Mayor de Blasio admitted on Friday that his handling of the city’s homeless epidemic has been his biggest misstep in office — a day after Police Commissioner Bill Bratton called him out for minimizing the issue.
“In terms of things I’m not happy with, you know, I’m very clear, I’ve said it — I did not explain to people well enough what we were doing to address homelessness,” de Blasio said when asked to name his biggest failure during an interview with WOR-AM’s Len Berman and Todd Schnitt.
“I think I still have a lot more to do to explain what is going on with this new reality of homelessness.”
HHe said he’s proud of a new $2.6 billion program that will provide 15,000 units of supportive housing.
“But I didn’t get ahead of this to explain to people the problem and the measures we’re taking,” he admitted.
“And, bluntly, we’re going to have to do a lot more, because the reality of homelessness now is different than it was even just a few years ago.”
Speaking in a panel discussion Thursday, Bratton said the de Blasio administration had made a “mistake” by not “validating what everyone was seeing.”
“There are more homeless out there that are more shelter-resistant, more people begging on the streets than there were. It’s quite clear,” he said at the Manhattan Institute event.
As recently as July 9, de Blasio was downplaying the issue, saying the numbers have “gone down a bit,” but he was using data collected in the winter, when fewer people are on the street.
Released Thursday, the federal Annual Homeless Assessment Report said the city saw an 11 percent rise in the number of people living on the street this year compared with last year.
Meanwhile, de Blasio said during the radio interview that his biggest success as mayor was his universal pre-kindergarten initiative.
“I’m very, very proud of what we did with full-day pre-K for all — now well over 55,000 kids in full-day pre-K,” he said.