If you think a “hotspot” offers free Wi-Fi and a “pop-up” is a place to buy artisanal food or Christmas gifts, you obviously don’t work for Mayor Bill de Blasio.
That’s because Hizzoner has appropriated the innocuous, millennial terms to describe the hordes of homeless people who bed down in public across the Big Apple each night.
In City Hall jargon, a “hotspot” identifies an area where the mayor’s “HOME-STAT” outreach workers have found vagrants — often as a result of complaints to 311.
And a “pop-up” refers to a people living in easily dismantled shelters, like tents or cardboard boxes.
Only if someone has built a fixed structure out of wood or other durable materials does the city finally call it like it is: an “encampment.”
The hair-splitting distinctions became a sticking point this week when The Post photographed a group of vagrants camped out on a Times Square sidewalk, where they used construction scaffolding as a clothesline to dry a load of rain-soaked jackets and other garments.
Although City Hall claimed the sprawl of cardboard and blankets didn’t qualify for a clean-up because it was only a “hotspot,” cops rousted the group a short time later, and their former home was made off-limits by metal barricades.
City Councilman Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island) blasted de Blasio’s embrace of bureaucratese in addressing the homelessness crisis.
“We should be accurate in describing the real issue with homeless encampments around the city,” Borelli said.
“It seems easier to toss word salads then it does to toss people from our public spaces and into shelters.”
De Blasio spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said, “Whether obstructions are called pop-ups or encampments, we don’t allow them in New York City.”
“When they are spotted, they’re taken down,” she added.