The glaring omission in Mayor Mamdani’s “rental ripoff” hearings, called to spotlight the sins of private landlords, are the problems of New York’s public landlord, the city’s Housing Authority, which houses at least 400,000 residents. NYCHA’s estimated $78 billion in deferred maintenance is reflected every day on its sobering “service interruptions” website. Over the first nine weeks of this year, 318 public housing developments saw 558 such issues, from no heat to no power.

Mamdani is on record in support of “doubling the amount of money we spend on preservation for NYCHA” — but has not made clear where such funds would be found. But there’s actually a practical way to bring private funding into public housing renovation — and, if he has a pragmatic streak, the mayor should go to the Stanley Isaacs Houses in Yorkville to sell its 1,130 tenants on just that.

Tenants there are in the last........

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