This is called “bad luck”

If you’ve been out and about in Manhattan over the past six weeks and you have eyes and ears, you know something’s happening — something worrisome.

The urban streetscape is ­degrading.

Take a walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side from the 100s to the 70s, as I did Sunday, and you’ll see it everywhere. It seems every barren storefront with a rental sign in the window has ­become impromptu outdoor housing for a homeless person.

There are many such storefronts — ironic signs of prosperity, not recession. Rents have risen so high that small businesses often can’t afford to continue and landlords will keep a storefront unoccupied for a very long time to secure a wealthy customer willing to take a very lengthy lease (i.e., a bank).

The number of people living on the street in the neighborhood, or at least taking up daytime residence to beg for change, has skyrocketed from a mere handful to several dozen or more.

And many of the faces on the street are a type new to New York City. They’re often startlingly young and white and look like nothing so much as the hippies who used to populate the Upper West Side in the late 1960s and early ’70s. They would have fit right in at the Occupy Wall Street encampment two years ago or at a G20 protest. […]

The change in atmosphere over the holiday weekend was startling. And it wasn’t just the constant demands for money or the filthy bedding in the storefront doorways.

In a shop in the low 90s on Broadway where I was buying my kids ice cream, a young man came in and demanded free sample ­after free sample from a clearly uncomfortable teen girl behind the counter, bought nothing, then planted himself in the store, started making phone calls, and wouldn’t leave.

Only the fact that people kept coming in and out, and that someone was working in the back who could call for help if necessary, prevented me from alerting the police. But what would I have told them? He’d done nothing wrong, yet he’d crossed some civilized boundary.