Resignation done ‘for my family,’ says NYC housing boss
Shola Olatoye, the chairwoman of the New York City Housing Authority, said Tuesday that she was resigning at “an important time for my family, for me personally” — not because of scandals over false lead-paint inspections and failing boilers or looming oversight by the state and federal government.
Speaking at the Ocean Bay Bayside projects in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, Olatoye said Mayor Bill de Blasio had never sought her resignation — and in the past, when she asked him whether he wanted her to go, de Blasio said, “I said no.”
She called her decision to resign, which will take effect at the end of April, “bittersweet,” citing safer projects, repair times cut by 70 percent and other improvements.
“Yes, we have identified some unacceptable shortcomings in our operations. For residents to be uncertain about possible lead paint hazards in their homes or unable to stay warm on the coldest days of winter, it unnerves me that we have failed here. It is a sign, though, of the real struggles that NYCHA faces.”
She will be succeeded by Stanley Brezenoff, a veteran hand whom de Blasio named interim chairman Tuesday. Brezenoff will not start the job until June 1, said mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips.
A handful of dissatisfied NYCHA tenants heckled and laughed during Tuesday’s news conference, at one point dismissing, with a barnyard expletive, Olatoye’s defense of heat and hot water outages.
NYCHA’s woes predate Olatoye’s tenure but she has been under intense scrutiny since the lead-paint scandal late last year and the disclosure this year that 80 percent of the 400,000 tenants lost heat or hot water during the recent heating season.
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is probing NYCHA’s housing conditions.
Asked about the lead-paint scandal — in which Olatoye falsely certified that apartments had been tested for lead paint — de Blasio criticized those who obsess over “whether a form was filled out a certain way.”
Olatoye said, “I regret not knowing sooner” that subordinates had given her wrong information that the inspections had been completed.
On Tuesday, the mayor said he didn’t want to disclose when Olatoye told him she wanted to resign or provide other details.
De Blasio’s first deputy, Dean Fuleihan, defended Olatoye’s tenure earlier Tuesday, saying she inherited a troubled housing authority and still managed to make improvements since she assumed the post in 2014.
“I’m not going to accept that this was a failed four years,” Fuleihan said at a breakfast forum sponsored by Crain’s New York, a business newspaper.
“Under Shola’s leadership, NYCHA for the first time was actually running a balanced budget. There were clearly improvements under this leadership in terms of safety, repairs happening at a faster pace,” he said. “There are improvements that we take credit for that she deserves credit for.”
Despite the authority’s needs pushing $20 billion — a result of years of disinvestment by all levels of government — Olatoye had sought to modernize the authority’s aging apartment buildings, remediate mold, exterminate vermin and repair leaky roofs, with varying success.
In early April, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed an executive order imposing a monitor on NYCHA’s use of state resources, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said the city would be required to seek permission before tapping any federal funds.
Brezenoff, the incoming NYCHA boss, has decades of experience in managing municipal bureaucracies, including as a deputy mayor, overseeing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the city’s public hospital system — itself in financial extremes.
Said de Blasio: “I want to say thank you to Shola, because it was not an easy mission and it was certainly a thankless mission — but it was a crucial mission.”
Brezenoff, asked what hope he could give to frustrated tenants, said NYCHA would be “focused and dedicated as it has been to make the best use of available resources to solve problems.”
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
Out East with Doug Geed: Wine harvests, a fish market, baked treats and poinsettias NewsdayTV's Doug Geed visits two wineries and a fish market, and then it's time for holiday cheer, with a visit to a bakery and poinsettia greenhouses.
Out East with Doug Geed: Wine harvests, a fish market, baked treats and poinsettias NewsdayTV's Doug Geed visits two wineries and a fish market, and then it's time for holiday cheer, with a visit to a bakery and poinsettia greenhouses.
