Who needs practical NYC housing policies when Mamdani has such lovely theories?

Progressives like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams love to rage about too-high rents and apartment complexes with lots of housing violations — conveniently ignoring a fundamental contradiction, namely: Higher-rent buildings have vanishingly few violations, because the landlord can afford to fix things.Unveiling his latest “Worst Landlord” list last week, Williams raged at greedy landlords’ thousands of open violations and other poor conditions.“Each hazardous violation on the Worst Landlord Watchlist, each building in disrepair, each landlord putting profit over people, represents New Yorkers suffering in their homes,” he huffed, calling for more housing inspectors to presumably hector the evildoers into changing their ways.Then again, Williams also admitted that he had to exclude City Housing Authority complexes from consideration, because otherwise NYCHA would’ve “far surpassed” the bad guys he targeted.

It has hundreds of thousands of open work orders to address various violations — but lacks the cash to address them speedily, because rents are too low and no one, including the new mayor, wants to simply spend more public funds to make up the difference.Oh, and the nonprofit building owners that Mamdani points to as the answer aren’t immune to the problem, either: His new Housing Preservation and Development commissioner, Dina Levy, arranged for taxpayer funds to help a nonprofit take over 1520 Sedgwick Ave.in The Bronx back in 2011, yet The Post just discovered that the building is in a wretched state of disrepair, with hundreds of outstanding serious violations.Mamdani this month hailed Levy’s “success” there, days after he thundered about the horrors of 85 Clarkson Ave.

in Brooklyn — a privately own building with less than half as many serious “Class C” violations.We guess Democratic Socialists just figure any “socially owned” building is inherently superior to a private one that’s better mai...