Let's eat. (EPA)

Just before Hurricane Sandy hit, everyone was busy stocking up provisions to weather the maelstrom. Following the storm, there was a scramble to to find more to eat as stores were empty and restaurants closed. This is a city of gourmands, after all. For the city officials who were responsible for guiding the city through the disaster, this was no exception.

While we were compiling our oral history of Hurricane Sandy, Joe Lhota mentioned that even in the worst of the storm, he had managed to keep his daily dietary regimen intact. This got us wondering: what was everybody eating while they scrambled around getting the city ready and helping it recover? Here is what the protectors and providers of the city had on their plates and in their pockets.

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, MTA: Even in the middle of the storm, I had what I always have—an omelet with two sausage patties. It's what I eat every morning. Would that be a cheese omelet? Is there any other kind? I don't put shit in them. Who needs onions in the morning? It's all protein, no carbs for breakfast, and that's the only thing I eat until dinner time.

Ray Kelly, commissioner, NYPD: He eats two patties a day, huh? Jeeze! He eats that stuff? I'm trying to eat egg whites. I had those Dunkin' Donuts egg white things, the sandwiches. I've had several of those. But I won't have anymore for a while.

It's funny because you take food for granted. I'm out riding around, and a place is closed, lots of places to eat are closed down. When the subways are closed, the restaurants are closed because they can't get their workers in there. It's something that is driven home sort of dramatically when you drive down Columbus Avenue, you think, "Hey there's no flooding here." Yeah, but they can't get their workers to work. Food suddenly became much more of an issue.

Sal Cassano, commissioner, FDNY: I think I ate a granola bar for dinner the night of the storm, and that was it.

Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner, NYC DOT: I’ve been eating a lot of granola bars, a lot of granola bars. And they serve peanut butter sandwiches at every relief station, so between the granola bars and peanut butter and jelly, that’s it. Fortunately I walk up and down the stairs at home and work, and when you’re out all day in the field, I hope it won’t be too damaging.

Josh Vlasto, communications director, Cuomo administration: I don't want to sound complain-y, but when you're on the road, we haven't been eating that much. On the days when you're doing four or five stops, you leave at 10 in the morning and your don't get back to the office till 4 in the morning. It's a lot of granola bars and bottled water that you pick up. But people have been ordering pizza. But nothing has been open. Lots of granola bars, lets put it that way. It's a lot of throwing granola bars into the jacket and munching along the way.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC OEM: Well I didn't eat that much. I mean, we do feed people here, so I'm a big salad person. If I can get fish I'm very happy, but we didn't get much of that. Mainly salads, a little bit of rice and little bit of bread. But I'm a skinny guy. I don't eat that much. There was pizza. I don't eat that stuff, but some of them do, unfortunately.

Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations: I was at OEM, and my hurricane diet was coffee. And I had a trail mix that I had that I actually had brought. Store-bought? No, no, I made it, I make my own. I go to this place called Nut Box and I make my own mix, and I had it in a big jar, and I was eating it by the fistful. Will you share your secret recipe? Almonds, cashews and dried apricots, dried cherries. And a little bit of coconut flaked shavings. It’s quite good.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, Cuomo administration: Coffee, Coke, bagels.

John Rhea, chairman, NYCHA: I had a couple boxes of Ritz crackers that I was running around with, a bunch of bottles of water, and I had some spaghetti that I made with a little sauce. That tasted just as good cold, but it was even better if it was room temperature.

Robert LiMandri, commissioner, DOB: I didn’t eat very much all week. I remember having chicken soup on Monday, and that was probably the last time I ate for two and a half days. I didn’t have an appetite, standing down there, watching that crane.

(Photo illustration: Ed Johnson)

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York's top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words.

The Storm

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: I have an app on my iPad that monitors hurricanes on the East Coast. I have always lived on the water. I always watch the app. So when I first got involved in this—it was long before it even hit Jamaica—I knew when it started as a tropical storm, and a hurricane, and a tropical storm, and then a hurricane again.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC Office of Emergency Management: We follow the weather very closely this time of year as it comes off the tip of Africa, or wherever it develops. This particular storm came out of the southwest of the Caribbean. At 11 a.m. on October 22, we saw a tropical depression. At that point it’s just a depression, and you don’t know much about it. By 6 p.m., it was upgraded already to a tropical storm called Sandy. It continued to strengthen during the next day, and we kept track of it as it moved across Jamaica.

On Oct. 24, we convened a coastal storm steering committee. That was made up of all the city and state agencies that would be part of any reaction to a coastal storm in New York City. When we do that, it means we see a potential threat to the city. On the 25th, we activated the situation room at OEM, we brought in the Police Department, the Fire Department, the city and state departments of health, the Department of Education, MTA, all the major agencies. We said, “We think this is going to be a big storm and we want to be ready.”

Josh Vlasto, communications director and senior adviser, Cuomo administration: We have a National Weather Service representative within our Homeland Security office up in Albany. When they send those emails saying “Potentially devastating storm coming in,” it puts everyone on notice.

Ray Kelly, commissioner, Police Department: It was a slow moving storm, so it was on everybody's screen that this storm had a lot of potential but these things are uncertain. We prepared. I think we prepared as well for this storm as any other and quite frankly we had more time because it was a slow moving storm.

Veronica White, Robert LiMandri, John Doherty, David Yassky, John Rhea, Mayor Bloomberg, Robert Steele, Janette Sadik-Khan and Sal Cassano at the Office of Emergency Management. (Mayor's Office)

Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations: Either Wednesday night or Thursday morning, the decision wad made that we were going to mobilize all the materials and stand up to shelters. And making that decision then, you basically are over the threshold of mobilizing staff, getting facilities ready and doing all that. So at that point, I was already fully committed to the idea that something was going to happen regardless of what the storm did.

Sal Cassano, commissioner, Fire Department: We were getting all of our boats out, getting all of our pumps ready, getting all of our equipment to where we knew we would need them, areas which would be hit the hardest. We would redeploy our equipment to the most vulnerable areas in the A-Zone, such as Staten Island, such as the Rockaways. We kept extra resources in the tunnels, in case the bridges were cut off because of the wind. That way, if the island was isolated we would have enough equipment to handle the calls that we knew we would receive.

Veronica White, commissioner, Department of Parks and Recreation: We sand-bagged everything, every recreation center and field house, every parks facility, everything that could possibly flood. It was all hands on deck, with people working twelve-hour shifts around the clock. We tried to station people near their homes, so they could be safe and still get to work without having to rely on mass transit for the clean-up we knew was coming.

