Helter $helter

A new report suggests Washington and Albany aren’t keeping pace with hikes in city homeless-shelter costs, but the real story is the explosion in homeless spending under Mayor de Blasio.

The Independent Budget Office reports that City Hall has been covering a greater share of the costs to shelter the homeless, while state and federal contributions have dipped. In 2013, City Hall picked up 48 percent of shelter costs, while the feds paid 38 percent; by 2017, the city’s share rose to 59 percent, and DC’s fell to 31 percent.

Yet those two years alone don’t paint the full picture: Compared to 2015, for instance, the federal share for family shelters (nearly two-thirds of total shelter costs) actually rose in 2017, from 38 percent to 49 percent. And it’s up even more since 2007, when DC covered just 32 percent.

What’s more, the dollar amounts laid out by the feds and Albany went up in 2013-2017, from $422 million to $638 million. Yet those sums failed to keep pace with the city’s payouts, which zoomed from $396 million to $924 million, up 133 percent.

Tally the total amount laid out, and it’s truly alarming: In four years, shelter costs have nearly doubled, from $818 million in 2013 to a mind-blowing $1.56 billion in 2017. Over the prior six years, they grew a “mere” $212 million, or 35 percent.

What triggered the post-2013 shelter-spending spike? Well, Bill de Blasio took office and quietly started letting radical homeless advocate Steve Banks set policy (though he didn’t put Banks offi

cially in charge until 2016, after firing the patsies who’d nominally been calling the shots).

And in short order, it got easier to qualify for a shelter and to stay in it longer. That, in turn, swelled the shelters’ ranks, from 50,689 when de Blasio took office to 60,529 last Tuesday.

IBO analysts suspect the longer stays meant more people hitting the time limits for federal assistance, which pays their shelter costs. That drove down the federal share and left the city on the hook.

At the same time, Banks & Co. began running short of places to house all these people. So the city turned to pricey hotel rooms costing as much as $6,000 a month.

No wonder costs doubled in four years — and that Homeless Services is one of three budget-busting agencies to land on city Comptroller Scott Stringer’s new “watch list.”

Meanwhile, the city’s plan to set up more shelters has run into predictable opposition and is way behind. Which just highlights the folly in the Banks-de Blasio strategy: They let the shelter population mushroom but had no affordable place to put the new tenants. And stuck taxpayers with the bill.