Official: Embattled NYC housing chairwoman stepping down

The embattled chairwoman of New York City’s public housing authority is quitting, leaving a system she struggled to revitalize after years of financial neglect and decrepit conditions.

Chairwoman Shola Olatoye’s resignation was confirmed by the office of Public Advocate Letitia James, who in November called for Olatoye to step down over a revelation she falsely certified to the federal government that subordinates conducted mandated lead-paint inspections.

Although the projects’ woes long predate Olatoye’s tenure — and even her boss Mayor Bill de Blasio’s election — the authority has been under renewed scrutiny since the lead-paint scandal and another disclosure, by the City Council this year, that 80 percent of the New York City Housing Authority’s 400,000 tenants lost heat or hot water during the recent heating season.

De Blasio, a second-term Democrat, for months dismissed calls for Olatoye’s ouster, tweeting in November that the demands were “a cheap stunt” and that she “isn’t going anywhere.”

The lead-paint issue is being probed by federal and local investigators.

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday night.

Oyeshola “Shola” Olatoye, an alumna of Wesleyan University with a master’s in public administration from New York University, became chairwoman and chief executive in 2014. She had sought to modernize NYCHA’s aging apartment buildings, remediate mold, exterminate vermin and repair leaky roofs, with varying success.

In the past few weeks, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed an executive order imposing a state-controlled monitor for the authority’s finances, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development decreed that the city seek permission to spend any federal funds on the authority.

Since taking office, de Blasio has increased the city’s budget for the authority — for decades beset by disinvestment at all levels of government — but has said that it’s fiscally impossible for the city to fully fund the needs of the projects, an amount last week he pegged at “$20 billion-plus.”

According to Politico New York, de Blasio plans to name Stan Brezenoff as successor. Brezenoff has decades of experience managing municipal government, including jobs as a deputy mayor and others overseeing the Port Authority and the city’s public hospital system — itself in financial extremis.

On Thursday, de Blasio went to the Queensbridge projects, the biggest such complex in the city and the country, to tout the authority’s progress.

Olatoye wasn’t there.

Asked where she was, de Blasio said she was vacationing with her children.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the New York City Housing Authority.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.