Cold comfort

When a heat wave pushes temperatures above 100 degrees this weekend, lucky and mobile New Yorkers can bliss out in front of their air conditioning units, visit a nearby cooling center, head to the beach or dip in a city pool (and thank Mayor de Blasio for keeping beaches and pools open late.)

Not so for public housing residents who rely on 49 NYCHA community centers across the city, where, as WNBC TV Ch. 4 reports, AC systems are on the fritz. (Thanks for nothing, Mayor de Blasio.)

Sixteen centers’ AC systems require repairs. At 33 more, technicians simply failed to turn off the heat and switch on the cool — work that should have been done months ago. Leave it to NYCHA to fail to properly heat buildings in the dead of winter,

then fail to cool them in the scalding sauna of summer.

A Housing Authority press flack told us that non-functioning AC is a minor problem compared to the housing authority’s other issues: lead paint, toxic mold, etc. Is that the attitude new boss Greg Ross, with his $400,000 salary, wants to instill — that lower-level incompetence is to be tolerated as long as staff is also tackling epic incompetence? An average 115 New Yorkers die each year from heat-related injuries and illnesses.

NYCHA couldn’t explain why it’s taken so long for technicians to turn on the cold air, nor whose job it is to get the work was done in a timely fashion.

Unlike many of NYCHA’s problems, this isn’t about money. This problem was caused by good, old-fashioned ineptitude.