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Bill de Blasio (second from right) stares down rival Rudy Giuliani. Photo: Getty Images
Mayor de Blasio couldn’t hide his feelings about nemesis Rudy Giuliani, giving him a piercing stare Friday during the 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero.
Only hours before they shared the stage at the solemn event, Giuliani for the second time this week criticized de Blasio for misrepresenting the city’s homeless crisis.
“OK, here’s how ignorant Mayor de Blasio is. He said that there were 40 percent more homeless people during my administration,” Giuliani said on Fox 5, adding the mayor misquoted that statistic, which The New York Times put at 32 percent.
Giuliani also said the spike was only in the shelter population, not in the number of homeless on the street.
“People who are in shelters, I would like to inform the mayor, are not homeless,” Giuliani sniffed.
The two mayors have been locked in a war of words since Giuliani blasted de Blasio and his “progressive views” for allowing vagrants to sleep on the streets in a Post op-ed last Sunday.
De Blasio fired back, calling the ex-mayor “delusional” and saying homelessness rose by 40 percent under his watch between 1994 to 2001.
“[Giuliani] clearly doesn’t remember the fact that he chased — as he said — he chased and chased people, but he also deprived families of benefits they needed and health care they needed,” de Blasio said earlier this week.
But Giuliani patted himself and his successor, ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, on the back for cleaning up the streets.
“All you had to do was live in this city and you know that when I was mayor, there was very little homelessness in this city. They were in shelters,” Giuliani told Fox 5 on Friday.
“Now, how ignorant can you be of what’s going on to use as a figure for more homelessness? That is a case for less homelessness — if the shelters went up, there were less people on the street,” he added.
De Blasio’s spokeswoman responded by saying 9/11 wasn’t the proper day for Giuliani to be attacking, calling the tactic “completely inappropriate.”
Additional reporting by Rich Calder
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