Michael Goodwin: Mayor Mamdani is NYC’s Mr. Freeze – and his cold-hearted approach is costing homeless people their lives

One of the only things I admired about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor was his temperament.

His events and social media videos were invariably upbeat, and he seemed to be enjoying the long slog enough to flash a smile even when his quest appeared to be a lost cause.

With a few exceptions, that even keel has remained intact since his shocking election, but I’m no longer convinced it’s a virtue.

Rather, with 18 New Yorkers found dead on icy streets, at least 15 of them from hypothermia, according to the medical examiner, any mayor with a heart would be devastated — and moved to action before another soul perishes in that god-awful way.

But it shocks the conscience that Mamdani maddeningly refuses to own the problem, let alone do anything of significance about it.

At the very least, he should have ordered city workers to move as many homeless people as possible indoors as soon as the temperatures plunged.

His refusal to pull out all the stops to save lives suggests his heart is as cold as the winter wind.

How could he see people huddled under filthy rags and plastic while wind-chill temperatures fell below zero, and not use his power to help them when they were so obviously incapable or unwilling to help themselves?

What, no compassion?

That’s socialism for you, comrade.

Outlandish justification

City Hall’s lame defense for the inaction is built on an outlandish claim that the laws prohibit moving people inside if they don’t want to go.

Oh, please.

That excuse didn’t stop any other mayor in the past 40 years from helping those who couldn’t or wouldn’t help themselves when temperatures got near freezing.

Ever since Ed Koch used city employees to pick up the homeless in vans and take them indoors, against their will if necessary, each succeeding mayor has successfully followed a variation of that policy.

The result is that there never was a death toll anywhere near what has happened already on Mamdani’s brief watch.

So either his administration is completely ignorant of history or is contemptuous of how his predecessors reacted when they were confronted with similar situations.

Instead of acting, he made excuses and looked the other way.

So saving lives would be illegal — that’s his defense?

This is sophistry, not leadership, and it’s certainly not worthy of New York.

As former City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer told The Post, “You bring ’em in and you worry about the court case later.”

He wondered whether Mamdani’s lack of action was because “of ideology or incompetence.”

I suggest a third option: Mamdani simply doesn’t care enough to do the job well.

He won the election, but apart from trying to enact his socialist fever dreams about raising taxes, giving away free stuff and imposing government mandates on private citizens and their property, nothing else about the job appears to interest him.

He couldn’t even be bothered to attend the installation of a new archbishop at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, making him the first mayor in nearly a century to skip such an event that is important to millions of Catholics.

He’s apparently too busy building utopia to actually care about the nuts and bolts of governing a city of 8½ million people.

‘What do we do now?’

His lack of interest in the nitty-gritty recalls the Robert Redford character in the 1972 movie “The Candidate.”

After pulling off a shocking upset to win a US Senate seat, Redford looks at his campaign guru and asks, “What do we do now?”

At this point, it seems reasonable to conclude that our 34-year-old mayor doesn’t even care enough to ask what he should do next.

However you slice it, he’s in way over his head.

Just six weeks after he took the oath, it’s painfully obvious he’s unfit to handle the awesome responsibilities that land on the big desk at City Hall.

Some of us said as much repeatedly before Election Day.

Unless you count a stint in the Legislature, Mamdani has been living off his wealthy parents his entire life and never had to get up each day and go to a real job.

Suddenly, after turning out a winning coalition of young progressives and old leftover liberals, he is responsible for running the nation’s largest and most complex city.

His lack of urgency about helping the homeless was foretold in key ways.

The fact that he has not even appointed his own team to run the sprawling Department of Homeless Services, which has a budget of about $3.5 billion, shows the agency’s mission was not a priority to him.

Instead, he kept as holdovers most of the team chosen by Eric Adams, the predecessor he reviles, but gave them little or no guidance about his priorities.

Officials tell the Post that in response to 96% of the calls the public made to Homeless Services to try to get help for those living outside during the deep freeze, nothing happened.

Testimony on Tuesday at the City Council showed that the agency has about 400 social workers tasked with responding to such calls, and that approximately 250 people living on the streets refused help.

The social workers took no for an answer, presumably because they were instructed not to move people against their will.

Unhealthy diversion

Meanwhile, Mamdani’s crusade against Israel already is in full swing, at, of all places, the Department of Health.

Employees in a Long Island City, Queens, office created a “working group” that accused Israel of committing genocide, The Post reported.

On city time, staff members held the first “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group,” meeting on Feb. 3 during office hours.

“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one employee said while reading the group’s mission statement, according to a video The Post obtained.

Just what the city doesn’t need.

Another example of Mamdani’s failure to do his job — managing the Sanitation Department — is visible throughout the five boroughs.

More than two weeks after about a foot of snow fell, icy mounds topped off by accumulated garbage and recycling materials have turned many city streets into filthy and cluttered eyesores.

Surely Mamdani sees what we all see, but why doesn’t he use his power to do something about it?

Has he tried and failed to get the mess cleaned up, or does he not care?

It’s not as if he is facing a problem unique to his tenure.

In fact, the January storm was not nearly a record snowfall.

With 11.4 inches measured in Central Park, NBC reports that the accumulation doesn’t even make the list of top 10 city storms compiled by the National Weather Service.

Heaven help us all if a citywide emergency of any kind occurs in the next four years.