POLITICS: Who needs practical 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 maintained — though even Mamdani isn’t calling for NYCHA to control more city housing.

But his prescription, and that of tenant-protection czar Cea Weaver, amounts to creating a host of new NYCHAs and simply assuming they’ll work out better.

You want proof? They’ve got theories!

Meanwhile, the city’s ongoing property-tax hikes (disguised as “reassessments”) and pricey mandates like the city’s “climate”-centered Local Law 97, plus the landlord-handcuffing 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (passed with Weaver leading the lobbying drive) continue to squeeze landlords.

Roughly a third of buildings with significant numbers of rent-stabilized units are already under water — their rental income too low to cover ongoing costs; Mamdani’s promised rent freeze will make the crisis worse.

The sinister (and possibly true) explanation is that Weaver and Mamdani want to bankrupt as many landlords as they can, so the city can snap up their buildings for a song.

Too bad the strategy means running down the buildings’ conditions first, only adding to the costs the city budget will have to cover if the units are to remain occupied.

Again: Weaver’s 2019 law has already forced well over 50,000 affordable apartments off the market because the allowed rents for the units won’t cover the costs of bringing them up to code, and Team Mamdani has yet to offer any solid proposals for resolving that dilemma.

Yes, landlords should maintain their properties — but the building’s income should be enough to cover its costs, no matter whether the owner is a corporation, a nonprofit or the city itself, otherwise decay is guaranteed.

Fine, Weaver wants to create a “universal right to housing” wherein rent depends on your ability to pay, but even she admits (as she told Reason magazine in 2021), that costs “money to own and operate and run.”

So what’s her solution for NYCHA, and her plan to avoid reproducing that disaster?

“Perpetual mismanagement of NYCHA has made the city itself the worst overall landlord for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers,” says Williams; but even if mismanagement were the only problem, does he, Mamdani or Weaver have some secret formula for ensuring good management?

President Barack Obama’s solution was to privatize the management of public housing, as it happens.

A Mamdani & Co. push all the city’s housing chips into the pot on the opposite bet, it’s sure be nice if they could offer some reason to believe they have a clue what they’re doing.