Shola Olatoye, the former CEO of the New York City Housing Authority, will start next month as Oakland’s new director of housing and community development, the city administrator said Friday.
She replaces Michele Byrd, who vacated the post in April after an eight-year tenure. The city, citing employee privacy laws, declined to comment on Byrd’s departure. In April, NBC Bay Area reported that Byrd had been fired after falsely claiming that the city had been working with landlords to prevent illegal evictions.
Olatoye comes to Oakland at a time when the city is experiencing a surge in homelessness, rising home prices and increasing rents. Last year, there were 4,071 people experiencing homelessness in Oakland, according to the federal government’s biennial point-in-time count, a 47% increase since 2017. Meanwhile, the average rent for an apartment in Oakland was $2,905, up 7% from the prior year, according to RentCafe, a real estate website.
In New York, Olatoye led a 10-year plan to stabilize the city's beleaguered housing authority, the largest in the nation, which was facing billions in unmet capital needs. But she resigned in 2018 amid a lead paint poisoning scandal and accusations that she knowingly signed off on false inspection reports to the federal government. In an interview with a local television station following her resignation, Olatoye said she wished she had known about the lapse in lead paint inspections sooner.
Ben Metcalf, the former director of the state’s housing and community development department who interviewed Olatoye as a finalist for the position, said her other achievements outshone the controversy surrounding her departure from the authority.
Prior to entering the public sector, Olatoye worked on community development investment projects for HSBC Bank in South Florida and Washington, D.C. She later worked at a national affordable housing organization after the 2008 mortgage crisis. After leaving the authority, Olatoye joined Suffolk Construction, a national construction management firm, as its vice president of business development.
That varied experience is going to be essential if she hopes to combat homelessness and high housing costs in Oakland, Metcalf said.
“She has the ability to bring together different kinds of people and transition across different levels of government,” he said Metcalf. “What she can do is see the big picture.”
Housing advocates say she has no time to waste. While the city is experiencing an uptick in housing construction, the number of affordable units being built is lagging, according to a report the city released last year.