New $24B plan for NYCHA fixer-upper

City Hall claimed Wednesday that it has a new strategy to cover the massive repair bill for the Housing Authority — two days before a judge could place the troubled agency under federal receivership.

“In other generations, people turned away from NYCHA and let it decline,” Mayor de Blasio said at the Hope Gardens project in Brooklyn, blaming his predecessors and ignoring his own administration’s lies and failures.

The city is under the gun because federal Judge William Pauley has rejected a repair plan hammered out with federal prosecutors and threatened to put NYCHA under the control of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

On Friday, the city has to file a new plan with Pauley.

City officials said they have identified $23.8 billion in resources to cover NYCHA’s massive repair bill, which has been estimated to be $31.8 billion over five years.

But almost all of the new funding will be delivered over 10 years — by which time, the repair tab is projected to soar past $40 billion.

Making that math work requires an enormous leap of faith: that NYCHA will be able to make repairs quickly and cost-effectively, and that more funds can be found to make up the shortfall.

“Twenty-four billion dollars is a huge amount of money,” said de Blasio. “We can fix the most pressing needs. If someone’s looking for perfection, it’s not here. [This plan] allows us to show the federal government that we are doing everything in our power to fix what has been a decades-old problem.”

The plan is anchored on three key new revenue streams:

The first is converting more than 60,000 apartments to private management, which would pay for roughly $13 billion of the repairs.

De Blasio took pains to say that existing tenants would not be evicted or face rent hikes as a result.

NYCHA hopes to generate another $2 billion by allowing additional “infill development” of new buildings on its land.

Seventy percent of apartments in these buildings would rent at market rates, and 30 percent would be affordable housing.

These projects would be exempt from the city’s rigorous zoning process.

De Blasio previously opposed plans to build mostly market-rate buildings on NYCHA-owned land. Instead, he sought developments where at least half of the units were set aside for lower-income New Yorkers.

But Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen conceded that program went nowhere.

“You can quote me: It was a failure,” she said.

Finally, officials are looking to score another $1 billion from selling air rights at NYCHA developments.

Previously, $8 billion had been allocated for NYCHA repairs.

We can fix the most m pressing needs. n If someone’s someo looking for perfection, it’s it not t here. — Mayor de Blasio

Big changes are underway at the city Housing Authority. But not big enough. And with no guarantee that the reform drive won’t peter out once the heat is off — and with NYCHA, you know the heat will go off, sooner or later.

The authority’s biggest union just agreed to a new contract that includes commonsense work-rule changes that the

last NYCHA chief, Shola Olatoye, pushed hard for — but couldn’t get, because City Hall wouldn’t back her up.

NYCHA also has embraced a host of money-raising changes that not long ago were also political nonstarters: Selling off air rights to private developers and letting the private sector build on NYCHA-owned land, plus a huge expansion of participation in the federal RAD program, which privatizes management of public-housing complexes.

Ideologues have been resisting all those reforms for years, calling it “privatization” — which Mayor de Blasio still insists he opposes, even as he’s swallowing a ton of it.

Yet all those changes promise to bring in only $16 billion of the authority’s $32 billion in capital needs — and that’s over 10 years, by which time those needs are expected to be $40 billion.

Even with $8 billion in new state and city aid, it’s not enough: More change must come, or it’s back to the same downward spiral.

These reforms only became thinkable because a Sword of Damocles is hanging over everything — the chance that federal Judge William Pauley may put NYCHA into receivership, taking control away from the city.

De Blasio is selling the reforms in part by warning this would destroy public housing altogether. Yet the mayor’s still clinging to his ideology — notably, settling for less money from private developers to keep “affordable housing” strings on those deals.

In short, neither NYCHA’s culture, nor the city’s political culture, has really changed; these are just concessions in a crunch.

That’s the pickle for Judge Pauley, who ordered the city and US Attorney Geoffrey Berman into court Friday with a new plan for a NYCHA turnaround: Whatever ideas they offer, he needs to keep that sword hanging over City Hall. Keep the fear alive!