NYCHA Boss’ Delusions

City Housing Authority Acting General Manager Vito Mustaciuolo actually bragged to the City Council the other day about all the “beautiful homes” he’s seen on NYCHA properties. Too bad they won’t stay beautiful unless the problems he was supposed to testify about get fixed.

Obviously, the acting GM would prefer to focus on cases where some of the residents in his agency’s 176,000 apartments haven’t suffered terribly. But 80 percent of them lost heat and/or hot water this past winter.

And the city Independent Budget Office says 15 percent of NYCHA tenants live in downright troubled developments.

Decades of deferred maintenance have the agency staring at a capital-investment hole of at least $17 billion. More immediately, it has a backlog of almost 100,000 work orders covering issues from rampant mold to broken elevators to unlit halls and stairs, not to mention lead-paint woes.

“It is unfortunate that the only focus is on unsightly conditions and the bad conditions,” whined Mustaciuolo to the council. Sorry: Focusing on the positive won’t change the fact that NYCHA is the city’s largest slumlord.

Nor is money the only issue. The Department of Investigation found NYCHA plagued by systemic mismanagement. And outgoing agency chief Shola Olatoye’s efforts to change insane union work rules died for lack of political support from City Hall.

The yet-to-be-appointed independent state monitor will have broad authority to prioritize and oversee health and safety repair projects (which the city will have to fund), but he can’t push through managerial reforms or undo those decades of capital neglect.

Behind Mustaciuolo’s happy talk is one large, grim truth: Massive city-owned and -managed housing projects simply don’t work in the long run. Elected officials just lack the incentives to make it happen.

For NYCHA to survive, it needs not just reform, but complete reinvention.