DETROIT, Mich. — They can’t get his attention back home, so a group of Billionaires’ Row residents is taking their battle with Mayor Bill de Blasio over a homeless shelter planned for their block someplace where the presidential wannabe might actually notice: Iowa.
“Hey, Bill de Blasio! It’s New York … Remember Us?” asks the first of 10 eventual billboards going up Thursday in the key battleground state — where Hizzoner has seemingly spent more time this year than his own city — one backer of the signs told The Post.
“He’s the mayor of our city. He should devote his time to listening to the people of New York City,” said Michael Fisher, a member of the West 58th Street Coalition who says that the group has been trying for years to score face time with de Blasio over the controversial plan to convert the block’s old Park Savoy Hotel to a homeless shelter.
“We’re going to run these billboards all over the state, and we’re going to run them until the mayor actually has a meeting with us,” said Fisher, explaining that one billboard will go up Thursday in downtown Cedar Rapids, with at least nine more to dot the Hawkeye State starting next week. “He doesn’t like listening to his constituents.”
The move comes as the mayor prepares for his second Democratic primary debate, taking the stage Wednesday night in Detroit along with such front-runners as former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris.
Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s press secretary, said City Hall had no record of a formal request from Fisher for a sit-down, despite The Post producing a March email to a mayoral staffer asking for just such a meeting.
The mayor’s plan to open a 150-bed men’s shelter in the shuttered hotel blindsided locals in January 2018, and has been tied up in a contentious back-and-forth court battle since.
Most recently, an appeals court in June ruled that the shelter can move forward, a decision that area residents vowed to fight.
Opponents, including the West 58th Street Coalition, have insisted that they are not inherently opposed to the idea of a shelter going up in their well-kept back yard, but that the Park Savoy would make for a hazard-ridden firetrap.
“I have no issue with a shelter opening up on our street,” said Fisher. “I have an issue with unsafe shelters.
“We have a major homeless problem in the city and he’s basically ignoring the whole problem,” Fisher said of de Blasio — a point the billboards echo, mentioning that “61,000 New Yorkers are homeless.”
Fisher says de Blasio’s insistence on ramming a shelter onto Billionaires’ Row is the Che Guevara-loving mayor’s way of sticking it to the upper crust.
“The mayor wants it there because it backs up against a billionaire’s building, one of those tall buildings where [Dell Technologies founder] Michael Dell lives in a $140 million apartment,” said Fisher. “De Blasio wants it there so he can say ‘f–k you’ to the rich people.
“I’m not a billionaire. I own an apartment, but I have a mortgage,” said Fisher, who owns a pharmaceutical recruiting firm and has lived on the block for 13 years.
His coalition, however, has plenty of money in its war chest.
Fisher said the group has a $100,000 budget — enough to keep the $1,500-a-month billboards dotting Iowa for at least six months, assuming 10 of them go up.
“We’re going to annoy the f–k out of him,” said Fisher, explaining that the group chose Iowa because of how much time the mayor of New York has been spending there of late. “We’re going to remind him no matter where he is in Iowa that he needs to come home.”
Hizzoner has stumped in the state six times so far this year.
“We’re committed to giving New Yorkers experiencing homelessness the opportunity to remain in their communities,” said City Hall in a statement. “We look forward to opening this site and providing high-quality shelter services to those who need it most.”
But even once de Blasio abandons his quixotic White House bid and stops touring the Midwestern battleground state, he’ll have a message waiting for him in New York.
“When he’s back in New York, we’re going to run them in New York,” Fisher said of the billboards. “When he finally gets out of his dream world and realizes he’s never going to be president of the United States.”
Additional reporting by Aaron Feis