City Hall’s Shelter Scramble

As the homeless shelter population this week surged to a record high, City Hall and its allies insist it would be worse without Mayor de Blasio’s new policies.

Then it got tragically worse: Two babies were scalded to death in their tiny beds after a freak radiator accident in a Bronx slum unit.

That horror left Team de Blasio scrambling to rethink its use of “scattered-site housing” — putting the homeless up in whatever apartments it can find, including ones run by negligent landlords.

This, after the mayor earlier vowed to phase out the use of “cluster-site housing” and hotels to shelter the homeless.

Hotels aren’t the answer, though the city’s actually been using them more: The average cost runs $6,570 a month per family.

Overall, it’s just painfully obvious that City Hall is desperately scrambling for answers to a crisis that not so long ago it was denying even existed.

It’s trying to ram new shelters into areas without getting community input — and calling the locals racist when they object. It’s using more hotels despite its own policy; it’s rushing to use “affordable” units to house the homeless, and dithering over “scattered” vs. “clustered” shelters.

What the mayor isn’t doing is considering any change in his core approach — like asking why the rate of approval for entry into the shelter system has more than doubled since the Bloomberg years.

One issue to confront is where the homeless come from: How many are New Yorkers who’ve exhausted their support networks — and how many are out-of-towners (and even foreign nationals) who don’t have support networks here? The Bloomberg policy was to put such people on a bus, train or plane home.

New York will always try to do right by unfortunate New Yorkers, but it can’t solve the problems of the entire world.