Metro

Stringer: Mismanaged NYCHA made heat outages worse

The recent rash of heat and hot water outages in the city’s public housing projects might not have been such a debacle if the de Blasio administration’s Housing Authority weren’t so mismanaged, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer.

The New York City Housing Authority may have used “inadequate’’ criteria to select boilers for replacement in 2016 as part of its five-year capital plan, Stringer’s office said.

And that’s potentially the reason why, as residents in 42 projects file complaints about the lack of heat amid the current cold snap, fewer than 12 percent of those sites are slated for the new boilers, the office said.

Of the nine complexes on the list for replacements, four haven’t even had recent heating breakdowns, his analysis revealed.

“It’s a management breakdown — and a financial failure,” Stringer told The Post. “These gaps in the capital budget raise big, big questions.”

The nine housing projects on track to get new boilers in the next five years are Baruch and Two Bridges houses in Manhattan; Pelham Parkway, Jackson and McKinley in the Bronx; and Gowanus, Marcy, Pink and Tilden in Brooklyn.

Four of those — Jackson, Marcy, McKinley and Two Bridges — have not experienced recent breakdowns, Team Stringer said.

Meanwhile, other complexes such as the Woodside Houses in Queens slogged through boiler failures as recently as last week that left tenants using their ovens to heat their homes.

And more than three dozen of the other complexes won’t get anything for new boilers under the current capital plan.

But “heat and hot water aren’t luxuries. They’re basic necessities,” Stringer said.

Stringer, who is planning a mayoral run, announced Saturday that he is now working on an audit of NYCHA’s heating systems.

He acknowledged Sunday that the problems with heating have been decades in the making — a point Mayor Bill de Blasio is also quick to make.

“The federal government started moving away from support for public housing back in the ’80s even. So we’ve got a lot of buildings with really old boilers, great employees who struggle to keep them going every day, but they unfortunately — we’ve got a lot of outages, and we have to fix them literally every single day in some cases,’’ de Blasio said during a radio interview with John Catsimatidis on Sunday.

Housing Authority spokeswoman Jasmine Blake blamed the present cold streak for “testing all of our facilities.

“While we appreciate the comptroller’s interest, the mayor’s budget plan is based on a more in-depth, comprehensive review of boilers across the system,” she said.