New York City's troubled housing authority is turning to one of the Twin Cities for help.

Gregory Russ, the executive director of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, was tapped Tuesday to lead the scandal-plagued agency known as the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

NYCHA has been without a permanent leader for months following a major settlement with the federal government and prosecutors aimed at reforming the agency.

The Bill de Blasio administration had blown two deadlines to select the new leader over the last several months.

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The job, no question, will be tough. Russ will take over the agency as it alongside a federal monitor.

"The notion that you are going to be fostering moves that may, a, deplete those units or, b, move your constituency to another location, is a huge tension, " Russ said in a 2017 speech.

And his new role will most certainly be a major step up: there are just approximately 6,000 public housing units in Minneapolis with about 10,500 residents.

Compare that to NYCHA: 175,636 public housing apartments here with about 392,259 authorized residents. That's a little less than entire population (422,331 for Minneapolis) of the city Russ is coming from.

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"We are currently high performing, entrepreneurial. We are doing a complete RAD portfolio conversion," Russ said in a 2016 speech.

Before Minneapolis, Russ led the housing authority in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's established a reputation for pushing a federal program called RAD, which hands over public housing units to private, nonprofit developers.

That position has led to some criticism of his leadership in the Midwest.

"I think Mayor de Blasio is making a huge mistake," Ladan Yusuf of the Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition said in a phone interview. "We were kind of shocked that New York City, the size of the public housing agency, that they would actually choose this guy to do this."

"You lose a lot of credibility when you are not engaging with the residents of public housing that are directly impacted by RAD and privatization-type plans," said Eric Hauge, the executive director of HOME Line.

It will be some time before Russ officially takes over; he is slated to start in mid-August.

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