De Blasio’s brick wall

Even while tenants living in the slums with NYCHA signs out front plead for salvation, Mayor de Blasio dismisses as a “privatization scheme” a fair proposition from Gov. Cuomo to fast-track overhauls to boilers, roofs, lead paint and more by knocking down bureaucratic barriers in the way.

At the teetering Taft Houses in Harlem Saturday, Cuomo upped the ante by adding $250 million to get the job done, bettering the $200 million the state Assembly proposes. With him stood tenant leaders who’ve sued NYCHA, demanding a court-appointed monitor intervene.

All say NYCHA deserves design-build authority to speed construction and save big bucks. But as a condition for delivering the city more state funding, the governor also wants assurances that the funds will be spent efficiently, not through the Byzantine NYCHA bureaucracy. De Blasio wants the cash without strings attached. Not this time. Because the mayor has in four years squandered opportunities to save NYCHA, and with it his credibility to lead a turnaround.

Many have been the calls for the head of NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye, who has made her share of management mistakes — most egregiously, failing to comprehend and act swiftly on failures of her crews to address lead poisoning.

This editorial board has refrained from joining the pack — because NYCHA’s biggest obstacle to recovery is plainly not its chair but the mayor.

It was de Blasio who stalled, the Wall Street Journal reports, while other cities embraced an innovative federal program allowing them to privately raise $19 for every public housing dollar — rainfall in the desert made barren by congressional budget cutbacks. NYCHA is in the game, but years behind the curve.

It was de Blasio who rebuffed a proposal from members of Metro-IAF to build 15,000 units of senior housing on NYCHA property — a cause now embraced by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson — and de Blasio who, undermining Olatoye, signed a NYCHA union contract leaving intact crippling and costly work rules.

It will take many hands to excavate the mayor out of the NYCHA hole he dug deep.