The Bloomberg administration has hired an outside consultant to help reduce the number of homeless people by increasing “affordable” housing and beefing up services to individuals at risk of ending up on the streets or in shelters.

The Center for Government Research, based in Rochester, was awarded a $50,000 contract in September to help execute Mayor Bloomberg’s recently unveiled plan to cut the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds over the next five years, said a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services, Jim Anderson.

The not-for-profit Center, one of eight contractors to respond to the agency’s request for proposals, was retained to study ways to reduce the number of city shelters, as well as to improve support services and intervention in an attempt to keep low-income, at-risk individuals in permanent homes – the centerpiece of the mayor’s plan.

Mr. Anderson said the center will focus on several key areas, such as converting government financing for shelters into financing for prevention services and housing; improving coordination with city agencies, and determining where it makes financial sense to convert shelters into apartments for those hovering dangerously close to homelessness and being pin balled through the shelter system.

That may mean changing the way the Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Correction help inmates being released from jail, who are prone to homelessness, or doing the same with agencies that deal with the mentally ill.

In June, Mr. Bloomberg called for a drastic reduction in the next five years in “chronic” homelessness and said he would create 12,000 units of affordable housing. At the time he compared homelessness to AIDS or drug addiction, saying: “It forces them to live on the margins of society in needless shame. It diminishes them and in doing so, it diminishes us.”

Besides offering only a punishing existence to those shuffling through shelters, the city’s current infrastructure for the homeless has become an exorbitantly expensive and inefficient stopgap. In the past decade, the city has spent $4.6 billion, about 10% of the fiscal budget, on building and maintaining shelters scattered throughout the five boroughs. For every dollar spent to prevent homelessness,$3.50 is spent on the shelter system.

“This is a historic opportunity,” Mr. Anderson said. “We want to be smart and make our resources work as hard as possible, and transform the system to create much better results for those approaching the city in need. We are taking about challenging a status quo that’s been 20 years in the making.”

The CGR contract may come under fire, however, from those who think $50,000 is not much to devote to fleshing out such an ambitious project.

Yesterday, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, Patrick Markee, said he was pleased with the mayor’s verbal commitment to expand “supportive” housing but concerned about how the plan will unfold.

“It’s great talk. It’s great language,” Mr. Markee said. “But so far we haven’t really seen the rubber hit the road.”