A report released by the Coalition for the Homeless said that "more New Yorkers were homeless during the last fiscal year than at any time since the Great Depression," according to an article by Michael Howard Saul in today's edition of The Wall Street Journal.

The study criticized the Bloomberg administration for policies it said contributed to the number of homeless people, although the mayor's office faulted how the statistics were complied, the article said.

The report said that 113,553 homeless people, including 42,888 children, slept in city shelters during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010, an 8 percent increase from the previous year and a 37 percent increase since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002.

The nightly census of homeless adults and children in the shelter system on February 28 of this year was 39,542, the highest point ever recorded, the report said.

Seth Diamond, the city's Commissioner of Homeless Services, said in an interview in the article that the coalition unfairly compiled the statistics to paint the worst possible picture and cited statistics indicating that the average number of families in city shelters in March was 4 percent lower than the same month in 2010.

He acknowledged, however, that the mayor and his administration have failed to decrease the number of homeless New Yorkers "to the extraordinary degree that the mayor pledged during his first term," the article said, noting that in June 2004 Mr. Bloomberg had said his administration planned to reduce the city's homeless shelter population and number of homeless people on the street by two-thirds by 2009.

"At the time," the article said, "the mayor hoped to 'make the condition of chronic homelessness effectively extinct in New York.'"

The article said that on Monday Mr. Bloomberg said that the city's homeless shelter system is "infinitely better" than it was when he took office, adding that "it is much better run. It is much more respectful. And we have been very successful in moving people out of shelter into...permanent homes of their own."

The article said that the coalition said that the city's policies have led to more than twice as many formerly homeless families re-entering the shelter system each year, the article said, adding that "administration officials have warned that the number of people in city shelters may rise even higher in the coming year because state budget costs have forced the Bloomberg administration to eliminate a program that moved people from shelters to permanent housing."

The report which was authored by Patrick Markee, the coalition's senior policy analyst, and Giselle Routhier, a policy analyst with the coalition, said "in the midst of this historic homelessness crisis, the Bloomberg administration's only response has been to defend its failed policies."

"Unlike previous New York City mayors from Ed Koch through Rudy Giuliani," it continued, "Mayor Bloomberg refuses to use proven and cost-effective Federal housing programs to move homeless families from shelters to stable homes. Instead, for more than six years the Bloomberg administration has replaced proven Federal programs with a series of untested, time-limited subsidies like the recently-terminated Advantage program."

"In the seven years before Mayor Bloomberg's misguided policy change, an average of 2,003 formerly-homeless "repeat families" entered the shelter system each year," it said, "but in the five years after the change, an average of 5,020 "repeat families" entered the shelter system each year, a remarkable 151 percent increase. And in FY 2010, an all-time record 6,294 "repeat families" entered the shelter system."