Outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” he said.



@sarahljaffe We always knew he thought he was God, didn't we?

... more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline. But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani’s found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever—a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

Outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to be making an all-out push to be remembered as a heartless plutocrat (which he is). In response to the' heartbreaking, enraging five-part series on a homeless 11-year-old girl named Dasani, a series focusing on many ways Bloomberg's policies directly contributed to homelessness, Bloomberg had this to say To which one absolutely fair response was:Bloomberg fiercely defended his administration's record on homelessness, claiming that "it’s fair to say that New York City has done more than any city to help the homeless." But as the articles to which he was responding noted in their opening paragraphs, there are And:That "pleasurable experience" includes sexual assault by shelter staff, mice running in and out of holes in the walls of rooms in which children sleep, lead paint, and a wait of an hour or more to heat meals in one of two microwaves shared by hundreds of shelter residents.

Michael Bloomberg has for just two weeks short of 12 years been dealing New York City's homeless people, and its low-wage workers and their families more generally, a bad hand. And while it might be convenient for him to think that God is responsible for the disgusting conditions he created and refused to fix in the city's homeless shelters, he really needs to learn to look in the mirror.