Banks’ Billion-Dollar ‘Bridge’

City taxpayers learned this week that they’ll be shelling out more than $1 billion over the next three years to put homeless people up in hotels — over $1 million a day. This is apparently considered progress in Mayor de Blasio’s “Turning the Tide” plan to address the crisis.

The city still intends to reduce its use of hotels, though it’s now putting more people than ever up in them: 11,300, up from 7,500 a few years ago. But it’s first cutting its use of apartment rentals (“cluster-site housing”), aiming to vacate 3,600 units.

Homeless czar Steven Banks told NY1, “We said, overall, as we got out of clusters, that we would use hotels as a bridge.”

A billion-dollar bridge. (Now you know why the mayor’s budget wonks weren’t ready to give hard numbers on homelesshotel spending when the City Council asked last month.)

Another part of the problem is the slow progress in building other shelters. Back in November 2015, the mayor committed $2.6 billion to create 15,000 supportive-housing units over 15 years. That’s a pace of 1,000 a year — but more than two years later, the city only has 488 of the apartments operational.

Then there’s de Blasio’s planned 90 new homeless shelters: Only 11 are open so far.

The bottom line: Banks and de Blasio still seem overwhelmed, throwing ever more cash at homeless policies that they never reexamine. The Department of Homeless Services budget has grown from $1.17 billion just three years ago to $1.65 billion next year.

What will it take for the mayor to throw in the towel on a homeless czar who never manages to produce change?