The first act of our new mayor on Jan. 1 should be to fire the man who has made life hell for too many of the New York City Housing Authority’s 600,000 residents.
His name is John Rhea. He’s the Wall Street banker with absolutely zero housing experience whom Michael Bloomberg named to chair NYCHA four years ago.
Both mayoral candidates, Democrat Bill de Blasio and Republican Joe Lhota, have said they’ll fire Rhea.
But it can’t happen soon enough.
This guy has done more in four years to decimate a once-great public housing system than all his predecessors combined.
Take this from someone who grew up in the Cypress Hills Houses in Brooklyn some 50 years ago.
Back then, families like mine saw those cookie-cutter, high-rise projects the federal government erected for the poor as a huge step up from the rat-infested tenements run by private landlords.
At least in public housing, we told our friends, you could always count on having heat and hot water.
Not any more. Not under Rhea.
As the Daily News reported this week, under the Rhea regime, NYCHA forced one family in the East River Houses, Cheryl Brown and her three young children, to survive without hot water for two years.
During that time, the agency, helped by its army of lawyers, kept flouting court orders to fix the problem.
And when a frustrated Housing Court judge finally ordered NYCHA to pay the family a nearly $20,000 fine, Rhea’s aides vowed instead to appeal the ruling.
Not even Rudy Giuliani’s former NYCHA chief Ruben Franco or the first agency chief under Bloomberg, Tino Hernandez, were so callous toward their tenants.
But what should we have expected from a former investment banker at Lehman Brothers? One who was right there when that once-high-flying firm collapsed in 2008 and nearly brought down the world economy.
Bloomberg has lauded Rhea as “the perfect person to lead our efforts to create long-term financial stability [at NYCHA], to ring in a new era of transparency and agency responsiveness.”
Among the first things Rhea did as NYCHA chief was pay a whopping $10 million to a firm where he’d once worked, Boston Consulting, for a report on how to improve the agency’s management practices.
His idea of a “new era of transparency” was to hide the $10 million report from the public.
He then spent tens of millions of dollars on new computer systems to track tenant repairs, housing applications and payments to vendors.
The more he spent on those systems, the worse were the services that tenants received. Backlogs on basic repairs mushroomed from months into years.
You’d think the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars to NYCHA annually, would want to monitor how that money is being spent. But under HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, federal oversight of the New York agency has been a joke. Before he left for his big job in Washington, Donovan happened to have been Bloomberg’s commissioner of housing.
And then there was Rhea’s grand plan for “long-term financial stability” — handing parking lots, basketball courts and community centers in NYCHA projects to real estate developers who would build luxury housing in exchange for long-term leases.
Needless to say, public housing tenants have overwhelmingly condemned Rhea’s attempt to sell off their public spaces. Still, the man keeps pushing forward.
Which is why the next mayor should not waste time. He should fire Rhea on the very first day he takes office.
