Homeless and adrift

Putting into numbers the heartbreak visible daily on New York City sidewalks and subways, the results of this year’s annual winter count of the street-dwelling homeless show a 40% spike in their numbers over last year, to 3,892. In a city that prides itself on a right to the homeless shelters where an additional 19,000 childless adults dwell, the surge shows a system increasingly spurned — and a growing catastrophe that needs fresh solutions.

Homeless people avoid the city-run shelters for as many reasons as there are people living unsheltered — including fears for safety borne out in multiple fatal slashings.

Another reason that New York must reckon with is that shelters bar drug consumption on the premises, even while an opioid epidemic rages. (Not that this stops smugglers or users.) Some users, including drifters who find in prosperous Manhattan prime turf for panhandling, prefer the relative freedom of sleeping wherever they slump.

Still others, in the grip of mental illness, suffer intense paranoia that leaves them fearful of authorities and institutions, even those that claim to help.

So it is that city outreach teams are, by the Department of Homeless Services’ count, in touch with more than 2,000 individuals, trying to coax them indoors or out of the subway system. Nearly 750 more had already accepted shelter in the year before the night of the February street-and-subway homeless count — and still the numbers swelled to heights not seen in more than a decade.

And so it is that Mayor de Blasio aims to build 90 new homeless shelters, projecting need among adults to continue to grow.

But the twin crises of a drug crisis and a mental health system frayed so thin that hospitals eject the still sick are meanwhile making homelessness in New York City more wretched and more resistant to the rosy solutions City Hall swears will work if only given more, and more, and more time and money.

Not for nothing did “services for homeless people” rank dead last on a Citizens Budget Commission survey asking New Yorkers to rate their government, with just 13.7% of respondents saying they’re satisfied despite $1.6 billion a year spent.

Stick with the status quo, and even with stepped-up outreach the ranks of unsheltered homeless will be bound to grow — only more so now with the rapid retreat from arrests for quality-of-life offenses and the move to depopulate and then shut Rikers Island.

By all means, build supportive housing. Make shelter available to those in need. But New York City cannot pretend that its neglect of seriously sick people living on the street, presuming their right to do so, shows anything close to compassion. On the contrary: It accepts a calamity.