HomeGeneral Voice of Late Paul Olatoye's legacy: Mayor de Blasio Appoints Leadership at Major Housing Agencies,
Voice of Late Paul Olatoye's legacy: Mayor de Blasio Appoints Leadership at Major Housing Agencies,
Written by Okemesi Ilu Agan
Apr 04, 2014 at 11:42 AM
Shola Olatoye appointed NYCHA Chair, Cecil House to serve as NYCHA
General Manager, Vicki Been to head HPD, Gary D. Rodney to direct HDC
Hear the voice
NEW YORK-Mayor Bill de Blasio today announced four key
appointments to his administration, pledging to expand access to
affordable housing and upgrade the city's aging public housing stock.
The mayor laid out a range of strategies to reach those goals, including
launching inclusive housing programs that serve both low-income New
Yorkers and the middle class, developing innovative strategies to
leverage new capital to spur housing production and preservation, and
working across city agencies to maximize every opportunity to address
the affordability issues facing New Yorkers.
The mayor named
Shola Olatoye as chair of the New York City Housing Authority, with
Cecil House serving as the authority's general manager. The mayor also
appointed Vicki Been as the commissioner of the Department of Housing
Preservation and Development, and Gary D. Rodney as president of the
Housing Development Corporation.
The administration is working
toward a goal of building and preserving 200,000 units of affordable
housing over the next decade and addressing longstanding health and
safety repair issues affecting the city's more than 400,000 housing
authority tenants.
"We are going to take a new approach to this
crisis that holds nothing back. From doing more to protect tenants in
troubled buildings, to innovating new partnerships with the private
sector, to forging a new relationship with our NYCHA communities, every
decision we make will focus on maximizing the affordability of our
neighborhoods. These agencies are going to work together as a collective
to lift up families and make this one city-where everyone rises
together," said Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Mayor de Blasio has
committed to fundamentally changing the city's relationship with its
public housing tenants. NYCHA is the nation's largest public housing
authority, and its aging buildings are in dire need of health and safety
repairs, and upgrades to make them more resilient.
Leading
those efforts will be Shola Olatoye, an experienced coalition builder
with an extensive background leading community-based development across
the five boroughs. Olatoye will focus on strategic goals like expanding
employment opportunities for NYCHA residents, developing plans to
retrofit buildings, and more fully supporting tenants-including the 40
percent of residents over the age of 62.
Olatoye will be joined
by Cecil House, who will continue to serve as the New York City Housing
Authority's general manager, a position he has held for the past 18
months. House will focus on continuing to reduce repair wait times and
improving the resiliency of buildings to severe weather.
"I am
honored to be asked by the mayor to run New York City's Housing
Authority. Everything we do will be focused on improving the quality of
life for our tenants, especially protecting their safety. This is an
enormous opportunity. Public housing helped people in my family. I want
it to do the same in the future for others," said incoming NYCHA Chair Shola Olatoye.
"I
cannot wait to work with Shola and this administration to make New
Yorkers proud of their public housing again. We've never had a
leadership this committed to making that happen, and to treating our
NYCHA tenants with the same respect as every other tenant in this city.
We are ready to roll up our sleeves, get to work, and change the way we
do business," said NYCHA General Manager Cecil House.
As
commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development,
Vicki Been will be charged with protecting tenants, rehabilitating
troubled buildings, and finding new opportunities to create affordable
apartments. Been is the Director of NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate
and Urban Policy, and is a national leader on land use, urban policy and
affordable housing. Most recently, she has worked extensively assessing
the impact of Superstorm Sandy on housing and neighborhoods.
"We're
going to take a much more aggressive approach to protecting and
building affordable apartments that responds to the crisis we're in.
From apartments approaching the end of their subsidy to homes lost to
Superstorm Sandy, we need faster and more innovative strategies that
seize every opportunity to keep apartments affordable and accelerate the
pace of bringing new ones online," said incoming HPD Commissioner Vicki Been.
As
president of the Housing Development Corporation-the city's housing
finance arm-Gary D. Rodney will play a critical role in the preservation
and creation of affordable apartments. Rodney is currently Executive
Vice President for Development of Omni New York LLC, where he financed
community-based affordable housing projects that rehabilitated some of
the most distressed buildings across the five boroughs.
"This
work is truly a collaborative effort that includes housing advocates,
community groups, developers, lenders, and an administration committed
to long lasting affordable housing. We are going to continue to foster
existing partnerships and aggressively seek out new ones to put more
shovels in the ground, rehabilitate more distressed buildings, and
really push the mayor's affordable housing plan. Most importantly, we
will continue to find creative ways to finance the best quality housing
that will be affordable to all New Yorkers," said incoming HDC President Gary D. Rodney.
About Shola Olatoye: Shola
Olatoye comes to the de Blasio administration from an exceptional
career in community development finance, housing advocacy and real
estate.
