Facing NYCHA Reality

In a move he’d been telegraphing for months, federal Judge William Pauley on Wednesday rejected the proposed consent decree on the New York City Housing Authority. It’s a slap at both Mayor de Blasio and US Attorney Geoffrey Berman — and a recognition of reality.

The city and the feds have until Dec. 14 to come back with a new, improved plan for how to bring NYCHA firmly into compliance with federal law. That could be an impossible task.

The judge cited several issues, all of which we’ve been flagging since the draft decree dropped on June 11. The plan is billions short of the cash needed for repairs — even if, as Pauley dryly noted, you assume “that NYCHA’s housing stock will not deteriorate further over the next 148 years.”

More, the agency’s behavior since June indicates that the federal monitor envisioned in the draft decree wouldn’t be enough to change NYCHA’s culture, as Berman has said is necessary. Indeed, Pauley sees “fissures in the parties’ collaborative front” that foreshadow a “prolonged judicial management of NYCHA through a monitorship whose costs may be limitless.”

Kudos to the judge for recognizing a prob- lem common to consent decrees: Time and again, they’ve set up oversight that never really fixes the root problem, even as they add expenses that also don’t buy improvements.

To be fair, that’s why acting NYCHA chief Stanley Brezenoff belatedly objected to the idea of a monitor — complaints Pauley flagged as a sign that it wouldn’t work.

But what else has to change? As we noted back in June, money alone isn’t enough, not “unless NYCHA is massively reformed” — including that cultural shift, big management changes “and a major rewrite of the authority’s union contracts.”

That, too, may not be enough: Public housing used to be about decent domiciles for the working class, but many NYCHA residents no longer work much at all. How well can the system work when its mission has changed, but not the laws that govern it?

New York is pretty much the only major US city that still has significant government-owned and -operated public housing. Everyone else has given up on that model for a host of good reasons, and it’s plainly not working here, either.

If de Blasio and Berman don’t admit that, they’ll have a tough time producing a plan the judge will accept.