John Doherty, commissioner, Department of Sanitation: Our department faced this like we would fight a snowstorm. That was the kind of plan we followed for where to deploy, what to prepare for. The weather is different, but the job is the same.

Mr. Kelly: We've been in this business for a long time, and we learn from experience. I was a police commissioner in 1992, I guess, when we had that Nor’easter that did a lot of damage. We learned a lot from that storm, from all of these storms and disasters. It's in the details. This administration put in these boats, they’re called Jon boats, which is a boat without a motor. They’re very shallow. You want to be able to get around on our streets. We had at least one per precinct that was reasonably close to water or had a history of water. Most people if you're on land someplace, you don't think of having boats.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, Cuomo administration: Really this started a year ago, the day Hurricane Irene ended. Everything we learned from that storm, we realized the system needed a total overhaul.

Joe Lhota inspects the storm preparations downtown. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: Given the experience I had a little over a year ago with Irene, everyone was aware of what and how long it took to get our equipment on safe ground. The Transit Authority needed 12 hours for the subways, the buses needed eight hours. With the Long Island Railroad, some of the equipment will snap if the wind gets above 40 miles per hour. That’s the last thing in the world you want.

John Rhea, chairman, New York City Housing Authority: Right up until the storm hit, we had cops out there knocking on doors, trying to get people out. We had buses from the DOE and the NYPD, school buses, prison buses, just pulling as many people out as we could. But at a certain point, you know, there’s nothing more you can do, and it actually becomes a danger to our people to be out there, so you just have to let them go and hope for the best. If only they had known better.

Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation: You had wind gusts hitting 101 miles per hour. We had not seen that before, and we didn’t want anyone stuck on the bridge. We knew we weren’t going to be able to get anybody onto the bridge to rescue them in those conditions. So we shut the eastern bridges, and we had crews overnight manning them. I mean, the heroism that went into the people who sat in those trucks all night keeping the bridges closed, and the people manning the ferries all night long as the surges were chest-high in the terminal.

Mr. Vlasto: We were looking at a statewide event, so we had to be prepared everywhere. One, you had the front coming down from the north, potentially hitting the front coming up from the south, so it had the potential to blanket the whole state. The second piece was our experience in Irene. Everyone said Irene was going to be a downstate event focused on the coastline.

Instead, it mostly missed New York City and it was disastrous upstate. We were lucky. We had deployed our national guardsmen in the Catskills and up through the north country so they could be out of harm’s way and deployed downstate quickly as needed. It turned out they were exactly where they needed to be. But we learned that these type of storms have to be treated as a statewide issue. The governor visited with security officials and met with them in all the different regions of the state: Nassau, Suffolk, New York City, the Catskills, Binghamton, Albany and up to the north country. We were treating this as something with the potential to be disastrous all over.

Sandy arrives. (Getty)

The Surge

Mr. Holloway: When the Mayor did his press conference at 11:30 on Monday morning, we had looked at the surge, tracking actual surge values and where flooding was happening, and it was happening on the FDR. I turned to Janette Sadik-Khan, and said, "Look, look at the numbers, I mean, isn’t this basically what we saw at the height of Irene?" And that was at 11:30 in the morning. So at that point, that’s where I thought, "Well boy, I don’t know that we really know exactly how bad the inundation is going to be here."

Mr. Cassano: On Monday we were here all day, planning. It was still relatively quiet when we got a report of a crane on a 90-story building that collapsed. That was pretty much the start of a very, very active and serious night. We had a four-alarm assignment for an incident that wasn’t even a fire, so we had a couple of hundred firefighters up there evacuating buildings, and now it’s starting to get windy, and now the activity is starting to pick up, and we have all these resources in Manhattan.

Robert LiMandri, commissioner, Department of Buildings: Certainly none of us—including contractors, anyone you talked to—ever expected the boom on that crane to snap back. For me, that was when we started to see the actual power of the storm. I think most commissioners would tell you that it really put everyone on edge. But then as the fire broke out in Breezy Point, the flood surge was coming up and we saw how bad it was past Zone A.

Mr. Cassano: And then we get a fire on City Island, another four-alarmer, and that took a lot of resources up in the Bronx, and that was not even because of the hurricane, it was just a fire, a fire in a restaurant.

Mr. Holloway: When the storm starts to get worse, there's not much you can do. It’s like turning an aircraft carrier. What you can do is you can put people on the ground, and you can really encourage people to leave, and you can make sure that you have the capacity to accept them. It just shows that this is a truly life-and-death situation that people need to take it very seriously.

A police officer watches the surge in Battery Park. (Getty)

Ms. Sadik-Khan: I live downtown. When I saw the water go all the way up to Washington Street, which is two blocks from the river, and the wind was howling and glass was flying through the air, I had a pretty big ‘oh shit’ moment right then.

Mr. Lhota: I was on my way downtown to see Tom Prendergast, the head of New York City Transit, who was down there keeping an eye on the subway tunnels at the Batter. I was at NY1, I left NY1, and the West Side Highway was just gone. We headed down 14th street and we couldn't get onto 11th Avenue. It was already at least a foot of water at 11th Avenue. Chelsea Piers will tell you they were completely underwater. So we did a U-Turn and then went down Washington Street and went down as far as we could and then the water was coming up over Washington Street. So the water had gone beyond, you know, had gone up one more block, and in fact the next morning we could see all the debris that was left there. So the surge pushed up and pushed over on both sides of the Hudson. And then it was looking for anywhere, anywhere to go.

Mr. Cassano: We had resources being deployed all over. Once the surge came, we got hit with a flurry of calls. The tide was rising and the wind was knocking down trees. In the middle of all that, we got this fire at Breezy Point, and we had no access to the fire, our apparatus couldn’t get down the street. So what the firefighters did was, they went in to evacuate the people out of buildings, get them out of there. We thought we’d take care of the life hazards first and then we would fight the fire.

That was happening in Breezy Point and we were getting a flurry of calls from people in Staten Island and certain parts of the Rockaway who were trapped in their houses, trapped in their attics. We had 30 small boats deployed all over the city and they were being used, our high-axle vehicles—like the brushfire and torpedo vehicles—we were getting them deployed to try and get these people out of their houses in the high waters. By the way, we were also getting those calls from Manhattan and the Battery. That was flooded and the power had gone out, and people were trapped. I don’t think anything has overwhelmed the city like that before.

