Oops: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “historic,” “ground-breaking” “game-changer” on the homeless turns out to be far, far less.
He’s spent a week insisting that overnight subway closing had allowed a miracle. But on Thursday he admitted that it has moved only 100 or so vagrants into shelters on any prolonged basis.
Plus, a Post photo and stories by Gabrielle Fonrouge and Julia Marsh reveal that his “game-changer” has left dozens of homeless men sleeping crowded on a stairway at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter, inches apart, with no masks and using makeshift cardboard beds.
And most of the people approached in the subway actually refuse help — or accept it but change their mind later, perhaps hopping right back on the trains.
Between May 6, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo began shutting the system at night, and Wednesday, cops and workers engaged 3,004 people, de Blasio says. Yet only 1,620 agreed to get help. (And advocates fear even that number involves double-counts of homeless engaged on multiple nights.)
As for “accepted help”: Of 824 individuals who agreed to services, only 201 (24 percent) made it to a shelter — and many of those might’ve stayed for just hours.
In all, more than 3,000 people were engaged by cops and outreach workers, yet only 103 actually stayed in shelters.
Clearly, de Blasio’s not “solving” the problem at all.