It’s been a month since Mayor de Blasio belatedly vowed to “own” the city’s homeless crisis “110 percent.”
Huh. It’s hard to do that if the city has no idea how many are living on the streets — and its rules are designed to lowball the number.
As The Post’s Frank Rosario and Bruce Golding reported Wednesday, volunteers taking part in Monday night’s annual street census were ordered not to count many of the homeless they encountered.
One rule was to bypass anyone seen in publicly accessible private property, like ATM lobbies. Another: Don’t count any homeless seen on subway platforms or trains.
Monday was one of the coldest nights of the winter, so it’s no surprise more homeless than normal sought shelter indoors. But the city told the counters: “Those are the rules. Ignore the homeless people you see indoors.”
This isn’t new: Those rules have been in effect for more than a decade. But they run counter to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s own guidelines.
HUD, which requires the census, says anyone whose “primary nighttime residence” is a place “not ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation” is homeless.
Last year’s census also took place on a sub-freezing night — and allowed de Blasio to claim a drop in street homeless.
He stuck to those figures even as The Post demonstrated the opposite was true, accusing us of “fear-mongering” — before finally backtracking.
The mayor says his HOME-STAT initiative will conduct quarterly censuses and a daily canvass of Manhattan streets. Fine.
But the fact remains that no one knows precisely how many street homeless there are. And we won’t know as long as the rules are crafted to minimize the problem.