Throughout her entire career, Olatoye has been an agent
of change and manager of complex and large collaborations, effecting
urban neighborhood revitalization. Olatoye has a wealth of experience in
both the private and public sectors, and a unique ability to leverage
both to create public-private partnerships aimed toward preserving and
creating affordable housing and communities. Most recently, Olatoye was
Vice President and New York Market Leader for Enterprise Community
Partners, a national nonprofit that has helped build or preserve more
than 44,000 affordable homes for lower-income New Yorkers and invested
more than $2.5 billion in and around the city. At Enterprise, Olatoye
has overseen a cross-functional team that works with community partners,
the public sector and private capital sources to build and preserve
approximately 3,000 affordable homes per year in New York City.
Olatoye
has also overseen a number of public-private partnership initiatives at
Enterprise, including a 2013 project the East Harlem Center for Living
and Learning located in East Harlem, in which Enterprise provided more
than $12 million in debt and equity to create a new 151,000-square-foot
multi-family, mixed-use development with 88 new affordable apartments, a
58,000-square-foot K-8 charter school, and 6,000 square feet of office
space dedicated to not-for-profit organizations. Olatoye has also served
as a Vice President and Senior Community Development Manager of HSBC
Bank; Director of HR&A Advisors, Inc., an advisory and economic
development consulting firm; and Director of Community Outreach at the
Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc.
Olatoye is the daughter of a
Nigerian immigrant and working class mom, who hails from Bedford
Stuyvesant. She lives in Harlem with her husband and two sons.
About Cecil House: Cecil
House has deep management experience, and the familiarity with New York
City's Housing Authority to truly understand where it needs the most
attention to fix what has long been a broken system.
As the
current general manager of the housing authority, he leads a staff of
more than 11,000 employees and manages an annual budget in excess of $3
billion dollars in federal, state and local assistance. He has a proven
track record of implementing reforms that respond to the needs of
NYCHA's tenants.
Since joining the housing authority in August
2012, House has designed and implemented a comprehensive plan to reduce
the authority's backlog of repair and maintenance requests. By January
2014, the average time it takes NYCHA to respond to maintenance requests
had dropped to just 10 days from 134 days in January 2013, and from 249
days to 48 days for skilled repairs. Prior to joining NYCHA, House was
Senior Vice President for the Operations Support Business Unit and Chief
Procurement Officer for California Southern Edison (CSE), one of the
largest electric utilities in the United States. House has also held
senior management roles at the Public Service Enterprise Group
(PSE&G) in New Jersey, and was an attorney in the New York City
offices of the law firms McDermott, Will & Emory and Debevois &
Plimpton.
The son of a coal miner and a nurse's aide, House was
raised in Virginia and received a Bachelor of Science degree from the
McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia; a J.D. degree
from Harvard Law School; and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. House
lives in Manhattan with his husband, T.J. Stevenson, and their three
children.
About Vicki Been: Vicki Been brings a strong
record of advocating for housing equity with a focus on the intersection
of land use, urban policy, and housing, especially in New York City.
From writing one of the first articles on the distributional fairness of
environmental and land use policies, to her research on the fairness
and effectiveness of foreclosure responses, focusing on neighborhoods,
families, and children, Been has a keen understanding of the issues
everyday New Yorkers face when looking for affordable housing.
Been
most recently served as the Director of NYU's Furman Center for Real
Estate and Urban Policy, the Boxer Family Professor of Law at NYU School
of Law and Affiliated Professor of Public Policy of the NYU Wagner
Graduate School of Public Service.
Been graduated from Colorado
State University and received her J.D. from New York University School
of Law. Been has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law
School, and an Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey.
Been lives in Greenwich Village with
her husband Richard Revesz, the Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean
Emeritus at NYU School of Law. They have two children, Joshua and Sarah.
About Gary D. Rodney: Gary Rodney brings more than a
decade of experience financing affordable housing development, and is
considered an emerging leader in the industry. Rodney previously served
as Executive Vice President for Development of Omni New York LLC, a
leading developer of affordable housing in New York City and the state.
In
his role at Omni, Rodney was directly responsible for securing the
acquisition and preservation of 5,500 units of affordable housing in New
York and Massachusetts-with an aggregate transaction value of
approximately $950 million. Prior to joining Omni, Rodney was the
Director of Development for BFC Partners, a New York City-based real
estate development company that specializes in green, mixed-income,
mixed-use developments in neighborhoods around the city. From 2001 to
2006, Rodney served in various roles at the New York City Housing
Development Corporation, beginning his career at the agency as a project
manager and rising to Vice President for Development in 2005.
Rodney
has also worked for the New York City Housing Partnership, managing the
development of retail, residential, and mixed-use homeownership
projects, and at the Lower East Side Business Improvement District
(BID), where he was the Economic Development Coordinator. He received
his B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1997 and a Masters of Urban
Planning from New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of
Public Service in 1999.
The son of Haitian immigrants, Rodney lives in Tarrytown with his wife, Joan, and their three children.