Blaz adds $21 mil to battle the city’s homeless epidemic

Mayor de Blasio is throwing an additional $21 million at the city’s homelessness crisis, he announced Monday.

“Mobile treatment teams” that try to connect homeless people with mental health services will get $9.4 million in new funding, while unspecified sums will be allocated for social workers, housing specialists and legal assistance services.

ThriveNYC, the de Blasio administration’s much-criticized mental health initiative, helps run the mobile treatment teams with the city Health Department.

“We have an obligation to address our broken mental health system and do all we can to connect people who are struggling to treatment,” Hizzoner said. “That includes the small percentage of those with mental illness that, left untreated, are at risk of committing violence against themselves or others.”

The funding is the fruit of a review of the city’s application of Kendra’s Law, which empowers authorities to assign mental health care to people against their will. The statute targets people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

It gained renewed attention after a vagrant beat four homeless men to death in Chinatown in October, raising questions about the city’s handling of people with mental health challenges.

Nearly 2,500 people were assigned mandatory outpatient mental health treatment under Kendra’s Law in 2018, according to de Blasio’s office, a 27% increase compared with 2013. De Blasio became mayor in 2014.

The administration said it would “build on this approach” by training more city staffers on how to interact with people who have serious mental illness. The city will also “deploy NYPD resources” to facilitate mental health care referrals for the homeless.

The city is hiring extra Health Department workers to handle a 20% increase in mental health referrals expected to come from these and other steps.

The grassroots Coalition for the Homeless rejected the mayor’s plans to beef up the use of Kendra’s Law.

“Mayor de Blasio continues to get it wrong when it comes to his reliance on inappropriate and ineffective surveillance, policing, and involuntary transport and treatment of people in psychiatric crisis,” the coalition’s Shelly Nortz said.

“Expanding the use of courtordered treatment using Kendra’s Law is not the answer to homelessness — in fact, the vast majority of people with assisted outpatient treatment orders have no history of homelessness at all,” she added.

“At the end of his sixth year in office, it is time for the mayor to finally accept that what our neighbors on the streets need, first and foremost, is a safe place to live.”

Monday’s announcement came after de Blasio vowed to get all homeless people off the streets within five years — once he’s out of office.

De Blasio promised 1,000 new temporary beds for the homeless plus 1,000 new units of permanent housing, though he was light on details.

Homelessness has gone up since de Blasio’s first year as mayor even as he has made the issue one of his priorities and spent $3.2 billion total on a range of programs.