NEW YORK — City Comptroller Brad Lander says if elected mayor he would seek to use the municipal government’s pension funds to help city workers become homeowners — a proposal aimed at dampening some of the effects of the city’s deepening housing crisis.

In a policy proposal shared exclusively with The New York Daily News this week, Lander’s mayoral campaign suggests the city’s pension funds should step in and pay half of what it costs a city worker to buy a home anywhere in the five boroughs worth less than $1 million.

The pension funds, which control nearly $280 billion in public money, would only offer the homebuyer assistance to workers who’ve served in the municipal government for at least five years, according to Lander’s proposal. There are roughly 200,000 municipal employees in that category at the moment, including everything from cops and sanitation workers to teachers and EMTs.

As comptroller, Lander helps oversee the city’s pension system, and he said his team has calculated an initial investment of about $400 million — 0.1% of the total amount of money at the pension funds’ disposal — would help buy 1,000 homes for city workers. His plan doesn’t specify how much pension fund cash he would like to see poured into the proposed homeowner investment in total.

Lander, who’s among a sprawling field of candidates running against Mayor Eric Adams in June’s Democratic mayoral primary, wouldn’t be able to pull off such a pension investment move on his own.

Rather, he would, if elected mayor, have to convince a majority of trustees on whichever pension fund he wants to make the investment to support the move. Lander’s team said he would ultimately like to see all of the city’s five pension funds invest in homes for workers.

The trustees of the largest municipal pension fund, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, include all of the city’s five borough presidents, the comptroller, the public advocate, the mayor and some top municipal union leaders, like the head of DC 37.

Lander suggested it wouldn’t be hard to get trustees on board, arguing the benefits of his proposal would be twofold.

For starters, the pension funds would own half of all the homes they help buy, meaning they’d also get 50% of any increase in value generated once workers sell their homes, amounting to a return on investment, Lander said.

Additionally, Lander reasoned the five-year employment requirement for eligibility is an incentive for city workers to stay in public service, a boon at a time that vacancies in the municipal ranks remain high as compared with prepandemic levels.

“Our government employees keep New York City running — they teach our kids, clean our streets, and keep our neighborhoods safe. They deserve to know that New York City has their back, and New Yorkers deserve to see the high-quality services we all rely on,” Lander said.

The city pension funds are supposed to invest money so it grows over time and covers the monthly pension payments nearly all city government employees are entitled to upon retirement.

But John Murphy, a longtime public pension plan consultant who served as the executive director of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System for 15 years, said Lander’s proposal could prove administratively complicated.

For the pension funds to co-own thousands of individual residences would require a “very slick management operation,” given all the complications that people already face in purchasing a home, Murphy noted.

Still, Murphy called it an “incredibly interesting” idea that’s likely to provide a reliable rate of return, given that real estate in the city is considered a safe investment that almost always grows in value. He also noted the city’s pension funds already hold major investments in real estate, including mortgage-based bonds.

“If it works the way they they think it would work, it would have a tremendous effect both for the pension funds and for city workers,” Murphy told the Daily News.

A spokesman for Adams’ reelection campaign didn’t return a request for comment on Lander’s proposal.

The proposal comes as housing affordability and availability remains a severe problem in New York.

According to public data, the median price to buy a home in the city is $785,000, a 15% jump from prepandemic levels.

Meantime, rents are at an all-time high while the number of available apartments in the city are at nearly all-time lows, a combination that has also resulted in the city’s homeless shelter population being at the highest level in history.

Housing is among a handful of issues expected to be front and center in this year’s mayoral race. The Democratic mayoral primary is set for June 24.

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