What horrors The Post found this week inside the city’s $2.1 billion, 400-facility shelter system. But it’s a case for fixing what’s wrong, not for accepting homeless living on the streets or in the subways.

In fact, most shelters are better than what was once standard, but the few remaining city-run congregate shelters fall far short.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services reigns over bedlam palaces where the old and disabled are routinely at the mercy of the depraved and violent.

While the system strives to move people into better shelters, this helps explain why only 22 of the 1,000 or so homeless persons in the subway encountered by the city’s new SOS teams accepted a shelter bed. “Yes, it may be safer for them on the street in some cases,” said a shelter worker outside the notorious 30th Street Intake Center.

The homeless single men and women housed in these temporary shelters (which also include converted hotels) range from down-on-their-luck low-skill workers and tradespeople to recently released ex-cons and the mentally ill. Few offer much in the way of mental health, housing, job referral or training services.

Another outrage is the soaring spending on too-often-sleazy nonprofits and slumlords to lease decrepit apartment buildings for hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

What to do? For starters, put all ex-mayor Bill de Blasio’s expensive new-shelter plans on hold — and focus on cost-effective, humane ways to move forward. Break up the large DHS-run central intake centers, creating smaller, safer temporary shelters with access to drug-treatment and mental-health services.

But don’t take this as an excuse to just shrug at the homeless who insist on staying in the streets and subways, nor to stick with a contracting system that accepts profiteering (including by nonprofits).

Do better for the homeless — and for the general public, too.