‘What the hell am I doing?’
As woes surge, temp NYCHA boss says wife feels he’s ‘nuts’ to stay
The temporary chairman of the city’s troubled Housing Authority says for the time being he’s going to tough it out, even though he sometimes wonders why he took the job in the first place.
Since Stanley Brezenoff started as interim chairman of NYCHA’s board in June, he’s had to deal with a federal consent decree that exposed years of lies and coverups, NYCHA staff accused of sex parties on overtime, and a horde of rats descending on a Bronx development.
“Some mornings I wake up and say, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ and sometimes when I think about it I feel guilty,” Brezenoff said during a sitdown Tuesday with the Daily News Editorial Board in which he revealed he hasn’t given the mayor a date to head for the door.
“So I’m not walking, even though my wife thinks I’m nuts,” he said.
De Blasio announced he was bringing in Brezenoff shortly after Shola Olatoye — his appointee as NYCHA chair — left in April after admitting that she’d falsely certified that the authority was performing all required lead paint inspections in its aging apartments.
He has held a series of high-profile public service jobs for decades, including first deputy mayor under Ed Koch, president of the city’s Health & Hospitals Corp. in the 1980s and then interim CEO of HHC again last year, and executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
He admitted that he’s been taken by surprise by the depth of problems at NYCHA, from its chronic underfunding to a “demoralized staff” to a system of work order repairs that continues to be dysfunctional. He was particularly troubled by the recent revelations by The News that workers allegedly participated in orgies while collecting overtime.
“The place is, in many respects, a mess,” he said. “This is a challenging place, probably tougher than any place I’ve been.”
In the coming weeks, he says, NYCHA will announce a new aggressive effort to track apartment repairs and hold workers and their supervisors accountable through a datadriven Compstat system similar to the NYPD’s.
And the authority plans to dramatically expand a plan to lease NYCHA developments to private managers under a program known as Rental Assistance Demonstration from 15,000 to 26,000 units. Under the program, private managers fix up and maintain the NYCHA buildings and collect rent that’s subsidized by the federal Section 8 housing program.
But as he struggles to cope with the chaos at the agency, Brezenoff still sees some cause for optimism. “I believe I’m starting to have impact on people and pushing a sense that we don’t have to accept defeat as the natural course of business at NYCHA,” he said.