I’m A Goin’ To Stay Where You Sleep All Day Where They Hung The Jerk That Invented Work In A Bat Cave Hive Under Riverside Drive . . .

Mayor Bloomberg announced that the City will attempt to get homeless people living in encampments off the streets:

Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City’s streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday.

. . .

The Department of Homeless Services, under its new commissioner, Robert Hess, has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in Manhattan, to which roughly 350 homeless men and women — of a total homeless population of about 3,800, according to the city’s last count — return nightly.

Most of the encampments are little more than collections of cardboard boxes, or tarpaulins hung over a beam, officials said.

. . .

Officials stopped short of saying that they would force people off the streets, but they do plan to clear the makeshift dwellings and make them inaccessible for others to return.

“We’re going to let them know that their days on the streets must come to an end,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an address to the annual conference of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “And we’ll secure and clean up the places where they’ve been bedding down, to make sure that they won’t be occupied again.”

Over the past four years, officials said, the administration has worked to shift its focus from improving and expanding shelters toward more permanent solutions. That effort has included the use of supportive housing — or housing that affords a range of on-site social services — and a program called HomeBase, which offers flexible subsidies or other support for people at risk of homelessness.

Mr. Hess would not give the precise locations of the sleeping areas — most of them out of sight of the public — that the city plans to target, out of respect for the people who stay in them, he said.

But officials said that some of the sites are already familiar to the department’s teams of outreach workers and that they will coordinate with the Police and Sanitation Departments and with transit officials to identify other sites, both outdoors and in vacant buildings.

One site, near Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, is known to homeless workers as the Bat Cave. Lately, it has been home to at least four people, including Gladys Anderson, 44, who sleeps on a discarded bed propped on milk crates. Monday afternoon, sitting on a red velveteen bedspread, she said she would gladly accept the mayor’s offer of more permanent housing.

She said it was “time to be out” of the cave.

“I will drop it like it’s hot,” she said. “This is not no life adventure for me. We’re just passing through.”

City outreach workers stopped by a few days earlier, she said, and had the people in the encampment fill out paperwork needed to get apartments.

Her boyfriend, who would give his name only as Country, was more skeptical of the offer.

“This is America,” he said as he loaded 12 garbage bags full of cans and bottles onto a large rolling cart. “This is living off the land. That’s how we built this thing.”

If I were to guess, Country will be living indoors soon.