It isn't easy attracting and keeping homeless people on the streets in a northern city like New York City. The homeless can vote with their feet and often migrate to more pleasant places with milder winters like Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and especially Berkeley, California, where homelessness was first invented by a hippie with a bong. But Mayor Bill De Blasio was up for the challenge and under his administration he has managed to attract recordbreaking numbers of homeless to the streets of New York. Here's how he did it: They are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front of the doors of Macy's, and panhandling outside Grand Central. New York is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and 1980s. The city's police chief this week said that as many as 4,000 people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the city's...(Read Full Post)