Turn on the damn heat

Shivering and suffering, tens of thousands of tenants in New York City public housing spent the bitter, sub-zero plunge in intolerable conditions, with heat and hot water in their apartments sputtering or plain out. We’re working on it, says their landlord. Our boilers are really, really old, says their landlord, and the prior owners did a lousy job with upkeep.

That landlord is Mayor de Blasio — blowing hot air at tenants in more than 30 developments so frigid in past days that the Office of Emergency Management bused some to shelter.

No, the crisis at his New York City Housing Authority was not de Blasio’s doing, nor Chairwoman Shola Olatoye’s — not the rampant mold, not the lead paint left unabated before kids moved in, and not heating systems so obsolete that NYCHA estimates they will cost $2 billion to fix.

But de Blasio and Olatoye have owned the problem for four years, and their excuses are by now as tired and broken as many boilers.

Start by having enough staff on hand to respond when heat pipes clog and valves sputter. The union representing heating technicians says more than one in four have left their jobs since 2013, and haven’t been replaced. What are Olatoye and de Blasio waiting for? And don’t pretend that a solution will come from the feds, who have so drastically underfunded NYCHA that barely a tenth of obsolete boilers have replacements in store.

Mayor, chairwoman: Move heaven and Earth to raise funds to replace furnaces. Hit up wealthy former NYCHA tenants like Lloyd Blankfein; lease more land for more money-making real estate; squander no more funds on folly like subsidies for Stuyvesant Town.

This state of emergency won’t repair itself.