NYPost, Rich Calder, April 4, 2026

The New York City Housing Authority is widely considered one of the Big Apple’s worst landlords, yet its top execs are living large in mansions on huge taxpayer-funded salaries – even as residents sometimes wait years for basic repairs.

The cash-strapped, city-owned agency saw all 104 of its upper-management honchos pocket $22 million combined last year – all made at least $140,000 annually, and 74 pulled down $200,000 or more, a Post examination of NYCHA records shows.

That’s more than double NYCHA’s nearly $11 million spending on exec salaries in 2015, when its upper-management team was 34% smaller, totaling just 79 execs.

Leading the way is CEO Lisa Bova-Hiatt, whose base salary is an eye-watering $399,999.

She owns a $1.4 million home on Staten Island’s tony Todt Hill, about a mile from NYCHA’s Todt Hill Houses.

David Rohde, NYCHA’s executive VP for legal affairs, pulls down $301,198 and lives in a $2.8 million waterfront estate on the North Fork of Long Island.

Despite execs living high on the hog, the embattled authority — which saw 70 past and present staffers arrested in 2024 and later convicted following the largest single-day bribery takedown in the U.S. Department of Justice’s history — currently has 610,000 open work orders.

NYCHA also estimates it needs $78 billion to repair its aging infrastructure, which houses more than 511,000 residents across 335 public housing projects.

“NYCHA executives are cashing out off of the suffering of residents, and living large on the taxpayers’ dime,” ripped Rev. Kevin McCall, a civil-rights activist and longtime NYCHA critic.

“They turned public housing into a new hustle, with residents an afterthought, rather than saying ‘let me not take a raise’ so the money can go back into fixing the infrastructire, so that the living conditions have basic dignity.”

NYCHA’s own internal data shows it takes 449 days on average – or roughly 15 months– to resolve tenants’ non-emergency repair requests like clogged tubs and broken refrigerators, compared to 370 days just two years earlier. 

Some repair requests — for routine fixes like faulty pipes — remain unresolved more than five years later, according to residents.

As of last month, paint jobs took an average of 616 days to complete, electrical work 237 days, plumbing 233 days, and elevator repair 101 days.

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