NYC is screwing citizens by housing the homeless

Let’s face it: Nobody really knows what to do about the homeless crisis. The sheer numbers of 60,000 people in city shelters and nearly 4,000 more on the streets — many in the latter group psychotic, drug-addicted and violent — overwhelm the best-intended plans to help them.

That said, there are better and worse ways to cope with the nightmare. It’s bad enough that the city now spends $2.3 billion a year on homeless services including $1.4 billion on shelter housing, twice what it spent just three years ago.

But making things worse: City Hall is now paying landlords more money to put up the homeless than the property owners could make by renting apartments and hotel rooms to non-homeless people at ordinary market rates.

Shouldn’t developers be incentivized to create actual affordable housing for permanent residents — not more shelters for transients with no links to a community?

The hapless Department of Homeless Services has gone off the deep end at a site in The Bronx, whether out of stupidity, incompetence or sheer desperation.

As first reported by The Post’s Carl Campanile this past week, the city tentatively agreed to let politically connected Bronx developer Mark Stagg use his brand-new building at 5731 Broadway, in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, as a homeless shelter.

Stagg designed it as an ordinary, six-story rental residential building with ground-floor storefronts. He originally planned to rent out 83 apartments at an average of $641 per room to ordinary, stable tenants.

Last winter, he asked the city for a property-tax break in exchange for keeping 20 percent of units “affordable” — a not uncommon step.

But then, in one of those murky, backstage dealings that define Mayor de Blasio’s irredeemably corrupt administration, the city agreed to let Stagg use the whole building as “transitional housing” for homeless families. (Homeless Services would pay a nonprofit management oufit, Praxis Housing Initiatives, $5.3 million to run the shelter. Praxis can use $2.4 million of that to cover rent payments to Stagg — an average $2,409 per unit or $1,028 per room.)

Not only will Stagg make more money, the deal will spare him the nuisance of managing and marketing the building. All he has to do is sit back and collect a monthly check from Praxis.

This is a truly terrifying precedent. It bodes no long-term good for those truly in need. It’s also bad for taxpayers and disastrous for neighbors who didn’t expect a shelter to be plopped in their midst.

Working- and middle-class Kingsbridge is on the brink of an economic boom, according to real-estate tracking site StreetEasy. The last thing such a community needs is the destabilizing imposition of a large, out-of-the-blue homeless shelter.

Scarier still: When de Blasio talked last winter about opening 90 new shelters, he was awfully vague about where they’d be or how they’d be funded.

Stagg’s 5731 Broadway sure looks like City Hall’s answer. Let’s get private developers to build new shelters, and we’ll pay them tons of money to use them for the homeless!
The administration’s s bumbling, counterproductive approach to “solving” the housing crisis comes as no surprise. De Blasio has ignored and lied about the problem since the day he took office.

Some of the crisis is of the mayor’s own making. He and his Homeless Services commissioner, Steven Banks — who previously “spent a lifetime advocating and agitating for the poor,” as The New York Times delicately put it — loosened requirements for shelter entry. The acceptance rate is now 50 percent, more than twice what it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the number of shelter residents has swelled 14 percent under de Blasio.

Lax admissions opened the floodgates to “homeless” families from far beyond the city itself. As Nicole Gelinas wrote in The Post, “New York is one of the only places in the country, by inclination and court order, that will give a free apartment to any family from anywhere in the world” if they try hard enough.

Of the 60,000 people in the homeless system, more than 6,600 are from out of town. That figure is certain to swell as word spreads that jobless, unstable drifters might luck into a room at a nice hotel or new apartment building.

Like other mayors before him, de Blasio has pledged to create “affordable” housing one way or another. But his long-touted “Housing New York” strategy to “create or preserve” 200,000 affordable units in 10 years is uniquely misleading. Some 120,000 of the apartments the mayor has in mind are, in fact, existing ones that the city is paying to fix up.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But relatively few of the 80,000 units supposedly to be created from scratch have actually come on line. Many of them were prompted by previously existing mechanisms such as rules that require developers to include a certain number of affordable units in exchange for putting up larger buildings than zoning allows.

And most of the “affordable” apartments encouraged by de Blasio’s various zoning changes are still too expensive to the truly poor who are at risk of needing shelter housing.

Meanwhile, Homeless Services has made an incredible 425,000 hotel bookings for homeless families costing taxpayers $72.9 million in a single year, city Comptroller Scott Stringer reported. Nearly 8,000 homeless now stay in hotels.

Not all seem grateful for it. Homeless residents at a DoubleTree in the Financial District had the chutzpah to complain that the neighborhood where they’re living for free is too expensive. “We live out of Burger King,” one told The Post.

Now the city’s giving them the keys to nice new apartments, too. What a scandalous waste of public money — and a disservice to those truly in need of our help.

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