A Bizarre NYCHA Hire

It’s not the timing, it’s the choice: City Housing Authority Chairman Stanley Brezenoff tapped a total insider to be NYCHA’s new compliance chief.

Critics such as Bronx City Councilman Ritchie Torres complained that Brezenoff didn’t run the pick by the federal monitor — but there is no monitor yet. The consent decree that will create the position hasn’t even been finalized, and then it’ll take time to fill the job.

Thing is, as was described in detail by the federal complaint that prompted the decree, NYCHA’s culture has been all about the reverse of complying with federal law. So much so that it literally had a detailed handbook for how best to deceive individual federal inspectors.

Surely it’s best to start changing that culture ASAP. But Vilma Huertas-Cymbrowitz is far from the obvious woman to be leading that change. As a veteran NYCHA insider, she’s been part of the agency’s culture of dysfunction and dissembling for decades.

She’s an insider in local politics, too: Then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg apparently named her as NYCHA board secretary as a political concession to Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez (long before scandal ended his career).

Huertas-Cymbrowitz is married to the chairman of the Assembly Housing Committee, Steven Cymbrowitz. And she succeeded him as head of NYCHA’s intergovernmental relations unit in 2000 — when he replaced his first wife in the Assembly after her death.

Torres is clearly on-point when he argues that hiring a real reformer as chief compliance officer would “serve as a powerful catalyst for change within the agency.”

Huertas-Cymbrowitz may be technically qualified for the $200,000-a-year post of executive vice president for compliance, but “reformer” is no part of her résumé.

Time and again, New Yorkers have been burned after the de Blasio administration filled a key job with a political hack. Will the mayor ever learn?