Bricks and tricks

More than once, Mayor de Blasio has expressed bewilderment that his city doesn’t better appreciate all he’s done to advance affordable housing he promises will total 300,000 apartments newly built or preserved at low rents. But it’s no wonder, when honesty suffers in his defense of the biggest win on the scoreboard so far, 5,000 apartments he says he saved from the brutality of market rents in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

Five years ago, tenants in these once middle-income bastions were on the defensive as speculative owners planned to cash in by hastening their departure or awaiting their demise, then hiking rents as high as possible.

In 2015, in rushed de Blasio to what he called the rescue, striking a $220 million deal supposedly keeping thousands of units on the affordability rolls for a generation.

The Independent Budget Office now finds that the nearly-quarter-of-a-billion-dollar sum will likely make a far smaller dent than de Blasio led the city to believe — which was 20 years of guaranteed rent restraint for 5,000 apartments.

Pardon the gloating, but this is exactly what we warned at the time.

Just 30% of the benefit, says the IBO, will go to new tenants, many paying rents surpassing $3,000 a month. In the main those millions of dollars merely discourage the landlords from nudging aging residents, already well insulated by rent regulations, out the door.

Which falls far short of the transformational accomplishment the big guy had us believe he’d achieved. Do you sense a pattern here?