Mr. Rhea: We were watching the television, we were seeing this movie play out in real life, in terms of water gushing in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan, the Rockaways, you name it. Seeing the level of surge, it's rushing into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, knowing that so many of our projects in these low-lying areas, knowing how much water we took on with Hurricane Irene, which was nothing close to this, realizing that most of our mechanicals are subterranean—it was clear we were going to have real problems.

Joe Lhota, Josh Vlasto and Governor Cuomo inspect flooding in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: When I got downtown to meet Prendergast, we were looking at where we were, we both realized how deep the water was at South Ferry station. It didn’t surprise me when we found out later that the water was all way up to the ceiling. It was four feet above the ground that night. And then we walked over to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, where we ran into the governor totally by accident. I don’t know why I went over to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. I really don’t. We hadn’t been told about water rushing in, but we went over there, and boy, what I saw was extraordinary. White-water rapids, and a pace—you could have created hydro power.

I’ll use the words that the governor used. It was disorienting. It was. You heard it. You saw it. And you weren’t really sure you were hearing it and seeing it correctly. I never expected the Hudson River to do that.

Mr. Vlasto: The governor was standing with Lhota at the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the water was rushing in so quickly that the sound was deafening. I think that for him, that was the moment—where the water was that night, when you’re down there, standing at the tunnel, there’s so much water that you can’t hear—I think the governor would say that was the “We Got a Problem” moment.

Mr. Glaeser: It was a sound you never heard before in Lower Manhattan, a rushing river. And then we went over to the World Trade Center and we saw Niagara Falls was pouring into the site. This was no ordinary storm.

Officials inspect the damage to the Rockaways, including a decimated Breezy Point, from National Guard Blackhawk helicopters. (Governor's Office)

The Flood

Mr. Cassano: We started to get into the buildings that were actually flooded to make some searches. We were still getting a lot of calls from people who were trying to get out of their homes. So we had to use the boats again the next morning. The challenge was to actually assess the damage. We had firehouses that we had to evacuate in the Rockaways and Coney Island, along with a number of EMS stations. We had streets blocked, we had streets still flooded—it was a very difficult operation. It was a mess, and it still is.

Mr. LiMandri: We use a methodology that is used in earthquake recoveries called ATC-45—it’s modified because it’s not an earthquake, but all the principles are the same. The first path is to do a windshield: to sweep the neighborhoods and try to identify how hard-hit each neighborhood is. With the areas that are hard-hit, we go block by block and then identify those buildings that have some damage. The categories start with green, meaning fine, we don’t see any exterior degradation of the façade or foundations. They may have had water damage, but we don’t think it is significant. The second is yellow for minor structural damage, major water infiltration that we know could be a concern for the foundation. The third is red, and we found this in many communities in Rockaway and Staten Island, where the building foundation had been compromised to the point where it could collapse or there was significant damage to the structure.

We’ve tagged 16,000 buildings so far, going back to last Wednesday. We expect to be done by Sunday. There were 400 red buildings so far, but far more are in worse shape. You may have a green building that has been destroyed inside. Structurally, it’s sound, that is our first concern, because it is a matter of safety, but everything else is ruined.

Mr. Doherty: There are some areas, particularly in Rockaway and parts of Staten Island, where you had structural damage to buildings and debris came out into the streets from them. Furniture, wall boards, insulation, tile, just about anything that people would have in their basements or on their first floors. It was just piling up everywhere. You'd spend the day, think you'd finally cleaned up the street and you could mark it off your list, and you come back the next day and it's full again.

The police rescue stranded New Yorkers. (Getty)

Mr. Vlasto: We were going downtown, the day after the storm, to look around. It was right after or shortly after the streetlights went out, and I was driving down Second Avenue with no streetlights. The sun was just rising. It just sort of sunk in. There were no cops on the street directing , no crosswalk lights to tell people when to stop and go. No lights to block people crossing avenues. It was scary. That was really scary. Because you never knew when you were going to hit people, when you were going to get T-boned. Or if somebody was going to jump out into the street. That was really scary. It’s almost better to be driving in than when it’s completely open.

Mr. Lhota: The MTA is a very complex organization. You’ve got the bridge-and-tunnel guys, they had two tunnels down. Not only is the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel out, which didn’t surprise me, but we had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel. We’ve never had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel before—ever. So that was a surprising occurrence. I always knew that the LIRR and Metro-North would have trees down all over the place, but this was hard to believe. And then there was the subway system, which I knew was going to have some water. The reality is that the preparatory work that the Transit Authority did helped in many cases.

Nobody’s ever asked why the 4/5 tunnel, the Drummond Tunnel—why did it come back so fast? Bowling Green station is a little higher, and so is Brooklyn where the train comes out. But we also made sure to seal up as much as we could. We moved the trains out and everything was ready to go. More importantly, everyone was ready to go, and they worked nonstop to dig us out, pump us out and get us back up and running. A week ago, when I saw all that water rushing in downtown, I never would have imagined we would be up and running again like this so quickly. Not in that moment, at least.

Mr. Glaser: Coming in with the National Guard on Thursday, carrying food and water with the governor down in Lower Manhattan—we were at the Lexington Avenue Armory with the Food Bank of New York—you don’t expect to be doing that in Manhattan. The power was still off. It was just a shift in our expectations of what government is. Just every day, on a regular basis, there were things like that happening every day. Just the sight of National Guard troops in Manhattan. They were on a humanitarian mission, you know, but it makes you realize what a thin thread it can be any time, keeping a society going.

FEMA, the govenror, the mayor, the MTA. (Governors Office)

Ms. White: We walked every street in every community board, the entire city, looking for downed trees and other damage. We inspected every park and playground, approximately 1700 of them, and made certain they were safe to open to the public. Now we have about 83 percent open. We've had over 3,000 volunteers come out to help us clean up. And we have hundreds of Parks people in the field documenting everything that has occurred to submit to FEMA so we get back every penny New York is entitled to for its parks.

Mr. Lhota: We heard that a 40-foot boat ended up across the tracks outside the Ossining station. The first thing everyone wants to do is get a picture: “We gotta see this.” So we got a picture. And then Howard Permut, the president of Metro-North, and Robert Lieblong, the executive vice president who operates the railroad every day, without blinking an eye they found a piece of machinery in our shop that could lift up a boat. They went to a boatyard and bought the racks and put the boat underneath and lifted it up. They used a train crane to move a boat. It’s emblematic of how anything could possibly happen. They just said, “Okay, let’s deal with it.” And they did.

