There’s a difference between “affordable housing’ in woke fantasies and housing that’s actually affordable in the real world of bricks and mortar. Because advocates for long-range, massive affordable-housing programs based on socialistic pipe dreams are blowing more smoke than the stoners now stinking up every block in town.

People’s Exhibit No. 1 is the damage that City Council member Kristin Richardson Jordan has done to the cause of bringing actual homes for lower-income tenants to central Harlem. A new effort to sway her is under way but in Mayor Eric Adams’ dream-world “City of Yes,” her answer is likely to be “No” once again.

Any time there’s a chance to have new housing that includes cheaper apartments, even if not as many as “activists” demand, we should greet their developers with cookies and cake. Because in today’s climate of “No,” they’re the only reasonably-priced new housing we’re going to get.

But Richardson Jordan single-handedly blocked developer Bruce Teitelbaum from building One45, a mixed-use project at Lenox Avenue and West 145th Street. It would create 458 rental units, out of a total 915, priced for poorer New Yorkers — including 174 for Harlem residents who earn as little as $28,020. The rest would be market-rate.

But Richardson Jordan didn’t want One45 in her district. “Gentrification,” you see. Translation: she didn’t want any new residents who would dilute the voting base for herself or her likely far-left Council successors. The same insidious, exclusionary motivation drove corrupt State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to block Lower East Side redevelopment for nearly 40 years. The site, which Silver kept barren, is today’s Essex Crossing (Silver has since passed away).

Harlem in the West 140s needs as much new housing at any price it can get. Richardson Jordan’s “no” compelled Teitelbaum to withdraw his proposal, which required a zoning change, last year. (The Council traditionally yields to the district member’s wishes). Now the half-empty site faces a future partly as a truck depot.

In an epic stroke of chutzpah, Richardson Jordan is raging against having a truck depot at the location, too. It recalls the old joke about the kid who kills his parents and then whines to the judge that he’s an orphan.  

As Cindy Adams would say: Only in New York, kids, only in New York. But the joke’s on us, the voters. We elect “progressive” lawmakers and judges who champion more affordable housing — but then throw down every possible roadblock to prevent such housing from being built.

Teitelbaum moved last week to try again to have the land rezoned. He put Richardson Jordan on the spot by pointing out — correctly — that she, and she alone, would be responsible for denying Harlemites new housing in favor of  a truck lot. She’s been silent ever since.

Her hypocrisy typifies the demagoguery and fantasy-spinning that rule the public discourse around “the housing crisis.”  Often, this crisis is framed in terms of visibly suffering “homeless” living on the street. But many folks without homes wouldn’t accept Plaza Hotel suites for free, for the simple reason that they’re mentally ill, psychotic and/or drug-addled. They need humane medical and psychiatric attention, not empty promises of better places to live.

We’re told that “government” can and should solve the housing shortage by simply spinning cheap, or even free, apartments out of whole cloth — as if our elected leaders could seize private property or otherwise deny reality.

In fact, nice, woke-list buildings filled with low- or no-income tenants who pay little to no rent will rise on the moon before they appear in the five boroughs. No wonder Mayor Eric Adams’ described his recent housing “blueprint” for 500,000 new homes within a decade as a “moonshot.”

Anti-progress “progressive’ types fabricate every excuse possible to justify this madness. Wacky Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur F. Engoron took it upon himself last month to negate a plan approved by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to build apartments, 20% of them affordable, on an empty lot in the Seaport District.

The lot at 250 Water Street is beloved only by residents of neighboring towers unwilling to give up their East River views. Why would a judge nix an obvious no-brainer like replacing an empty lot with new homes by a responsible developer, the Howard Hughes Corp., which rescued the decayed Seaport from oblivion a few years back?

Answer: Ergoron decided that because the LPC had previously rejected a different plan for 250 Water Street, it should have rejected the new one as well. The bench buffoonery was so outrageous that even “progressive”-friendly New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote that it “ignores the altered realities of an increasingly alienating housing market that has escalated to a humanitarian emergency.”

The “realities” include a thicket of laws that inhibit any kind of development, endless  land-use and environmental reviews and onerous rent controls. The nation’s highest land and labor costs, too, make it all but impossible for a builder to break even, much less make a profit, unless apartments are sold or rented for big bucks.

Already, developers say they’re giving up on creating 32,000 new apartments, which would include  8,200 affordable ones, because the state Legislature let the 421-A tax exemption for such projects expire, according to the Real Estate Board of New York. (Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying to revive it.)

Politicians nonetheless continue to hype unachievable housing goals. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine made a splash a few weeks ago for identifying 171 Manhattan locations where 73,000 homes supposedly could be built.

But three-quarters of Levine’s wish-list locations would need zoning changes — the same  zoning changes which the City Council increasingly rejects. Moreover, many office buildings can’t actually be converted to apartments, unless tenants don’t mind living without windows.

Which is why if we end up with even fewer new places to live than we had before, we should blame our “leaders” who halted true progress — and ourselves for letting them get away with it.