To curb NYCs post-migrant-crisis pain, starve the shelter-industrial complex

The flood of incoming migrants is ending, but New York City is looking at a years-long hangover from the crisis unless it finally wakes up to the evils of the shelter-industrial complex.Having already spent $7 billion on sheltering and caring for the hundreds of thousands of “asylum seekers,” the city still hosts about 45,000 in the shelter system — about the same as the number of regular homeless it housed as the crisis began in 2022.With the illegal-migrant influx tapering off toward zero, City Hall still says it could take years for the system to stabilize.But the wiser course isn’t to go back to business as usual, but to upend the toxic status quo ante, which only made the crisis worse.The city’s default shelter system is a $2.4 billion industry, infiltrated by corrupt, overpaid opportunists milking Big Apple homelessness for their own benefit.By the de Blasio years, Homeless Services czar Steve Banks was handing out public funds like candy to scandal-ridden shelter operators, like CORE Services Group, which netted $763 million in city contracts while ex-CEO Jack Brown pocketed $1 million per year.That kind of grift seems the rule, not the exception, as the city — cornered into honoring an impossible “right to shelter” — actively shies from vetting the recipients of taxpayer money.And when the migrant crisis hit, the Adams administration simply fed the beast, doling out lavish no-bid contracts to companies like DocGo, an agreement that was so bad for city taxpayers that Comptroller Brad Lander urged the mayor to try to claw back $11 million in allegedly misspent funds.Just last month, the mayor inked an almost $1 billion deal with the Hotel Association of New York City to continue to shelter migrants through at least June 2026.Someone needs to pull the gravy train off its tracks, but there’s little hope of a hero among this crop of mayoral candidates.The Democratic options range from card-carrying commies who will make the problem worse to e...