Why doesn’t Mayor Mamdani care about NYCHA affordable housing?

We’re starting to wonder if Mayor Zohran Mamdani has any real interest in promoting affordable housing in New York, rather than just posing on the issue: Why else would he ignore the thousands of public-housing units that sit empty for lack of funds to renovate?

The city Department of Investigation just identified 6,740 apartments now warehoused because the New York City Housing Authority can’t find the cash to bring them up to code.

The cost is only an estimated $52,000 per unit, far less than Mamdani wants to spend on other housing plans: The Queens project he’s asking President Donald Trump to fund would cost hundreds of times that per apartment.

Indeed, he could help renovate tens of thousands of private units now kept off the market for far less than that pipedream.

But back to NYCHA: The vacant units put other tenants in danger, as drug crews and vagrants seize them for illegal squats.

Indeed, squatters sit in hundreds of these apartments, while 165,000 law-abiding families languish on NYCHA’s waitlist.

Mr. Mayor: You are the landlord to half a million public-housing tenants, with a duty to address their inhumane living conditions — rats, dilapidation, lack of heat and hot water, poisonous mold and lead paint.

Bart Schwartz, the federal monitor overseeing the beleaguered agency since 2019, says NYCHA is “fraught with serious problems in structure, culture, and directions, and perhaps even worse.”

Mamdani’s rent freeze and “rental ripoff” hearings (where NYCHA tenants can’t ask questions!) will do nothing for these New Yorkers — are they just not bourgeois enough for him?

Or is it simply that facing the dysfunction of public housing would make a mockery of his plans to “socialize” buildings that are now private?

For what it’s worth, the NYPD cares: It drove crime in public housing down 14.7% in February and 12.1% year-to-date with record-low shooting incidents, shooting victims, murders and robberies.

Instead of asking the president for $21 billion for the Sunnyside project, Mamdani could find $400 million in his own budget to rehab these NYCHA units.

You could probably even get a great TikTok video out of it, Mr. Mayor.