Transformation in the public eye

Nearly 3,000 buildings, crumbling, leaking, and not enough money to renovate them or operate them well. That is what we inherited when I started at the NYC Housing Authority in 2014, as Senior Advisor to the Chair & CEO, newly-appointed by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Change at the scale of New York City public housing—the largest residential landlord in North America with nearly 200,000 apartments that it owns and operates—was about strategically seeding transformation that would take generations to realize. And now, 8 years later, the words on the page of a strategic plan I auhtored (page 87 here) are now 15,000 fully renovated units of public housing based on a community planning process (now called PACT). The change is starting to be realized, incremental as it may be when the scale of it is housing for almost 1/2 million people.

Every step is scrutinized when you’re driving change in government. Every move is reported on. Learning how to challenge the status quo while bearing responsibility to the public, and its most underserved, was the most humbling and amazing experience I ever had.

See here for two examples where I was quoted on proposed development on our strategic plan:

NY Observer: NYCHA to Announce Sites for Mixed Income Development on Public Housing Land In August (July 2015)

Gotham Gazette: De Blasio's Record on NYCHA (Nov 2017)