Gov. Cuomo’s move to shore up the rent laws is terrible news for city housing.

Cuomo is calling for the end of vacancy decontrol — i.e., laws that let landlords turn regulated “luxury” apartments into market-rate units. He also wants to limit how much they can legally tack on to regulated rents to cover the cost of improvements. And he’d limit security deposits to no more than one month’s rent.

This lets the gov pose as a champion of the little guy, but it’ll just hasten the decline of buildings whose owners struggle to make ends meet. It’ll also further tighten the city’s already squeezed-to-the-gills housing market and drive up unregulated rents.

As Citizens Budget Commission research has found, “rent regulation leads to housing that is less well maintained.” Building owners who can’t pass on costs (for maintenance, insurance, taxes, upgrades, etc.) will have a harder time paying their bills. So they’ll cut back on fixes and improvements, or worse, abandon buildings altogether. In the 1960s, rent laws led city landlords to abandon more than 100,000 units.

Under Mayor de Blasio, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board has been keeping rents flat, cutting into landlords’ margins. Now Cuomo wants to prevent more owners from escaping the rent caps — so more of them will become financially jammed.

Fact is, few policies have been as destructive to the city as rent regulation. Not only has it spurred the decline of some buildings; it also prompts tenants to stay in units they no longer need. And it’s deprived the city of property-tax revenue to the tune of hundreds of millions a year, the CBC says, by depressing the value of buildings.

Most pathetic: Regulated units aren’t even reserved for the poor; stories of rich celebs paying obscenely low rents are common. So what’s the point?

Count this as one more way Cuomo is playing politics at the city’s expense.