The number of homeless people living in shelters in New York is the highest in three decades and the city’s program to get them out of shelters is critically flawed, an advocacy group said in a report released yesterday.

The Coalition for the Homeless called the 2000-05 period the worst time span for homelessness since the Great Depression. The group has made similar references to that era in past years.

Citing data from the city, the group said the average number of homeless people residing in shelters every night has jumped to 32,609 in the first five years of this decade from 22,611 in the 1990s. It said more families are staying in shelters and that the average stay has increased to nearly a year, up from an average of about seven months in 1995.

“Homelessness is still a crisis in New York City,” the executive director of the group, Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, said.

The report portrays the city’s Housing Stability Plus program, started by Mayor Bloomberg a year ago, as “flawed” and more likely to perpetuate homelessness than to get people into permanent housing.

The program was started after the federal government cut back on the Section 8 vouchers that helped people living in shelters to secure permanent housing indefinitely. To encourage financial self-sustainability, the city’s program reduces the amount of rent assistance to 20% annually over five years. If a family makes more than a preset amount of income, it loses the housing grant. The Coalition for the Homeless said that is forcing people back into shelters. More than 5,000 are currently living in apartments secured through the program.

The acting commissioner for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, Fran White, said in a statement yesterday that the report didn’t acknowledge the significant improvements in helping the homeless population made in the last two and a half years.

“Far from being the worst decade for the homeless, this decade is on track to cut chronic homelessness by two thirds, reform the shelter system, and create record numbers of supportive housing units for formerly homeless families and individuals,” she said.

One critic called the report a “publicity ploy” and said the organization makes people more reliant on welfare, rather than helping them to become self-sufficient.

“It is a joke to see Mary Brosnahan claim to care about economic self-sufficiency. She’s never done a thing to advocate any expectations of the poor,” a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Heather MacDonald, said. “The whole mission of the coalition is to keep people dependent.”