Open in hurry

FIVE NEW homeless shelters down — 85 to go.

Almost 90 days after Mayor de Blasio vowed to build a network of 90 new shelters over five years, the city has opened five and plans to meet with shelter providers to talk about next steps, Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks said.

“We appreciate the support of New Yorkers, who are fundamentally compassionate people, and that’s the spirit that’s helped us open five shelters in 90 days,” Banks told the Daily News.

“And we’re going to continue to do that across the city so that we can implement a boroughbased shelter system and undo a haphazard system.”

One of the five shelters — the Bergen Street shelter in Crown Heights, Brooklyn — was only able to open this week after a judge tossed out a lawsuit filed by neighbors who say the area is already overburdened.

While the city will have to grapple with neighborhoods that may not welcome shelters, it will also have to deal with the providers who will build and run them — some of whom are already pushing officials to think big.

“We’re talking about building new, purpose-built shelters. Let’s make them the best structures physically, so we can then have the highest level of services inside of them,” said Christine Quinn, president and CEO of Win, a nonprofit shelter provider for women and children.

The specifics of what shelters look like — where they are, how the space is developed, what kinds of services they provide — often come from the providers who respond to the city’s bid for proposals. But the city is also updating its request for those proposals to jibe with the new plan, which will be a topic of discussion at next week’s meeting.

Banks said the city has tweaked the request for proposals to encourage building of permanent housing alongside shelter units, encouraging community spaces within shelters.

“I think the most important thing is that we talk about program, rather than beds,” said former mayoral candidate George McDonald, president of the Doe Fund and one of those invited to the meeting, recalling his partnership with Andrew Cuomo on the Way Home initiative in the early ’90s.

“It was a novelty that homelessness was complex that some people have mental health problems, that some people live with HIV and AIDS, that some people were old and frail and elderly, that their service needs were different.”

Services are what Quinn, the former former speaker of the City Council, is worried about. Of the new shelters, 40% will be for families — and she argued that all of those shelters should include onsite child care.

“A homeless child is twice as likely to be a homeless adult. That is an irrefutable fact. I would argue that is in large part due to the trauma a homeless child suffers and the fact that our system has never comprehensively helped a child process that trauma,” Quinn said.

State law requires shelters provide child care, but allows for several options — licensed onsite care, supervised dropoff care and connecting family with children to day care in the community.

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