#Pandemic homeless horrors expose utter failure of de Blasio’s enabling approach

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NYPD foot patrol walking past The Lucerne hotel, which is housing homeless individuals.
Robert Miller

The pandemic continues to expose the rolling civic disaster that is Mayor Bill de Blasio’s approach to homelessness.

Last week, just days after he bowed to the fury of Upper West Side residents and vowed to start moving homeless out of hotels, downtown Brooklyn woke to find homeless being dumped in hotels there.

The city ramped up its use of luxury and boutique hotels as shelters months ago, aiming to protect the homeless from the virus. Meanwhile, the NYPD — overstretched by the crime spike and likely under orders to lay off the homeless — has been turning a blind eye to encampments and other problems.

The result: “anti-gentrification” in such neighborhoods as the Upper West Side and Chelsea.

Just two weeks ago, de Blasio was saying the Manhattan-hotel homeless would be staying put for months, until there is a vaccine or more effective treatment. But on Monday he seemed to bend, saying: “It’s important to note that as the situation, the health situation, has continued to improve, we’re going to start the process of figuring out where we can get homeless individuals back into safe shelter facilities and reduce the reliance on hotels.”

But Friday revealed that the “solution” involves things like turning the Hotel Indigo on Duffield Street in Brooklyn into permanent shelters.

Nor does he yet offer a timeline for ending the Upper West Side’s nightmare. Three hotels there — the luxury Belleclaire on Broadway, the Lucerne on West 79th Street and the more down-market Belnord on West 87th Street — are housing the mentally ill, registered sex offenders and “recovering” drug addicts. And locals have seen big upticks in public urination, open drug use and catcalling.

Michele McDowall, a 39-year-old nanny, told The Post, “It doesn’t feel safe anymore,” adding that she was recently offered crack by two homeless men as she pushed a 2-year-old down Riverside Park at 79th Street.

The situation is so bad, a Facebook group has formed in which residents post photos of men peeing, masturbating and lying sprawled and passed out near the hotels, The Post reported.

One longtime UWS resident, Eve Epstein, had a suggestion for de Blasio in a post on the West Side Rag blog: “Rather than preaching faux compassion, citizens should insist that our limousine liberal Mayor move his family into Hotel Lucerne — without his security detail.”

Meanwhile, Midtown residents have reported visibly intoxicated, unmasked men getting into disputes with one another.

In Chelsea, the homeless encampment at West 24th Street and Sixth Avenue has grown from two “residents” pre-pandemic to 15 to 20 vagrants, who’ve built makeshift shelters out of flower pots, plastic kiddie gates or shopping carts.

The drug use and violence are rife there, too. “They take drugs and they pass out. They overdose,” a woman who gave her name as Sharon and described herself as the “mother” of the group told a Post reporter. “I call the ambulance and they go to the hospital, but they come right back.”

Whatever he promises, de Blasio’s plainly unwilling to address the root of all these problems: his administration’s utter refusal to make tough love a real part of homeless policy.

As the race to replace him heats up, all candidates need to explain how they’ll move beyond this failed philosophy of appeasing the homeless’ worst instincts.