Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met last week with real-estate-industry leaders, he said, to discuss “the importance of us reducing the timeline of getting New Yorkers into affordable housing.”

I want New York City housing to be affordable, too. But I want it to be affordable to working- and middle-class people who pay taxes and respect the civic order. I don’t want the municipal treasury milked to provide cozy quarters for the drug-addled and insane who usually (as Mamdani is going to swiftly discover) prefer life on the street.

Unlike Mamdani’s fellow travelers in socialist sophistry — like former City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, who two years ago torpedoed plans for a large Harlem housing project for not being 100% “affordable” — I want rental apartments to be affordable to people who’ve earned them. And to a surprising extent not sufficiently acknowledged, many already are.

Let’s be clear: The word “affordable” as it’s commonly kicked around is entirely ideological. President Trump’s dismissal of the issue as a “hoax” and a “Democrat scam,” although not altogether baseless, missed the larger issue. “Affordable,” as Merriam-Webster........

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