Mr. Cassano: I spent this weekend on Staten Island helping out a couple of different command centers, and this weekend is when it really hit me to the core, because my sister lives in the area. When I was helping out, I just took a ride down to make sure that she was okay, and they were just emptying the house out. It had been totally flooded. All her possessions were on the sidewalk. And going down blocks and blocks and seeing the same thing in other people’s homes, it really hit home how bad this was.

Mr. Vlasto: I think it was Lyndenhurst—this will stick with me—we were walking, and we went to a street and into a house. The governor walks in a house, and this old lady was standing outside the house crying. She had a picture in her hand and she was crying, and she said, “This is my grandson.” She said, “I’m so happy I found this picture.” She said, “I found it right here.” And we couldn’t figure it out. And then she said, “But I live four houses down.” That was sad. I don’t have any happy moments yet. I’m waiting.

The mayor surveys the damage. (Mayor's office)

The Wake

Mr. Lhota: The thing that amazed me is that when we put together maps of what was together in the system, it was substantive. And then there was the desire to put together the bus bridge, because we realized we had a gap in service between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens and Manhattan with the 7 train, so very quickly Tom Prendergast and his team, along with Darryl Irick on the MTA Bus, put together the bus bridge.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: You had issues everywhere, you had no subways coming across from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so we needed to set up a new surface subway system. We worked with the MTA—we’d set up the bridges, so why not some bus bridges?—and the NYPD got their people out there to enforce that.

Mr. Lhota: I drove by it the first day, but the was so horrendous I just wanted to get into the city. But what I saw was a lot of people gathered around. New Yorkers don’t do things in a line. People were all jockeying around, seeing who could get on the bus first. But we learned our lesson. That was Thursday morning, and by Friday morning, we took the Disney approach—we created pathways, allowing people to see that they were moving through the pathways. On Friday morning we were putting 3,700 people an hour on buses, three buses loading at a time, dedicated lanes from the city, police escorts from the city. And once they got on the buses, they were at 42nd Street in 20 minutes. A world of difference from what happened on Thursday. First time through, it was really important to see what we could learn, how could we make it better, and we made it better.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: On Wednesday, when everybody came in to drive, it was just one big parking lot. So looking at that, you needed to do something. I wanted to go with the HOV3, and of course that only works if you have the Police Department doing the enforcement. And they were really terrific—they did an amazing job. I can’t say enough for Ray Kelly’s team, it was really extraordinary what they did.

Govenor Cuomo comforts families put out by the storm. (Governor's Office)

Mr. Kelly: I’m going out again tonight, and I know I will ask people, “How are cops treating you?” And it will probably be very positive, because it’s been very positive. I haven’t had a negative comment. And people aren’t afraid to give me a negative comment.

Mr. Doherty: We have had a number of sanitation workers, particularly out in Rockaway and some areas in Staten Island, who have either lost their homes completely or had a lot of water damage. The ones that I have talked to, they are coming to work, they have been coming in. And I remember earlier in the storm, I was talking to this gentleman out in Rockaway, and he said “I’m here to help my neighbors. Yes, I had damage to my house, but I’m here to help.” The morale has been outstanding by the men and women of the department. They are looking for work to do sometimes. If I’m not moving them quickly enough, they are asking me, “Where can we work, where can we work?” Relax, we are going to get you there.

Mr. Kelly: Cancelling the marathon is something I'm going to remember. It was something that we were prepared to do, and all of a sudden, it was cancelled. But probably more significant for me was the sight of the area that was burned in Breezy Point. I went there, the ground was still smoldering, and all you see is an open field where the houses had burned down. But then I looked out at the end of the field, and I could see a person, and the person was very, very small. The breadth of the damage, it didn't really hit me until I saw the size of that person so far away. It's something that you see in other parts of the world. It's not something that you see on the East Coast of the United States.

Mr. Vlasto: You’re seeing idleness, and kids who are so lonely and tired and exhausted, so the governor said, you know, lets get something for kids. Give them some board games, something to make them smile. That’s where he came up with the idea to ask Walmart for some toys. They had volunteered to help, they had been donating water, so we just said, how about some toys for the kids?

Mr. Bruno: Key people, the president and everyone on down, have reached out to us. Every major official came through here, and they’ve been following up on it. We have the National Guard here. We have Department of Defense forces—they’re helping a lot with the fuel. We got the Army Corps of Engineers, they’ve been a huge partner for us and totally dedicated to getting New York City back up and running. So after the anxiety about whether help was going to come—it is a good feeling when you see this stuff.

Joe Lhota directs traffic at the bus islands in Brooklyn. (MTA)

Mr. Holloway: I was in the Rockaways this morning and this recovery, we’re going to be dedicating an absolutely enormous amount of resources to getting cleaned up and helping as many people get back into their homes as quickly as possible. We have another storm coming, you know, and now we have to brace for that, too. In Irene we responded, the storm broke up, and everybody was able to get back to business as usual pretty quickly. Here, there are certain areas in the city where people’s lives have truly been turned upside down. And we are going to be out there for as long as it takes to get it right side up.

Mr. Rhea: There were many people, through no fault of their own, who bet against Mother Nature, and to see the faces of those who were impacted because they were still in their residences and didn’t evacuate, or those who didn’t think they needed to evacuate because they were outside of the zone, that was hard. They were saying, “We really need help to get basic necessities and power and heat and hot water restored.” And asking very directly and emotionally for that assistance.

Then there’s the flip-side of that, which is being able to fix a problem—to have someone say to you, “Thank you for being able to get that done as fast as you were able to.” So for every person who is still without heat and water, there is somebody who has had it restored. For every person who is without electricity there are four times that number who have had it restored. The people who ask for help, and the appreciation when we do our jobs and deliver on behalf of these families, that is something I will remember.

Mr. Vlasto: Seeing the subways fill up, I think, was a very jarring sight for the governor. He says that it’s not just that, it’s the frequency: now we have dealt with this twice in two years. How many times do we have to deal with this again before we make substantial change? It’s almost like, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” And now we’ve just been fooled again.

Mr. Lhota: I walked into a bar on Saturday night, and even though I’m somewhat of a public figure, I’ve always enjoyed my anonymity. When I was budget director for the city and when I was deputy mayor, I didn’t even unlist my phone number. On Saturday, I walked into a bar, and people wanted to buy me a drink. That’s something that’s going to stay with me, because I was very surprised. By the way, that was my first drink after that whole week. I had wine.

