'Last' big boo$t for homeless

After nearly doubling city spending on homeless services in just three years, Mayor de Blasio on Friday claimed that the infusion of $386 million should be the last.

The mayor’s new executive budget projected spending at the Department of Homeless Services to hit $2.15 billion in fiscal 2019 — up from $1.17 billion spent in fiscal 2015.

“We think we’re going to be able actually [to] reduce the number of people in shelter soon and that’s going to reduce costs too,” the mayor said during his weekly appearance on WNYC radio.

“We believe based on the projections that we have that this is the last big expenditure on the way to restructuring the system and then starting to reduce costs.”

There were 59,638 people being housed in city shelters as of Wednesday, up from the 50,689 when de Blasio took office in January 2014.

De Blasio eventually acknowledged that he had been slow to recognize the growing homeless problem, and in February 2017 released a plan to resolve the issue by creating 90 permanent shelters over five years.

The plan called for moving the homeless out of scattered apartment units that were generally in poor condition, known as clusters, and temporarily housing them in commercial hotels until more permanent shelters were ready.

The city also committed to stopping the use of hotels as shelters by 2023.

Since hotels are more costly than the scattered-site units, the city increased its fiscal 2018 budget to $1.6 billion in June 2017, four months after the plan was released.

In the 10 months since, however, de Blasio has added nearly half-a-bil- lion dollars — a sign that officials underestimated the cost of the plan or were reluctant to reveal the true costs up front.

“With a shortfall of shelter space, more costly alternatives are driving spending increases,” said Doug Turetsky, chief of staff for the city’s Independent Budget Office.

“While the number of families in the shelter system has leveled off, the pipeline into permanent housing remains clogged,” Turetsky added. “So as the number of homeless single adults rises, the plan to open new shelters lags, and the effort to move people out of decrepit scatter-site apartments continues, the de Blasio administration is forced to rely more heavily on expensive hotel rooms.”

As of last month, there were roughly 11,300 homeless people housed in commercial hotels and 6,800 living in cluster apartments.

'This is the last big expenditure on the way to restructuring the [shelter] system and then starting to reduce cost.'

— Mayor de Blasio