39% more in city call streets home

The number of people living on the streets skyrocketed by 39 percent to 3,892 this year — the highest number recorded since 2005, city officials said Wednesday.

Last year, the federally mandated count came in at 2,794. It was the second straight annual drop, a downward trend that Mayor de Blasio trumpeted in a press release on April 28, 2016.

With the numbers surging this year, the administration waited an extra two months for a summer holiday week to announce the results. Officials insisted they weren’t playing politics, but needed the extra time to confirm the accuracy of the data.

City Councilmember Barry Grodenchik, of the General Welfare Committee, said he was “obviously concerned” with the sharp increase.

“There’s probably some nuance there, but obviously the number of homeless people living on the streets is going in the wrong direction,” said Grodenchik (DQueens).

The surge came despite a massive effort by the de Blasio administration to canvass and convince the homeless to enter shelters.

In December 2015, de Blasio announced an initiative dubbed Home-Stat that has added 196 workers to the Department of Homeless Services and 14 more cops to the NYPD’s homelessoutreach unit.

The annual budget for staffing the city’s outreach effort is $38 million.

Officials attributed the jump in the annual count in part to warmer weather on the February night of the tally — it was 40 degrees compared to 28 degrees on the survey night in 2016 — and to the length of time it takes to persuade people to come in from the streets.

“It can take many months — five months on average — to establish the trust that will encourage street-homeless New Yorkers to accept assistance and come indoors,” Homeless Services said in announcing the new data. “This means the work that hundreds of Home-Stat outreach staff began over the past several months has likely not yet yielded results.”

Officials said the program has helped convince 748 homeless individuals to move indoors since fully launching in March 2016.

This May, the department said it was making “enhancements” to the program without acknowledging the boost in street homeless.

Those changes include better coordination with hospitals, libraries and parks where the homeless congregate and a greater focus on panhandling.

With its belated posting of the grim results of this year’s street-homelessness census, City Hall just exposed Mayor de Blasio’s real homelessness policy: Hide the bad news.

The count was done back in February, but didn’t get posted until Wednesday — after Politico had published it.

It’s obvious why Team de Blasio didn’t want you to see the numbers: They show 3,892 people living on the streets, up 40 percent from last year and the highest rate since 2005.

The mayor’s minions were quick to note how misleading that may be: The night of the count was unseasonably warm, so fewer folks felt compelled to find shelter, and so were easier for census-takers to find.

Then again, the shelter homeless population is also at a high under de Blasio, having crossed the 60,000 mark last October.

Plus, the mayor himself once made a big deal of the street-census figures — during the summer of 2015, when he was citing them as “proof ” that The Post’s reporting on soaring homelessness simply wasn’t true.

And never mind the photographic evidence, or the metastasizing encampments that the NYPD was belatedly taking down nearly as fast as The Post was pointing them out.

It wasn’t ’til that fall that de Blasio finally began admitting the truth, and months later that the public learned City Hall had been holding emergency meetings on the homeless crisis all year.

Eventually, the mayor announced “new” policies that amounted to more of the same: more spending on services, more plans to build new shelters, more promises to bring the homeless population down . . . eventually.

The only change has been to put lifelong activist Steven Banks officially in charge of homeless policy, though he’d plainly been calling the shots from the start.

Clearly, though, the overall de Blasio strategy is still to keep the public in the dark.