No wonder Mr. Rhea found himself on the firing lines recently. The Daily News carried out a campaign that had readers believing Mr. Rhea was an incompetent hack who was sitting on a billion dollars in unspent money while tenants suffered in conditions worthy of a Dickens novel.

As Mr. Chaban’s excellent report noted, the real story of Mr. Rhea’s tenure at the Housing Authority is, well, a little more complicated than critics acknowledge.

The Housing Authority truly is a city of its own. Accommodating 420,000 tenants in 178,000 apartments in 334 housing projects is almost, by definition, an impossible job. There always will be a repair that needs to be made or a condition that requires immediate attention. None of this happens with a simple phone call.

Mr. Rhea was a banker before he agreed to take on the thankless job of heading a troubled agency—his critics seem to regard private-sector experience as a negative, but then again, they would, wouldn’t they?—and he has drawn on his expertise to find creative solutions to the Housing Authority’s perennial budget woes. The authority is dependent on federal funds, and it has been a long time since Washington was particularly interested in public housing.

What’s more, Mr. Rhea has tried to spend money wisely, even if that means not writing checks as soon as he has the money. For example, Mr. Rhea suspended the expenditure of $42 million on security cameras until he was satisfied that the cameras actually were useful in combating crime. That was a prudent decision, but bear in mind that it takes no small amount of courage to put a hold on spending in any public agency. One City Council member, Rosie Mendez, noted that she didn’t like Mr. Rhea’s decision at first. But, she acknowledged, “it was the right thing to do.”

Mr. Rhea also had to answer the Daily News’s charge that he had a billion dollars sitting around doing nothing while tenants lived in squalor. It turns out that nearly all of the money has been allocated, and while about half of it hasn’t been spent yet, it takes time before money actually changes hands between Washington and New York. And, by the way, sometimes it’s a good thing to actually think about how money is being used, rather than simply handing out checks.

John Rhea has been asked to turn around one of the city’s largest and most complicated agencies. He is doing so by paying more attention to problem solving than in cultivating political alliances. That’s not a bad thing at all.

Housing, housing, everywhere, and not a room to rent. (Courtesy NYCHA)

Housing homies. (Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests.

With more than 420,000 residents, NYCHA has a population that surpasses Atlanta. Factor in the 232,000 people who receive Section 8 vouchers, which NYCHA oversees, and it is larger than Denver, Seattle or Boston. The difference is that this mythical city would be made up of only the very worst neighborhoods—a world of Brownsvilles and Stapletons and Mott Havens without the Park Slopes and Upper East Sides to support them. This is both NYCHA’s biggest problem and its greatest virtue, a blessing and a curse passed down from Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt. Despite the eternal outcry over NYCHA’s shortcomings, most agree that the neighborhoods the projects inhabit would be even worse off without them. Who else is going to provide so many residents with affordable, if not always attractive, housing, in a city that has less and less?

Which is why the agency’s decline is so frustrating to so many. None more so than John Rhea, the man Mayor Bloomberg charged three years ago with fixing the problems—so many problems spread among so much real estate: 178,000 apartments in 334 complexes scattered across all five boroughs.

Of average height and trim build, Mr. Rhea still dresses like he’s headed to work at his last job, as a managing director at Barclays. On the morning of a two-hour interview with The Observer in the chairman’s conference room (as the sign outside the door said), his suit had a fine pinstripe. He wore a white shirt and red tie patterned with tiny Barrel of Monkey monkeys, hand-in-hand.

While he refuses to believe NYCHA’s troubles are intractable, he admits they are grave. “To me, the problem with NYCHA is gridlock. It’s no one actor but things piling up,” Mr. Rhea said. “It starts with an accident, then people are blocking the intersection, one truck is sticking out a little too far so one lane is jammed down. Everyone is trying to merge into fewer lanes. The traffic lights aren't changing.” Mr. Rhea sees himself as public housing’s traffic cop.

As if trapped in Bizarro World, NYCHA's story runs counter to the city's resurgence of the past two decades. When New York was in decline, the housing authority remained, thanks to federal largesse, a shining beacon of hope in the city even as everything around it was consumed. Now the situation has flipped. As the city swells, NYCHA has been suffering, thanks largely to neglect in Washington, where almost all of the authority's funds come from.

In many ways, the debate surrounding NYCHA mirrors those raging throughout the country over the role of government in society.

“It was the place to be, everyone was always hanging out at our place,” said City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who grew up in the Williamsburg Houses, New York’s second oldest housing development (the complex was even made a city landmark in 2003). "Even when the city started to get really bad in the '70s and '80s, NYCHA still had it all."

Now representing the East Village and the Lower East Side, Ms. Mendez has one of the largest tracts of public housing in her district. Since joining the council in 2006, she has chaired its public housing committee. She is a fierce advocate and frequent critic of NYCHA, but she is also quick to credit Mayor Bloomberg for supporting the authority when few others will.

“When John Rhea came in, I was skeptical,” she said. “I didn’t think we needed a banker, but I have to say, he’s done a good job. We’re seeing progress, but I don’t know if it’s enough. Given the situation we’re in, I don’t know if any one person could fix it.”

First Houses ground breaking. (La Guardia and Wagner Archives)

On December 3, 1935, Roosevelt, LaGuardia, Moses, Congressman Robert F. Wagner and what seemed like half the city crammed onto the corner of First Avenue and East Third Street to open First Houses. Thus began an era of American progress, a social experiment,  affordable housing for all, or at least those fortunate enough to win the housing lottery.

Before long, LaGuardia and his New Deal pals were on 105th Street for the East River Houses, and in Williamsburg, Red Hook, Queensbridge, ceremonial silver shovels in hand, breaking ground on dozens of new housing projects. By 1939, the mayor was regularly traveling around the country, advising cities like Newark, Providence and Philadelphia on how to follow suit. As important as affordable housing was, the construction was as much a jobs program as anything, a salve to the Depression. “In so many instances, it was a pioneering program,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, long-time director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The Great Migration, the Great Society and white flight, aided by discriminatory practices in the real estate industry, conspired to leave NYCHA’s developments with largely minority and lower-income tenants, rather than the economic mix that had been hoped for. Still, the projects gave birth to everyone from Lloyd Blankfein (Linden Houses, East New York) to Jay-Z (Marcy Houses, Bed-Stuy) and Sonia Sotomayor (Bronxdale Houses, Morisania, since renamed in her honor). Mr. Rhea’s goal, he said, “is to ensure that NYCHA can still foster these kinds of success stories.”

