Gimme more than shelter: Tish

THE CITY’S public advocate blasted Mayor de Blasio’s plan to curtail homelessness, calling on City Hall to build more low- and moderate-income housing instead of just shelters.

“I’m sure the landlords are very happy about it,” advocate Letitia James (photo) told John Catsimatidis on his “Cats Roundtable” AM 970 radio program of de Blasio’s plan to build more shelters.

“The conditions in some of these clusters, in some of these housing shelters, is horrendous,” she added. “Tonight, 80,000 New Yorkers are going to sleep in our shelters homeless, and a third of them are innocent babies and children.

“And it’s really unacceptable,” James added.

“What we really need to do is build more low- and moderate-income housing in the City of New York. We need to think bolder,” she said. “Unfortunately, the rents are too damn high . . . It’s unacceptable.”

Last month, de Blasio unveiled a plan to address housing for the homeless, vowing to build dozens more shelters but saying little about where he’d place them. De Blasio promised to stop using the expensive hotels and private apartments in “cluster sites,” where the city has been putting the homeless population that grows each year. Instead, the mayor said he would move the people now staying in those facilities — many of which are plagued by poor conditions — into 90 new, traditional city shelters across the city. But he provided no details about where the shelters will be built, a glaring omission that follows furious protests over the last year when the city tried but failed to locate shelters in some neighborhoods.