Mayor de Blasio is expected to lay the foundation for his ambitious housing team Saturday, when he announces two commissioners in charge of the city’s major housing agencies, according to multiple sources.
Our Matt Chaban reports:
Vicki Been,
who had been a frontrunner to take over the city Planning Department
, will instead take over the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. From Mayors Ed Koch through Michael Bloomberg, the agency has been at the forefront of building and restoring affordable housing in the city.
While it may not have been her first choice, the Housing Department post is still a plumb assignment for Been, who has spent two decades
at NYU running the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy
.
She will be expected to deliver on the mayor’s ambitious campaign promise of to create 200,000 homes affordable to low- and middle-income New Yorkers.
Helping her in this endeavor will be Gary Rodney, the new president of the Housing Development Corp., which finances roughly $1.5 billion in affordable housing each year. It is the third largest housing financier in the country, paying for thousands of units annually and doing more business than most major banks.
Rodney worked at the agency during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years before leaving in to work at private affordable developers BFC Partners and Omni New York,
where he is currently executive vice president
.
Neither appointee could be reached for comment, and a mayoral spokesman did not respond to a request.
At the announcement of Carl Weisbrod as the new planning commissioner
Friday (the job Been wanted), he and the mayor emphasized the importance of housing to the administration.
“Carl and I feel, and
, we all feel that this is about using the planning process to achieve a bigger set of strategic goals — that includes the creation of affordable housing,”
de Blasio said in the Blue Room this afternoon
.
But building his housing team has been no easy task. The appointments bring to a close another tumultuous chapter in De Blasio’s transition.
Been was displaced from City Planning — the mayor even joked about forcefully submitting Weisbrod’s name for the job at Friday’s presser — but her appointment displaces a top candidate for the Housing Department, Ismene Speliotis, who the administration has been pursuing for months, according to sources.
Speliotis runs the Mutual Housing Association of New York
, which has been developing low-income housing in East New York, Brownsville and other Brooklyn neighborhoods since the 1980s.
She came under fire in 2009 for connections to ACORN, the national housing group taken down by conservatives for supposedly encouraging people to lie on housing applications. Speliotis had no connection to that chapter of the group.
For-profit affordable housing developers have also been lobbying against her appointment, for fear the progressive Speliotis might diminish their profits.
Meanwhile Rodney, who is well-respected, replaces Marc Jahr, the HDC president since 2007.
Many in the housing community credit Jahr with transforming the typically dry housing finance agency with new innovations that made it the largest housing financier in the country during the recession, when banks essentially stopped providing mortgages.
Jahr had hoped to continue on in the job, but he was fired by Glen, despite initial indication from transition team members he could keep his job.
While Glen was at Goldman Sachs, she often sat across the negotiating table from Jahr, and the two occasionally butted heads. He also formerly worked at rival bank Citibank before going into government.
“For all the hype about housing being a keystone of the mayor’s agenda, the administration has yet to demonstrate it,” one former housing official said.
