“That’s just the way it is.” So sang Bruce Hornsby, in his song about homelessness in 1986.

He added: “But don’t you believe them.”

Today, conditions in LA’s MacArthur Park are much worse.

As The Post reported this week, MacArthur Park has become a “Zombie Apocalypse.” Homelessness, human filth, and drug abuse — with junkies stooped over in the “fenty fold.”

Local officials look the other way — or, worse, subsidize the horror in a historic public space, spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on groups that give out free crack pipes that keep addicts coming to the park.

We reached out to City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez close to a dozen times, both before and after running our report; she never responded.

The media — and the public — deserve better accountability than that from our elected officials.

The only time Mayor Karen Bass seems to care about MacArthur Park is when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shows up to arrest gangsters who have no business being in the country. 

Bass called those ICE raids in the park “outrageous” and “un-American.” 

What’s un-American is accepting conditions in the park as just part of life in LA.

Once, MacArthur Park was Westlake Park — a luxury tourist destination, as much a part of LA’s brand as Rodeo Drive.

It was renamed after Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific theater in World War II, and later the antihero of the Korean campaign.

In the last decades of the 20th century, it became synonymous with crime. But that wasn’t the park’s origin — nor does that have to be its fate.

Americans can’t accept urban dystopia as the fate of our cities — not in LA, and not in New York. Not with the World Cup coming — and not after that.

We deserve better.