Mayor Bloomberg Warns of ‘Uprising’ Over Cost of Homeless Shelters

Rise up against ... the homeless? Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Mayor Bloomberg continues to blame lax admission policies for the record number of people in the city's homeless shelters, and he thinks it's only a matter of time before The People rise up against the resources being devoted to New York's neediest. 

Last week, Bloomberg marveled that "you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we've got to give you shelter." Of course, while this may technically be true, the people crowding homeless shelters are not wealthy. Nobody prefers to live in a homeless shelter if they can avoid it. But what a crazy policy, right!?!

Bloomberg continued to hammer this point home at the tail end of his soda-ban press conference this evening. "You're gonna see an uprising here," Bloomberg said. "The public cannot afford to continue to do what we've been doing with homeless where everybody has a right to shelter, whether they need it or not. The public at some point is going to say to their elected officials: 'I don't want to pay anymore.'"

It was an awkward juxtaposition to the impassioned defense Bloomberg had just made for a ban on certain large sodas: "We have a responsibility as human beings to do something, to save each other."