The entwined crises of housing affordability and homelessness, decades in the making, have been the most consistently vexing to the de Blasio administration. Early last year the mayor outlined a series of goals and strategies that he called a “blood and guts” war on homelessness, including reducing the nightly count of people in shelters by 2,500 and opening 40 new shelters by the end of this year, with 50 more by 2022. So far, only 16 of those shelters are up and functioning.

While our current moment has many lamenting the death of democracy at the federal level, locally, tensions play out differently. In fact, in many cases, there is perhaps far too much input, as the increasing concentration of wealth and progressive energy in major cities has come with greater allowances toward a certain brand of entitled self-governance. In New York, during the Koch and Giuliani years, for example, a shelter would arrive on a block because the city had decided to put it there, and if you lived in the neighborhood, you would hear about it when it opened.

But now deference is paid across the spectrum of opinion. We solicit ideas and hold community board meetings; environmental impact studies are generated. And then lawsuits are filed to fight shelters when neighborhoods don’t want them. This happens again and again in a kind of civic amnesia, even as communities usually find shelters far less troubling than anticipated once they are in place. Two years ago, I wrote about a shelter in the Kensington section of — Brooklyn, which first met with neighborhood resistance and then emerged as the recipient of local largess, as people from the community began donating diapers and toys.

Legal battles have delayed the opening of two shelters recently, one on West 58th Street, bordering some of the most expensive real estate in the city, and another in Ozone Park, Queens, where one man went on a hunger strike to make his opposition clear.

Another impediment to progress, and one that goes almost entirely unremarked, is the simple horror of trying to get anything built in New York. The city itself does not build shelters or convert existing structures into shelters — there is no capital budget for this. Developers do that work, in what is a very lucrative business, making money on what the city pays them in rent. Developers and social-service agencies are typically left to scout empty buildings and lots, and the agencies then run shelters through city contracts.