New York City's Housing Authority, whose buildings house 400,000 residents and are plagued with electrical outages pretty much every time day it rains, has a new boss! John Rhea is the former managing director of the Lehman Brothers global consumer retail group, but also worked at JP Morgan Chase. Also he gives money to political campaigns completely indiscriminately. John Edwards and Mitt Romney, wow. Bloomberg's point in hiring him was that he take the deficit-riddled nightmare of NYCHA into hand. It would be some sort of fallacy-addled argument for me to point out that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy just last September, right?
I think you're missing the point. (but then again so did the NY Times). He will be able to follow Bloomberg's prior model for a variety of public agencies: get a rich person who isn't beholden to any interest group and have them lead private fundraising with all their rich friends. Rhea won't be getting his precious, manicured hands dirty actually running anything at NYCHA. He's just a fundraiser.
I don't know, sigerson - Klein actually runs the Education Department, for example.
I think the Development Mayor wants the land for development. First they starve the authority of funds, then they point out how inefficient it's run (because it doesn't have funds), then they bankrupt it and then they sell it to the private sector cause, hey, we all know the private sector can do it better! And then they finance the development that the private sector does because, hey, public-private partnerships are the best of both worlds - investment by the public, ownership by the private.
Up next for salvage by the private sector: the MTA.