringing its historic bell? Impounding cupcake trucks? Billing bloggers? Hardly headlines to put in the scrapbook.

The one fight Nutter picked with gusto - gutting the costly, controversial Deferred Retirement Option Program - he'll likely lose.

Though the mayor could replace PHA board member Jannie Blackwell at any moment, he has yet to wave that wand. Nutter did send Street a nastygram implying that Greene had duped the PHA board. But Street dismissed his critic like a child - "he's just talking" - and Nutter let it go.

Many excuse Nutter his virtual silence on the PHA melee, noting that he didn't hire Greene and can't fire him. Nutter isn't on the board and Philly doesn't fund the PHA, so what's a mayor to do?

Act the part, that's what. PHA controls the home lives of 81,000 of Nutter's most vulnerable constituents. Surely he could speak up and insert himself in their behalf.

I secretly hoped Nutter would appear at last week's PHA board meeting to vent and vamp as a concerned citizen. Instead, he sent a press aide who sat in the corner.

That seemed fine by the Ringmaster. The less Nutter noses around this mess, the more Street's star can shine.