CHANGE! NEW YORK CITY SETS A NEW RECORD – 61,000 HOMELESS PEOPLE. On Homelessness, De Blasio Made His Bed:

Why would so many apply to live in homeless shelters when they have other options, however dismal? One answer is rent aid.

Fulfilling another campaign promise, de Blasio made New York City Housing Authority apartments and federal rent vouchers available to people in shelter — reversing a much-reviled Bloomberg blockade.

But Bloomberg had a rationale for his miserliness: His homeless officials became convinced that making shelter a ticket to lifelong low-cost housing served as a perverse invitation for aid-seekers to enter the homeless system, diverting emergency resources from those in greatest need.

The Independent Budget Office estimates that such aid boosts the numbers entering shelter by as much as 9% — people who presumably have discretion about whether or not to enter — and encourages longer stays in shelter by people awaiting aid. Similarly, when aid programs end, the number of people entering shelter declines.

In the frenzy to move people out of shelters in volume, Banks began in March offering payments to friends and family members of homeless people to take them in — even though parents seeking shelter are supposed to prove they have no such friends or family able to help them before they are allowed into the system.

So far, just 35 have left shelters to move in with friends or family members. Coincidentally or not, the number of monthly applicants for shelter has since climbed.

Offering housing to those living in shelters may seem an obvious way to shrink the numbers living there — but the real-world math doesn’t work quite so favorably.

Do tell.