Councilwoman Letitia James is questioning Mayor Michael Bloomberg's appointment of John B. Rhea, who has no public housing experience, to head the city's Housing Authority (NYCHA) at a time when the authority is facing important challenges across the city and in her Central Brooklyn district.

Since the May 13th appointment, other City Council members have joined James in protesting the mayor's decision to pick a former Wall Street executive for the city's top housing post.

"I recognize that the administration is demographically challenged," James said in an interview, referring to the small percentage of elected officials who are minorities (Rhea is African-American), "but they should not appoint someone without experience to this crucial position."

Rhea replaces Ricardo Elías Morales, who served for several months as interim chair of NYCHA after Tino Hernandez stepped aside in December following a seven-year run as head of NYCHA.

James said Rhea's years on Wall Street, where he worked as an executive for Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase, make him best suited for a key financial advisory role in city government.

"We do not want to lose his experience," she said. However, James continued, a career in finance does not necessarily translate to one in public housing policy, where the chairmen of NYCHA must balance a complicated set of contending issues across many diverse neighborhoods throughout the city.

The chairmen of NYCHA is responsible for overseeing the nation's largest public housing system, one with 178,000 apartments in 340 developments. According to the authority's most recent statistics, it serves a total of 633,637 residents - a number so large, if NYCHA were its own city it would be the 19th largest, by population, in the country.

"Rhea has never walked in the door of a New York City public housing complex," James said, arguing that the chairmen of NYCHA must be familiar with the system to effectively oversee its development. "This is not the time to learn. We need someone who can hit the ground running."

In James' district, which comprises Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights, she said there are several pressing public housing needs that must be addressed. These include crumbling infrastructure, lack of community services, and inadequate funding, among others, James said.

Rhea is sure to face a brewing public housing controversy in Fort Greene, where the Whitman-Ingersoll houses have been chosen for an infusion of $87 million in federal stimulus funding for interior and exterior renovation work.

Section 3 of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Act stipulates that housing authorities must make a good faith effort to hire public housing tenants and low-income residents to work on federally funded public housing improvement projects. Public housing advocates have accused NYCHA in the past of failing to comply with the law.

Two weeks before Rhea's appointment, James appeared with New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and other elected officials before the Whitman-Ingersoll houses to demand that NYCHA hire locally before starting the $87 million improvement project.

Beyond the employment issue, said James, lies the starker fact that the stimulus funding, while timely, is a temporary solution at best to NYCHA's long-term financial problems.

"The stimulus funding is bricks and mortar. It does not address operational costs," James said. "We need more funds from Washington and Albany."

Securing them will be one of Rhea's biggest challenges, though if it's up to James, he might not get the chance. While she conceded the decision has been made, James said she would continue lobbying the Bloomberg Administration to "do a 180 and reconsider" overturning the appointment.