Damon E. Duncan, a public and affordable housing veteran with 26 years of experience, is to be named the next chief executive officer of the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, the Free Press has learned.

RRHA’s board is scheduled to meet next Wednesday, Feb. 20, to officially tap Mr. Duncan, currently chief executive officer of the Housing Authority of Elgin, Ill., 35 miles northwest of Chicago. He has held that post since 2012.

“Is he the right man? We’ll soon find out,” said one source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Efforts to reach Mr. Duncan this week were not successful.

His selection would cap a yearlong national search to replace T.K. Somanath, who resigned in late January 2018 amid an uproar over RRHA’s slow pace of fixing broken heating systems — a problem that continues to plague the authority this winter.

Orlando Artze has served as interim chief executive officer, and he and his staff also have struggled to keep the heat working in the aging public housing communities while launching new developments in Church Hill North and Jackson Ward to partly replace current units in Creighton Court and Fay Towers, respectively.

As of Feb. 8, radiators were not functioning in 10 public housing units and only partially functioning in 46 others, RRHA reported, despite pouring extra resources into making repairs. Those tenants have had to rely on space heaters provided by themselves or by RRHA.

In selecting Mr. Duncan, who is an African-American, RRHA’s board will again bypass its own staff as well as others in Richmond who applied and go outside to find its next leader. Mr. Duncan has never worked in Richmond or Virginia, instead spending his career in Michigan and Illinois.

That is expected to be a sore point from some in Richmond.

“We have expertise here, but everyone wants to look elsewhere. I don’t understand why our government isn’t willing to choose someone who knows this area,” another source said.

Mr. Duncan appears to have outshone competitors with his experience in housing development and the conversion of public housing into subsidized affordable housing — a key RRHA goal.

RRHA has laid out a plan to largely divest itself of most or all of the 4,000 units of public housing it was set up to manage more than 76 years ago, when it built the first public housing community, Gilpin Court, north of Downtown.

Instead, with the approval of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which owns public housing, RRHA is seeking to partner with private developers who would gain majority control, renovate or replace the units and receive monthly rent subsidies through the housing choice voucher program.

During his tenure in Elgin, Mr. Duncan has led the conversion of that community’s public housing into affordable housing communities, with vouchers now the main element of subsidized housing. The website for the Illinois authority states that there is no longer any public housing in Elgin.

Along with running the Elgin housing authority, Mr. Duncan has operated his own real estate consulting firm, ClesiaVentures, according to information he posted on the internet.

His internet page states that he has “over 26 years of experience in public housing and Section 8 operations, resident initiatives, grants writing and program management.”

His résumé includes five years as a senior manager for IMC Consulting, which provides program management for public housing authorities, community health centers and primary care associations and two years as director of the HOPE VI public housing transformation effort in Detroit.

He is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University. He also has earned a master’s in public administration from Central Michigan University and a master’s in real estate development from Auburn University. He participated in Rutgers University’s executive director education program.