No Heat for Thanksgiving

It was 11:30 a.m. Thanksgiving morning when the heat went out for 4,200 tenants at the Grant Houses in East Harlem, according to the city Housing Authority’s Web site. In total, more than 25,000 NYCHA residents suffered heat or hot-water outages in the runup to the holiday. When do things start getting markedly better — and how?

After just a few months on the job, acting NYCHA chief Stanley Brezenoff is still trying to get agency management into some kind of rational shape, even as he triages limited resources to the most urgent problems. And he’s only starting to talk with NYCHA’s unions about labor reforms.

He has gotten Mayor de Blasio to go along with major changes that will bring in badly needed billions, at the “price” of putting up to a third of NYCHA projects under private management. But that’s a long-term, partial fix.

Meanwhile, City Hall is trying to work out a way forward with US Attorney Geoffrey Berman after federal Judge William Pauley tossed out their planned consent decree as utterly inadequate to turning NYCHA around. The judge somewhat agreed with Brezenoff ’s complaint that installing a fed- eral monitor over the agency could make things worse — or, at least, cost plenty without doing much good.

But Pauley also flagged the agency’s insular culture — and fresh evidence of that problem comes from city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who charges that NYCHA leaders have “purposely done everything they can” to delay his year-long audit. Even repeated subpoenas aren’t getting NYCHA to cough up the info he’s been demanding for months on how it handles heat and hot-water woes.

Is NYCHA management stonewalling an elected city official whose job is to investigate how the agency works? Is its staff so incompetent that it just can’t supply the information? Either way, it suggests a monitor would be pointless.

Clearly, the judge needs to demand the city agree to even broader changes of some kind — whether that means full-blown receivership for NYCHA, or wholesale management changes and a voiding of all its union contracts.

Whatever it takes to produce a publichousing system that doesn’t leave countless residents shivering through the winter.