Like so many government programs from the era, the carefully planned social engineering did not always pan out. As Robert Caro and so many others have detailed, the new housing projects erased entire communities along the way. The new homes may have been affordable and modern, but they were not exactly inviting—especially as the technology progressed and the towers grew taller, more ominous and more dense.

Yet still they stand. NYCHA’s current repair bill systemwide tops $6 billion, and is expected to balloon to $14 billion in the next three years, many times the roughly $270 million NYCHA receives a year for capital expenditures.

One housing official marveled that some 10-year-old, privately developed low-income apartmentsare actually in worse shape than many 60-year-old public housing complexes. NYCHA, even with its massive portfolio, is held to a higher, perhaps impossible, standard. “Even in a perfect world, NYCHA would still have its problems,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.

Starting in the Reagan era, federal funding, which makes up the vast majority of NYCHA’s non-rental income, began to diminish. Even during the Clinton administration, with welfare reform a national issue (and Andrew Cuomo running HUD), funding waned and talk of privatization was rampant. The situation deteriorated drastically during the Bush years, with federal funds falling to 69 cents on the dollar. NYCHA enjoyed full funding in President Obama’s first year in office, as well as $424 million in stimulus funds—the largest public housing grant awarded in the country. Since then, it has fallen by the wayside due to Congressional intransigence and presidential ambivalence.

“Obama has been hostile to public housing, which surprised a lot of people, since he came up working in it,” said John Arena, a professor at the College of Staten Island and housing expert.

“It is time for New York to realize we have to fight for what is ours, but we also have to be able to stand alone,” Mr. Rhea said. “We have too much at stake to rely on anyone but ourselves to make do.”

Williamsburg Houses, the city's second development (Skyscraper City)

Two thousand, six hundred apartment buildings—2,597 to be exact, built in neat little clusters in almost every corner of the city over the course of six decades. From a plane, or Google Maps, they are plainly visible from above, shocks of green and brown, big gaps in the city’s otherwise uniform street grid. They are pinwheels, crosses, long slabs of concrete and brick lined up like dominoes.

Such projects were once sprouting up across the country, but more and more, New York stands alone. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley demolished one notorious housing project after another, from Cabrini Green to Robert Taylor, names synonymous with urban blight and bureaucratic failure. He replaced them with new developments that lined the pockets of connected developers but housed half as many residents. In Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Newark, New Orleans, the story has been the same.

“It’s a battle that’s still being fought here in New York, whereas it’s been given up in most every other big city,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing analyst at Community Services Society of New York.

Mayor Bloomberg is typically viewed as out of touch with the needy. After all, he called the city’s homeless shelters “pleasurable” last month. Nonetheless, he has done more for public housing than almost any other mayor in the country. He has invested more than $100 million into the housing authority and spent political resources on NYCHA when necessary, including drafting John Rhea to run the agency. Granted, his predecessors still received ample federal funding and could basically ignore the housing authority.

Mr. Rhea’s job is not unlike that of other outsiders recruited by the mayor. “NYCHA needed a change agent, and I think I have experience in being an insurgent—you know, going into an organization to make substantial change happen,” he said. “I also didn’t come with a set of preconceived notions about what was right or wrong structurally or strategically at NYCHA.”

Mr. Rhea grew up in inner-city Detroit, in a mixed-income neighborhood where he walked by housing projects and rundown homes on a regular basis. His father ran his own office furniture supply business, his mother was a medical technician He came east for school, attending the honors program at Wesleyan, where he majored in social studies. While attending Harvard Business School, he became friends with Barack Obama, who was then at the law school. He then went to work for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago for three years, where the two remained friendly. He hosted the future president’s first fund-raiser in New York.

Mr. Rhea came to the city to work at JPMorgan Chase, where he arranged more than $50 billion in deals, and then went to Lehman Brothers, where he rose through the ranks to become head of global consumer retail group. He sees himself as a business facilitator, rather than a money-maker (though there was plenty of that too). It was this skill that attracted the Bloomberg administration, along with his management experience at both firms.

When Lehman collapsed, Mr. Rhea found himself with a job at Barclays when it bought up Lehman’s investment banking division. But he had long felt called to public service, and the moment seemed right. He considered heading to Washington, but when word got out he was in the market for a public-sector position, the Bloomberg administration approached him first.

He said that the banking crisis played no role in his decision to leave Wall Street, and someday he could even go back.

“Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t personally feel guilt. I wasn’t a real estate banker, I didn’t put together complicated derivatives, I didn’t sell subprime mortgages, I didn’t have any role at all in housing,” Mr. Rhea explained. “As an American, watching the financial debacle that had many culprits—the financial industry being one, but government policy being another, and just excess, sheer excess in the economy—I didn’t feel guilt but I certainly felt responsibility. I don't know how any American can watch what we went through and not feel some level of concern for the fellow citizens who were truly impacted.”

John Haynes Holmes Houses, Yorkville. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Mr. Rhea's financial experience experience has come in handy at the cash-strapped NYCHA. “Washington has been very clear in saying that there are $30 billion of unmet capital needs for public housing nationally and it doesn’t have the capacity to fund them,” Mr. Rhea said. “Therefore, housing authorities have to think about other ways of availing themselves if they want to maintain their buildings—other ways of attracting capital, and having conversations with residents and advocates about those options, and how we pursue them and what the risks are.”

One of the first projects Mr. Rhea tackled was creating an office of public-private partnerships, a controversial move. Public housing, the bedrock of the so-called safety net in New York, is considered sacrosanct in advocacy circles. Any private involvement, it is feared, will poison the well. How long until everything has been sold off?

Mr. Rhea insists the housing advocates have nothing to fear, and if they are serious about rebuilding NYCHA, they will have to be creative. When an idea was floated internally to possibly put billboards on some of the housing project’s towers, it was exposed in the Daily News and quickly shot down. The outcry was understandable, but what if it meant a new security system or money to reopen a community center or fix up a basketball court?

“What I find incredibly amazing is that the press can say NYCHA isn’t doing anything,” Mr. Rhea said. He said he has proposed “some of the most intransigent, kind of radioactive” ideas, about which NYCHA has been totally upfront. “We’ve put them out there, we’ve said, ‘Here’s what we plan to do about them,’ we’re fully transparent about it, and we’re willing to have a conversation about what are the implications of what’s being proposed.”

