The agreement calls for the appointment of a powerful monitor and would lead to the eventual replacement of the authority’s interim chairman, who was appointed last year by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The Trump administration stopped short of a full takeover, but the deal marks a turning point on a thorny issue for de Blasio, who has overseen the housing authority for the past five years, and has made addressing affordable housing a central theme of his administration.
Under de Blasio, NYCHA became the subject of a federal investigation and intense criticism for several controversies, including mishandled lead paint inspections and widespread heat outages.
The tentative settlement was reached after negotiations involving the de Blasio administration, NYCHA, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The deal comes two months after a federal judge overturned an earlier settlement and consent decree that was reached last year.
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Aspects of the new agreement were still being negotiated Thursday morning, a Trump administration official cautioned. But Ben Carson, the HUD secretary, was traveling to New York for a news conference later in the day “to make an announcement regarding the New York City Housing Authority,” his office said in a news advisory.
As part of the new deal, the city would also agree to invest an additional $1 billion in the authority’s dilapidated housing stock over the next four years and $200 million per year after that — the same commitment it had made in the earlier settlement that was voided, the officials said.
The deal would also establish deadlines by which NCYHA must remediate many of the hazards identified by the U.S. attorney’s office
By striking a deal with Carson, de Blasio avoided the potential federal takeover of the nation’s largest and oldest public housing system, home to more than 400,000 low-income New Yorkers.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.