NYCHA on the brink

Trump to NYCHA: Drop dead. That’s the upshot of a White House budget plan that would eliminate federal funding for public housing upgrades and sharply cut operating funds, even as New York City’s public housing authority flails to keep homes for more than 400,000 minimally habitable.

Rent vouchers to help pay for privately owned digs would shrivel, too.

Cue entirely justified outrage in a city that’s home to one in every six public housing apartments in the nation, and where neglect over decades has put an estimated $25 billion price tag on fixing bricks, boilers, elevators, plumbing and more.

NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye isn’t exaggerating when she says such cuts “would mean the dismantling of public housing and taking people’s homes away from them.”

But, awful as it is, the all-out assault from Washington must not distract from the fact that the very people who are supposed to be safeguarding public housing here at home — we’re looking at you, Mayor de Blasio and Chairwoman Olatoye — have failed, over many years, to get serious about putting the system on firmer footing.

Irony of ironies, the meat-ax Trump budget also holds out a lifeline NYCHA needs: the proposed expansion of a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program allowing private investment, called Rental Assistance Demonstration, that is already helping revive a battered 1,400-apartment NYCHA project in the Rockaways and has fueled dramatic improvements to public housing in places like San Francisco.

Disastrously for NYCHA residents, de Blasio has mostly snubbed the opportunity to do more projects like it. By the time NYCHA belatedly cued up 5,000 more apartments for the rescue program, most got shunted to a HUD waiting list.

Bizarrely, the mayor touts his plan to use billions of dollars in city funds and borrowing power to spur private affordable housing development and preservation — but just as fervently holds that public housing is the federal government’s responsibility, even as he knows the cavalry isn’t coming.

And refuses to count fixing up NYCHA apartments toward his housing tally.

In his State of the City address Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio professed: “Our public housing residents are a priority for me, they’re a priority for my administration . . . more than at any other point before in our history,” evidenced by new city spending.

To live up to that rhetoric, NYCHA needs more than money. It needs leadership. It needs imagination. It needs management mettle.

How about it, Mr. Mayor?