The oversized ceremonial scissors broke, but the Durham Housing Authority still managed to cut the ribbon on a made-over Edgemont Elms apartment complex last week.

“It has what you call curb appeal,” Mayor Bill Bell said. “We’re very pleased with what the Durham Housing Authority is doing.”

Edgemont Elms, on Angier Avenue in East Durham, was a $2.4-million renovation for a 57-unit apartment complex opened in 1989 but, like most of the Housing Authority’s apartments, sorely needing maintenance and repairs.

“It’s just one of many we have in the pipeline,” said executive director Dallas Parks. “We’re a stickler for quality, and we want to make sure we get the biggest bang for our buck.”

Just three years ago, the DHA was in such internal disarray it needed federal approval to spend its money. On a 100-point scale, Housing and Urban Development graded its performance somewhere under 50, Parks said.

Though its board of commissioners is appointed by the city and Durham County, the Durham Housing Authority is an agency unto itself. It was created in 1949 to receive and manage federal money appropriated through low-cost housing programs. DHA administers Section 8 vouchers and buys, builds and operates housing of its own.

According to Durham County tax records, the Housing Authority, Development Ventures and their affiliated LLCs own more than 250 properties, including the apartment complexes, duplexes, single-family houses and vacant lots.

The recent troubles began in 2003, when investigators found executive director James Tabron had misused an agency credit card. Federal probes found more than $12 million in improper expenditures and loans. In 2005, after auditors found so much incorrect in and missing from DHA records they could not guarantee an accurate assessment, most of the senior staff was fired.

More mismanaging came to light in 2008, leading HUD to declare Durham Housing a “troubled” agency and take away most of its spending authority. Another management turnover brought Parks to Durham in 2010.

Just more than a year later, HUD lifted its restrictions, auditors gave DHA a clean bill of health, and now the grade is almost “high performing,” Parks said. Confidence in DHA has reached the point that the agency has big plans, and money to pay for some of them.

“Money is tight,” he said, “(but) we’re scraping around.”

• The N.C. Housing Finance Agency has granted $600,000 worth of federal tax credits for DHA to renovate its 20-year-old Preiss-Steele Place in northern Durham.

• HUD has granted $368,000 cash and Self-Help is making a $600,000 loan toward the Housing Authority’s $2.7-million Goley Point. The 20-unit project in East Durham includes 12 apartments designated for formerly homeless residents and two single-family homes for rent-to-buy occupants.

• Parks is waiting to hear from Washington on a $300,000 HUD grant for planning uplift projects in the McDougald Terrace neighborhood near N.C. Central University – the entire area from the Durham Freeway south to Lincoln Street and from Roxboro Street east to Bacon. If HUD approves, the city, Durham Public Schools and some other agencies have pledged enough to raise the total over $1 million.

“The project will take years, but we want to get started,” he said. He’s also applied for money to rehabilitate the 224-apartment complex on Morreene Road “so that we will be able to sustain them over the next 20 to 25 years.”

DHA owns 14 apartment “communities,” and they all “need some type of renovation or redevelopment, reconstruction,” Parks said.

Edgemont Elms makes one down, and resident Cynthia Quick is happy about it.

“I’m an original Edgemont Elm,” she said, having moved in just after the apartments opened 23 years ago. “I just love being here. ... It’s a community.

“I could have been a homeowner,” Quick said, “but when you get so comfortable and just so secure, you really don’t think about what you could be, you just want to stay where you’re at.”