A golden opportunity

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Opportunity right under Mayor de Blasio’s nose, to unlock thousands of apartments for New York’s neediest in the middle of a housing crisis, on land the city already owns. Mr. Mayor, on behalf of thousands of families in desperate need of affordable housing and seniors in an aging city who can be matched to new right-sized units close to home: Focus. Now.

In a new report, the city’s Independent Budget Office says a whopping one in three households living in New York City Housing Authority apartments has more bedrooms than they need.

That’s more than 57,000 in all, half of them headed by senior citizens who watched children grow up and move out.

Upwards of 20,000, suggests a separate stocktaking from the Manhattan Institute think tank, consist of a lone individual in an apartment with two, three, even four bedrooms that younger and bigger families badly need.

These numbers have only grown more skewed since de Blasio took office in 2014, notwithstanding offers of $5,000 cash to 1,500 of those in the most absurdly oversized apartments to move to smaller digs elsewhere in NYCHA. (Just 171 took the lure, fewer than half those projected.)

NYCHA could simply demand the able-bodied move, but won’t for want of vacant units and the uproar that would ensue.

It all cries out for an obvious solution: On ample unused NYCHA land, erect new, modestly sized apartment buildings just for senior citizens — with services fitting their special needs.

Members of the grassroots group Metro-IAF have pleaded with de Blasio to do precisely this, suggesting 15,000 new units — equal to more than half the number of seniors now living in too-big NYCHA apartments. That would enable mass move-outs and, equally important, open up public housing to a new generation now locked out.

De Blasio counteroffered 1,000, an insult. He cedes the high ground on getting more public housing apartments to more New Yorkers to, wait for it, the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development local administrator Lynne Patton said the federal government may reboot a dormant program to fund construction of new housing for seniors, specifically to address the woeful, wasteful mismatch between tiny households and tremendous apartments.

If there’s a smidgeon of seriousness there, de Blasio should welcome every penny.

Unless he’s more worried about losing face than gaining tens of thousands of affordable units.