NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed the city’s sanitation commissioner Tuesday to temporarily run the embattled New York City Housing Authority, which is under fire for years of mismanagement and dilapidated and dangerous living conditions in its apartments.

Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation chief since 2014, will replace Stanley Brezenoff, who last year was appointed interim chairman of the nation’s largest public housing system after a lead-paint scandal led to the resignation of the housing agency’s chairwoman.

Brezenoff’s departure comes less than a week after the city struck a landmark deal with the federal government to appoint a monitor to oversee improvements to the city’s public housing system, which houses more than 400,000 poor and working-class New Yorkers. By reaching an agreement, the city narrowly avoided a potential federal takeover of the agency and committed to invest at least $2.2 billion in the city’s 325 housing projects, which are riddled with mold, leaks and heat outages.

The agreement also paved the way to replace Brezenoff within 90 days with a permanent leader jointly chosen by the city, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Brezenoff will step down Feb. 15, said Eric F. Phillips, the mayor’s spokesman.

“On behalf of all New Yorkers, I thank Stan not only for his decades of service to the city, but for leaving NYCHA much stronger than he found it,” the mayor said in a statement.

Garcia will take a temporary leave of absence from the Department of Sanitation to run the authority, known as NYCHA, while the search for a permanent leader continues.

“I am going to work every single day to make life better for the 400,000 New Yorkers who call NYCHA home,” Garcia said in a statement.

Brezenoff, 81, has served as the go-to fixer of many troubled city agencies; he said he always saw his time at the helm of the housing agency as temporary. De Blasio named him interim chairman after the departure of Shola Olatoye, who resigned in April amid revelations of mishandled lead paint inspections at NYCHA apartments.

“I’ve been trying to get out of this job for months,” Brezenoff said last week when the mayor and Ben Carson, the HUD secretary, signed the oversight deal.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Garcia began her career as an intern at the Department of Sanitation. Garcia later worked for eight years at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, where she was the chief operating officer before de Blasio appointed her sanitation commissioner.

During her tenure at the DEP, Garcia worked with a federal monitor to help bring the agency into federal compliance. After becoming sanitation commissioner in 2014, she oversaw about 10,000 employees and set the city’s long-term goal of contributing zero waste to landfills.

In October, the mayor gave her an additional role as a senior adviser in charge of coordinating cross-agency efforts to lower the city’s lead exposure to zero.

Her appointment came after the city faced intense criticism for mishandling lead paint inspections at NYCHA apartments, where a total of 1,160 children since 2012 were found to have elevated lead levels in their blood.

“I am excited to take on this new role and to work with my colleagues across city government to keep our kids safe,” she said at the time.

During his short stint at NYCHA, Brezenoff helped craft the housing agency’s aggressive plan aimed at tackling almost $32 billion worth of urgently needed repairs. Under the plan, the day-to-day operations of one-third of the housing stock will be handed over to private developers who will renovate and make repairs to the units.

“This is one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs in America,” Brezenoff said in a statement. “I will leave this interim role knowing that we are putting NYCHA in very capable hands.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.