Mr. Rhea’s most impressive victory was the federalizationof thousands of units that had been cast off in the previous decade by the city and state. Completed at the end of 2009, it was a reminder that Washington was not the only political culprit. In the late 1990s, Gov. George Pataki offloaded some 21,000 units of public housing the state had built and maintained for decades. The city pulled the same trick in 2002 with a number of developments it controlled, following a devastating blow to the budget as a result of 9/11.

The vast majority of these units had no federal support, thousands of apartments drawing against the rest of NYCHA’s funds. Through a deal with HUD, federal matching funds, however insufficient, are now provided for the entire NYCHA portfolio. The federalization deal also brought in an injection of $400 million in public and private financing, a never-before-attempted partnership meant to modernize many of the most dilapidated developments. “Standing up at the podium with the secretary of HUD and the mayor, the federalization deal being announced and knowing what that meant, that was a huge victory,” Mr. Rhea said. “It shows we can get things done.”

Queens Bridge Houses, Long Island City. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Still, Mr. Rhea’s job has been far from easy. Another of his marquee achievements is Plan NYCHA, essentially a strategy outline subtitled “A Roadmap for Preservation.” At 45 pages, it took more than two years to create, drawing lukewarm reviews when it came out in 2011.

“It’s a scrapbook,” remarked Mr. Bach. “It mentions some important policies, but it doesn’t go into them at all. It devotes most of its space to pictures of resident participation.”

Mr. Rhea defends it as more of a vision statement than a detailed blueprint. “You can’t give people the thousands and thousands of pages of research and documentation that we’ve done and expect them to digest it,” he said. “This allows people to help us guide individual projects moving forward.”

The same goes for the Boston Consulting Group report commissioned by the chairman that has led to some of the harshest media attention on the authority in memory. Begun in March 2011, the report was due to be completed the following September at a cost of $5 million. The study was extended through the following April, and the price tag doubled. In part, this speaks to the complexity of NYCHA—it takes 12,000 employees to manage that city of half a million—but also to a lack of political awareness on the part of Mr. Rhea.BCG is known for its experience in advising government agencies, but it also happens to be where the chairman worked after business school. The Daily News got wind of the report in June and began to demanding its public release. Mr. Rhea demurred.

“If he had public-sector experience, John would have known the report was going to get out, whether or not he wanted it to,” said one City Hall housing expert. “He’s focused on the product, not the politics, and that has its perils.”

Smelling blood, the paper began digging around in the authority and came up with a damaging story. NYCHA had, in the words of the tab, been “sitting on” nearly $1 billion in federal money dating back to 2009.

As bad as that sounded, it was not exactly accurate. In fact, 90 percent of the $950 million had been allocated already, and while $485 million had yet to be spent, that was not unusual. Between appropriations, requests for proposals, and approvals at nearly a dozen different agencies in Washington and New York, it can take up to three years for HUD funds to make their way from Capitol Hill to the streets of Canarsie or Kingsbridge. Furthermore, $540 million the News was complaining about had only been announced in the past six months to a year. Never mind that those numbers had been provided directly to the paper by NYCHA’s public affairs office as a sign of progress.

“That kind of lack of detail leaves a reader with the impression that if you’re Mrs. Smith and your ceiling is falling in, that NYCHA’s not going to do what it’s supposed to do, when it has all of the resources it needs to do that,” Mr. Rhea complained. “When you don’t say you need 6 billion, and you only have a billion, you leave out the fact that even if we snapped our fingers tomorrow and spent it all in the most efficient way, you still have five out of six people still upset about the quality of their conditions.”

To make matters worse, the tab ran accompanying pieces showing apartments full of black mold and rat holes. As bad as that is, the argument was disingenuous. Small repairs come out of the operations budget, while the billion dollars at issue was in capital funds. It is the difference between fixing a leaky ceiling and repointing the bricks in an entire complex to protect against weather damage. Not that NYCHA could rob from capital funds to pay for regular maintenance anyway. It is forbidden to dip into one pot to fund the other, and doing so could actually lead to serious sanction in Washington. A number of council members had to hold a hearing on the steps of City Hall to praise Mr. Rhea, fearing the negative publicity would imperil NYCHA. “That is my gravest concern, the message this will send to Washington,” Ms. Mendez said. “They treat us badly enough as it is.”

At least a few housing advocates believe Daily News owner and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman is working on behalf of the real estate industry to cripple the authority and thereby open up its prime land (along the East River, in Chelsea, on the Upper West Side, in Williamsburg and Red Hook) to development. Nevermind that Mr. Zuckerman exclusively develops commercial real estate.

Another prominent example of the gotcha news involves $42 million the City Council allocated for security cameras in 2009. While desperate for more funding, Mr. Rhea decided to suspend the council contributions to determine exactly the best use for them. In his view, many developments had security systems in place, but they were not having an appreciable impact on crime. He created the Safety and Security Task Force to meet with residents and better understand the issue. “John Rhea decided to freeze our money,” Councilwoman Mendez said. “I didn’t like it, but it was the right thing to do, and now, hopefully, we’ll get the right cameras, the right security, for the right developments.” Instead, the News lamented a rise in crime while NYCHA was developing the new security plan.

While trying to have the BCG report released, the News complained that the 87-page document cost $124,000 a page. “That’s just stupid,” Mr. Rhea said. “How about we talk about how the report could save NYCHA $70 million a year. It pays for itself seven times over in the first year.”

Mr. Rhea’s favorite story was the one about the $325,000 he spent for a two-day conference at the Javits Center that brought every NYCHA employee together to share their thoughts about the agency—an event painted as a management-driven boondoggle. To Mr. Rhea, it was part of a necessary refocusing. “At $30 a person, I would say that wasn’t a waste of money, to be able to hear the ideas and concerns of every one of my employees,” Mr. Rhea said.

“You can worry about the optics or the politics, or if you look like you’re doing a good job,” he continued. “We don’t need that. We don’t need another person just going through the motions. We don’t need more pageantry. We’re looking to make a difference.”

This is what it's all about. (Courtesy Kars 4 Kids)

Is there enough time, resources or authority to make a difference? Despite widespread praise from housing advocates, many question whether or not Mr. Rhea can truly effect the change he speaks constantly of. After decades of disinvestment, no one person could turn around NYCHA in four years.

Still, there are advocates who argue the mayor could be doing more to support his chairman. Mr. Bach, the housing analyst at the Community Services Society, points to the billions of dollars the city funnels every years to private developers through the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the millions more given to parks, museums, even new stadiums. “There’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no comparable attention and support to the New York City Housing Authority,” he said. How much time has the mayor spent promoting a ban on soft drinks this year? How much time has he spent on promoting NYCHA? It’s a question of political capital, Ms. Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association said.

