Liberals like to hate on Bloomberg because they don't feel he has been effective at helping the poor in the city. What they fail to see is that he's done something more important: keeping the rich from leaving, so they stay there and be taxed to provide the money that bankrolls NYC's safety net. The alternative is to become Detroit, where the rich people have left and there is no more money to pay for social services.

The fact is that NYC will always have a ton of poor people. It's almost guaranteed by virtue of its providing subsidized housing, etc, that all the poor from the surrounding areas will migrate to NYC.