Mayor Eric Adams began putting his stamp on the New York City Housing Authority Thursday — by stamping out its CEO.
Thursday, Adams booted Gregory Russ, a de Blasio administration holdover, relegating him to chairman of NYCHA’s board. The mayor cited a decision to split the roles of chair and CEO, both of which Russ had previously held, but the move was clearly about putting his own person in charge of the nation’s largest public housing authority.
The agency’s general counsel, Lisa Bova-Hiatt, will serve as interim CEO while Adams searches for a permanent head.
The New York Post reported that the decision to divvy up the positions dates back to June when the board of directors voted on the matter.
But the move also follows a major flub by the authority this month.
Days after NYCHA said it had found arsenic in the tap water at the East Village’s Jacob Riis Houses, the authority walked back the findings, saying the firm that did the tests had contaminated the samples. Further testing showed arsenic levels in the water were well below federal limits, Gothamist reported.
It was the latest in a long-running series of screwups by the embattled housing agency, one that further strained whatever trust its approximately 600,000 tenants have for the city’s largest landlord. Past missteps have included falsely claiming to have checked thousands of apartments for lead hazards, lengthy heating system breakdowns, rodent and mold infestations, broken locks and elevators, and playgrounds closed for years.
On the heels of the testing mistake, NBC New York reported that three dozen NYCHA residents plan to file a $10 million lawsuit against the housing authority.
Adams appeared to leverage the error as cause for a changing of the guard.
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“We cannot wait any longer to make transformational changes so NYCHA can provide safe, high-quality homes for New Yorkers,” Adams said in a statement, elaborating that he is “determined” to “identify the right leaders and the right structure for NYCHA to deliver on our promises to public housing residents.”
Russ, however, arguably accomplished more than any of his many recent predecessors and in a relatively short amount of time, notably by spearheading a Public Housing Preservation Trust signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in June. The move is set to unlock billions of dollars in federal funding for repairs and investments in the city’s public housing.
Russ, who was appointed by Bill de Blasio effective August 2019, also greatly expanded a program to switch Housing Authority developments from federal Section 9 rent subsidies to more reliable Section 8, allowing it to bring in private management agencies to fix up developments by borrowing against future rent revenue.
Russ had been running Minneapolis’ public housing system and previously worked in its Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Cambridge. He also held posts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration.
NYCHA has been estimated to need more than $40 billion to bring all of its 277 developments up to a state of decent repair.