Yet political capital does not always get results either. Consider education, an area on which the Bloomberg administration has focused tirelessly. “The solutions are not always easy, clear, or even possible,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said.

Perhaps the experience of another public authority might guide NYCHA back on the right track. “In the 1970s, the MTA was on the verge of collapse, and in the ’80s, it really executed an amazing turnaround,” said Fred Harris, NYCHA’s new director of development, who led the MTA’s real estate portfolio at the time before spending two decades in private development. “I think NYCHA is at a point where it needs to make the same transformation.”

The comparison may be apt for another reason. Despite all the improvements at the MTA, everybody still complains about it.

Last Thursday, without a cloud in the sky, John Rhea stepped out of his city-issued Toyota hybrid SUV and onto the leafy quad of Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens. He had on a navy suit, no pinstripe, light blue check shirt and matching tie. Local Councilman Reuven Willis, who grew up in the nearby South Jamaica Houses, had recruited Kars 4 Kids, a North Jersey Jewish charity, to hand out backpacks to families from the projects. “It is critically important these kids have the resources they need to succeed on the first day of school,” Mr. Rhea said, touting yet another of his public-private partnerships.

NYCHA had paid to rebuild the project’s community center three years ago, but it so far lacked the funds to open it. Instead, money would soon be spent on those new cameras, after two years of debate, and just in time—a police officer had been shot less than a month earlier. Mr. Willis went up the block to show off a basketball court that had been recently refurbished with a new coat of paint and a good weed whacking. It took 16 months, but it had been decades since anything had been done, and a totally new court was on the horizon, so he remained excited. "He came in, he met with my people, asked what we wanted, and he delivered," Mr. Willis said.

Scaffolding encircles many developments, suggesting repairs when there are none. It frustrates tenants, according to Mr. Willis, but he can live with it as long as more important problems are being tackled. Public housing, a work in progress.

“Growing up, did I know the NYCHA chairman? No. But everybody here does,” Mr. Willis said, gesturing around the quiet street. And it was true, he was getting hugs and fist bumps from many in the crowd, though also some tough questions about the community center. Mr. Rhea promised he was hard at work on the problem.

As Mr. Rhea rushed off to one more backpack giveaway, before a day of meetings in the city, he paused to consider the work he was doing. “I don’t want you to think I’m all pie in the sky,” he said. “I know we’ve got a lot left to do, and the challenges are huge in turning this around. We have another 15 months to run hard to put a bunch of runs on the board, to execute against the plan.”

He looked back at the kids holding their new backpacks aloft and smiled. “I wish this was the only part of my job.”

The commissioner's Foyer at 895 West End (Photo from Street Easy)

John Rhea, commissioner of the New York City Housing Authority, spends his days walking around the city’s dilipatated public housing. Until this week, however, he has gone home to a plush pad on the Upper West Side. Mr. Rhea will no longer be kicking his feet up in the French inspired co-op, however, as he and wifeYvonne have sold their apartment.

Unlike boisterous city tenements, Douglas Elliman brokers Max Dobens, David Cooper and Iman Barkhordari promise “a pin-drop quiet interior” in Mr. Rhea’s old apartment, and unlike those crumbling Fort Greene townhouses, his co-op is on firm footing at the luxury Italian palazzo style building at 895 West End Avenue.  The brokers note the “bright Eastern exposures create a style of living enjoyed by very few city residents." (Mr. Rhea did not return requests for comment.)

The three-bedroom, three-bathroom is très française with Parisian casement windows and French doors. Oak floors and high ceilings are added luxuries.

The property was originally listed in February for $2.295 million, but buyers Shannon and Richard Seidenstein paid $2.235 million for the apartment. Mr. Rhea clearly believes in affordable housing for all.

It came because Rhea has no experience in housing. A few hours after his appointment was announced in City Hall, multiple Council members sent out statements denouncing the pick.

Councilwoman Letitia James said that Rhea was the wrong man for the job, both on account of his inexperience in the housing field and his background on Wall Street.

“The appointment of an African-American man,” she said in a statement, “who has no experience in managing a low-income public housing authority of this size and scale, and whose experience may be limited to private equity financing is troubling, and should not serve as a substitute or a panacea for the lack of diversity at City Hall.”

The Bloomberg administration was also criticized for not consulting with the Council.

Aside from the criticism, the pick was a classic move for the mayor, who has frequently tried to reach into the private sector to bring skilled managers into government.

I have not only managed within large complex organizations … I’ve also managed multi-billion dollar capital budgets,”  Rhea said at City Hall. “More needs to be done to make the kinds of progress Mayor Bloomberg wants to make.”

Bloomberg emphasized that Nycha is in need of strong management given its financial problems and its perception of being unresponsiveness to residents.

“This is a management job and a finance job,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Nycha, the entity that manages the city’s 179,000-unit public housing stock, has faced a dwindling commitment of federal resources in recent years, though housing advocates are optimistic that will turn around under the Obama administration. Rhea highlighted the need to get more funding from Washington as a priority.

It came as Mr. Rhea has no experience in housing. A few hours after his appointment was announced in City Hall, multiple council members sent out statements denouncing the pick.

Councilwoman Letitia James said that Mr. Rhea was the wrong man for the job, both on account of his inexperience in the housing field and his background on Wall Street.

“The appointment of an African-American man,” she said in a statement, “who has no experience in managing a low-income public housing authority of this size and scale, and whose experience may be limited to private equity financing is troubling, and should not serve as a substitute or a panacea for the lack of diversity at City Hall” 

The Bloomberg administration was also criticized for not consulting with the Council.

Aside from the criticism, the pick was a classic move for the mayor, who has frequently tried to reach into the private sector to bring skilled managers into government.

“I have not only managed within large complex organizations … I’ve also managed multibillion-dollar capital budgets,” Mr. Rhea said at City Hall. “More needs to be done to make the kinds of progress Mayor Bloomberg wants to make.”

Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that NYCHA is in need of strong management given its financial problems and its perception of being unresponsiveness to residents.

“This is a management job and a finance job,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

NYCHA, the entity that manages the city’s 179,000-unit public housing stock, has faced a dwindling commitment of federal resources in recent years, though housing advocates are optimistic that will turn around under the Obama administration. Mr. Rhea highlighted the need to get more funding from Washington as a priority.

ebrown@observer.com