Don’t Gimme Shelter

We don’t blame East Harlemites in the least for being up in arms over City Hall’s move to drop another homeless shelter on their neighborhood. It means 35 more beds in a densely populated 1.5 square mile area that already hosts roughly 1,700 beds for the homeless.

Was Team de Blasio hoping locals would be too beat by the heat to object?

Local leaders say plans for the new shelter — solidly opposed by elected officials and residents — were pushed through without community input, even though East Harlem already has more than its fair share of homeless facilities.

Maybe City Hall has good reason for the move — but it can’t keep siting shelters behind residents’ backs.

Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez suggests that non-emergency shelter sitings should go through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process to guarantee meaningful community input. ULURP can be a night- mare — but City Hall’s just begging to have its hands tied.

Of course, bungling is almost the rule for the de Blasio administration when it comes to the homeless: It took City Hall long months to even admit the growing crisis last year.

Eventually, the mayor put longtime homeless advocate Steve Banks in official charge of policy. Yet Banks doesn’t seem to have come up with any fresh answers: Certainly, the East Harlem siting recalls a long history of communities having shelters snuck in without notice.

Yes, it’s always tough to find more ways to divert people from the emergency shelter system and into permanent housing. But Banks spent decades slamming past mayors for how they handled the homeless.

It’s past time for him to show he can do better, and start reducing the “emergency” population so the city can start closing some shelters.