A key state lawmaker downplayed the importance of a central cause to the Big Apple’s housing crisis in an extraordinary recent exchange with top city planners — providing a stark example of how hard it will be for Gov. Kathy Hochul to muscle reforms through Albany.

Piles of new research show New York’s shortage of homes and apartments is worsening, but Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal — chief of the Assembly’s housing committee — seemed to dismiss those findings during an exchange with the delegation from City Hall at a sparsely attended December hearing.

“I’m not that worried about non-affordable housing, actually,” Rosenthal told the Adams administration officials, who have been pressing for legislation that would speed and subsidize projects to convert empty office towers into badly needed housing.

“People who have means can buy, rent anything they need in this city.”

This is the second year that Hochul, Adams and City Planning chief Dan Garodnick have pushed Rosenthal and other state lawmakers to speed conversions as one way to build desperately needed new apartments quickly.

The lawmakers have refused so far unless developers are required to provide a large number of subsidized units.

Officials say this would make the pricy conversions uneconomical and leave the city with empty towers, a retort that Garodnick offered again to Rosenthal at the hearing.

Rosenthal shot back: “I never said that we don’t need other housing, I just said I’m not worried about it being built.”

The back and forth came as recent studies estimated that the Big Apple’s housing shortage exploded in size over the last decade — as the 216,000 new apartments and homes that got built still fell roughly 100,000 units short of the number needed to meet demand.

The five boroughs were 245,000 units short of the number of homes and apartments needed in 2012, a figure that grew by almost 100,000 to 342,000 in 2019, a study from the RAND Corporation revealed in 2023.

The housing hole is likely to grow worse without dramatic action.

The Regional Plan Association projects that New York City will need to build another 473,000 houses and apartments between now and 2032 — double the pace of the last two decades.

The RPA said that the suburbs — including Long Island, Westchester and the Hudson Valley — will need to build another 219,000 between now and 2032. That’s quadruple the 55,000 units they built between 2010 and 2019.

Rosenthal — a longtime Upper West Sider, who is insulated from the crisis thanks to an inherited rent stabilized apartment — partially backtracked from her remarks when asked about them by The Post.

“We need housing, we need market rate housing, we need affordable housing, all across the state,” she said.

The exchange provided a dramatic illustration of the remaining gulf between the two sides of New York’s housing fight as it enters its second year.

Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams argue — backed by a growing body of research from independent authorities — that the best way to tackle soaring rents is to dramatically increase the amount of housing that gets built, including market-rate housing.

Controversially, Hochul last year proposed requiring neighborhoods with subway stops or suburban towns with commuter railroad stations to allow the construction of brownstone-sized residential buildings near their transit stops. Additionally, she proposed requiring that New York City and its suburbs be required to permit a minimum number of new housing proposals to jump start construction.

“We want individual communities to decide what they want it and I still support that,” Hochul said recently, defending her mandates from last year. “But, I need more supply. It’s not sustainable people will leave our state to go to other states with the same tax rate and the same weather because they can find housing.”

Lawmakers, like Rosenthal, refused to back the measures.

They’ve argued aggressive redevelopment could endanger the character of city neighborhoods and suburban towns, new production should require developers to provide substantial subsidies to fund below-market rents and that increases in production should be tied to legislation giving tenants facing eviction the right to challenge rent increases.

It was unclear if lawmakers had the votes to pass their plan and neither chamber ever released the bill text for their counterproposal.

This year, the governor has hinted that she will pursue a scaled-down series of proposals to boost production, though she has provided few details so far.

For its part, in addition to the office conversions, City Hall to revive a major property tax subsidy for new projects that set aside certain percentages of units for rent stabilization; and for lawmakers to relax the state’s cap on the size of residential buildings, which a Columbia University study estimated has cost the city 200,000 apartments over the years.

As the housing shortage worsened, rents exploded and New Yorkers who can afford apartments were often forced to wait in block-long lines to check out the few vacant market rate units and then compete against dozens of other applicants to score a lease.

Separate research by New York University’s Furman Center and the Pew Research Center found that construction of new housing — even market rate housing — slows rent increases by expanding the overall supply of homes and apartments.

In nearby New Rochelle, officials recently rewrote zoning rules for broad swaths of its downtown surrounding its train station and saw rents drop by 5% as the new apartment buildings went up, even as housing costs soared in the five boroughs.