Mayor Zohran Mamdani just inked a public housing rehab so pricey it works out to more than half a million dollars for every single apartment — on city taxpayers’ dime.

The city closed financing Tuesday on a $607 million overhaul of Nostrand Houses, the aging NYCHA complex in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. 

Spread across the development’s 1,148 units, the math lands at roughly $528,700 per apartment. That’s nearly $38 million for each of the campus’s 16 buildings and north of $300,000 for every one of its roughly 2,000 tenants.

Jay Martin, head of the landlord group Community Housing Improvement Program, didn’t mince words either.

“My criticism is not about NYCHA getting needed repairs,” Martin wrote on X. “It’s not that those repairs cost $522,000 per unit. It’s not even that the average NYCHA unit costs 80% more per month to operate than a pre-1974 rent-stabilized unit. 

“It’s the inability to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of private rent-stabilized units have rents that don’t cover operating costs.”

Those units get a rent freeze and show trials. Public housing gets billions of dollars. City Hall, meanwhile, was popping champagne.

“This $607 million investment means new kitchens, safer and healthier apartments, modern building systems and the dignity of a home that works the way it should,” Mamdani said in a statement.

So what exactly does half a million bucks buy in Sheepshead Bay?

Kitchens and bathrooms will be gutted down to the studs and rebuilt with quartz countertops, new appliances, fresh plumbing and scratch-resistant floors. Every apartment gets double-pane windows, new intercoms, laundry hookups and window heat pumps that let tenants control their own heat and AC. Crews will also scrub out lead and mold hazards.

Building-wide, the money covers new elevators, boilers and hot water systems, rewired electrical, expanded security cameras and an on-site guard. Officials said 81 units will be retrofitted for residents with mobility needs and another 48 for those with vision or hearing loss. A new management office will house more than 40 staffers.

The project is the first to cross the finish line under the Public Housing Preservation Trust, a state-created entity that lets NYCHA developments swap traditional federal funding for the more generous Section 8 pipeline while staying in public hands. 

Nostrand residents voted to join back in December 2023. City officials said the switch roughly doubles the federal operating subsidy the complex collects.

“This $607 million investment gives us the resources to deliver the modernization residents have been waiting for while keeping Nostrand fully public and preserving resident rights and affordability,” Trust President Vlada Kenniff said.

The deal pulls in money from the Office of Management and Budget and the Housing Development Corporation (HUD), Merchants Capital and the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, with the city’s building trades unions signed on as labor partner.

The administration has not released a line-by-line breakdown showing how much of the $607 million goes to actual construction versus financing, reserves and other soft costs.

Construction is slated to start this fall.

“Residents have helped shape these plans from the beginning, and now we are one step closer to seeing the improvements we’ve been waiting for become a reality,” said Miriam Rodriguez, a Nostrand tenant who sits on the Trust’s board.

The timing is raising eyebrows in the private market.

The bill lands just as Mamdani’s hand-picked Rent Guidelines Board slaps a two-year freeze on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, taking effect on leases starting Thursday. Owners of those buildings, many of them pre-war walk-ups, say they’re being squeezed between flat rents and soaring bills for insurance, fuel and upkeep.

“Older rent-stabilized buildings are already struggling under rising operating costs, yet the Board chose to disregard those realities,” Real Estate Board of New York President James Whelan said after the June vote.

Mamdani has made NYCHA the centerpiece of his housing agenda, pouring $5.6 billion in capital funds into public housing in his first budget. Three more developments, Bronx River Addition, Unity Towers and Hylan Houses, have already voted to follow Nostrand into the Trust.