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 ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of denials.

Police officers have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, 20 of which are so entrenched that they have their own furniture...

Step 1: Discourage police from enforcing quality of life laws

Daily Mail Online has established figures which show how little police action has been taken against the problem.

Arrests for offenses normally associated with the homeless and street dwellers and assessed under the quality of life bracket, have dropped drastically since the election of Bill de Blasio as mayor.

In 2013, there were 8372 charges for littering. For the first three months of 2015, there were 1227 arrests.

People who were accused of urinating in public faced courts 29,579 times in 2013.... and the first three months of 2015 saw 4,547 summonsed.

Arrests for exposure in 2013 were 723... and for the first quarter of this year, the figure was 108.

In 2013 there were 56,103 arrests for disorderly conduct. Yet between January 1 2015 and the end of March there were 7005, which is again heading for a 50 per cent reduction.

Step 2: Let the liberal population continue to fund the drug habits of the homeless, and encourage them to stay on the streets

Homeless people spoken to by Daily Mail Online said that they were making $70 dollars every day from panhandling.

The amount is the same as working an eight-hour day in a minimum wage job in New York, where the state-mandated minimum wage is $8.75.

One homeless man - a former professional who had become a drug addict and ended up one the streets - said: 'People... are very kind and and give me food and on a good day I can get about 70-80 dollars which shows you the kindness of New Yorkers.'

And Patrick Kolher, who begs outside the Trump International Hotel at Central Park West, said he regularly saw donations of $70 a day into his collection tin.

Step 3: Continue supporting rent control laws which shrink the pool of available housing and create disincentives to create more.

Step 4: Decriminalize drug use and release the insane from the mental hospitals.

And... voila! Mass homelessness, spread out over some of New York City's most exclusive addresses. Rich liberals and homelessness; what could be more perfect together?

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.