GOP aims to make ‘NYC’ a slur

As the saying goes: Be careful what you wish for. With Mayor de Blasio and this week’s elevation of Melissa Mark-Viverito as City Council speaker, left-leaning pols now control every major lever of official power in our city — and with that power comes a gigantic bull’s eye for national Republicans, who have already signaled an intention to use New York City as Exhibit A in the conservative holy war against liberalism.

That was the unmistakable meaning of a political shot across the bow fired by Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, who used a speech to a think tank to single out de Blasio’s call to halt the expansion of charter schools in New York.

“Just think, how many families will have their choices taken away if Mayor de Blasio pursues these policies?” Cantor said in prepared remarks. “Mayor de Blasio should abandon this plan and allow New York’s charter schools to continue to flourish.” Needless to say, de Blasio fired back. “The Republican agenda in Washington doesn’t even scratch the surface of the inequities facing more than a million children in our public schools,” he said in a prepared response to Cantor. “It’s a dangerous philosophy that turns its back on public education — and it has failed many times before.”

That likely signals an end to what has been a 20-year moratorium on national Republicans using the Big Apple as a political punching bag. During the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, in fact, Republicans delighted in pointing out that both mayors — elected on the GOP line — claimed credit for a steep drop in crime rates here.

With the ascendance of a New York progressive, all bets are now off.

For the last five years, national Republicans have used “Chicago” as a slur — rhetorically laying every problem in that city at the feet of the Obama administration.

New York can now expect the same treatment. Should a pothole go unfilled, conservatives will gleefully blame it on de Blasio’s left-wing ideology.

That’s not necessarily a problem — vigorous political debate is always a good thing — but there’s a real danger that national trash-talking might distract local pols from the unglamorous business of keeping our city safe and prosperous.

The single best way for city’s new leader- ship to make good on oft-repeated promise to govern in a “progressive” way would be a focused, all-out mission to rescue the troubled New York City Housing Authority.

Talk about a tale of two cities. While private property values are soaring throughout the city, the 400,000-plus residents of public housing continue to grapple with elevated levels of crime, crumbling infrastructure, a vast backlog of repairs and a yawning budget gap.

Sources inside NYCHA tell me that conditions in some developments have deteriorated to the point that we could soon see the Dept. of Buildings categorize entire buildings as unfit for human habitation and order them vacated, adding dozens or even hundreds of New Yorkers to the rolls of the homeless.

That’s consistent with repeated warnings from the last NYCHA chairman, John Rhea, that the agency’s accumulated capital deficit is a mind-boggling $14 billion dollars — far more than can be cured with any of the small-bore proposals floated during the mayoral campaign.

One idea worth considering is the con- troversial proposal to lease unused parking lots and other spaces to private developers, who could build middle-income housing or commercial space and pay rent back to NYCHA. In the same vein, the city could aggressively assess the value of air rights above some developments and consider selling them to developers for use elsewhere in the city.

Another is the idea of creating low-income housing tax credits, which could put millions into the hands of residents to prioritize much-needed repairs.

Another big-ticket approach would be to search for better-funded partner agencies, including CUNY, SUNY and the Department of Education, and see if they could share space (and costs) with some NYCHA developments. None of this would be easy, nor is it likely to generate quick photo-ops or national headlines, but tackling the NYCHA crisis might be the best possible way to prove that progressive government in New York — and its vow to end the tale of two cities — is a practical matter, not a national battle of slogans.

Progressives need to get to work here, not trade shots with Big Apple bashers elsewhere