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, while its former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has spoken scathingly of how his successor is failing to keep order.
Busiest location: Homeless beggars have become part of the fabric of 34th Street, one of the busiest in the city, with them looking for change from shoppers flocking to Macy's, one of the city's biggest tourist draws
Presence: Grand Central station, another of the city's biggest tourist draws and used by tens of thousands of commuters every day, is used for begging
Elite address: Columbus Circle, beside Central Park, is the location of a Trump Hotel, the Time Warner building where apartments change hands for as much as $25 million - and an increasing number of homeless people
In the shadows: Mike Poshkin, 28, is living and begging within sight of the Empire State Building, one of the world's most famous buildings. He makes as much in a day as someone working an eight hour day in a minimum wage job
Another typical site: A homeless man sites outside the entrance to Madison Square Gardens, the city's biggest events venue
Street scene: New York's yellow cabs are the backdrop to this homeless person's trolley full of posessions
This week New York governor Andrew Cuomo said bluntly that 'it's hard not to conclude that we have a major homeless problem in the city of New York' while the city's police chief Bill Bratton described the scale of it as 'a tipping point'.
And even Bill de Blasio, who has spent months refusing to acknowledge that the growing scale of rough sleeping was anything other than a 'perception problem' finally said there was 'a reality problem'.
Now Daily Mail Online can reveal how a toxic combination of cheap drugs and softly-softly policing are fueling the epidemic - and that beggars are making as much money as someone on the city's minimum wage in cash each day.
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.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3218600/Four-thousand-sleeping-streets-New-York-homeless-crisis-caused-beggars-making-75-day-cheap-drugs-end-tough-policing-cleaned-city.html#ixzz3kmLX772d
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