Readers around the world read the New York Times’ front-page series about a homeless girl named Dasani, who was called “Invisible Child.”

They learned about the deplorable conditions in the shelter where she was living in a single room with her parents and seven siblings. They learned about the rats, roaches, and mold; about inspectors who wrote reports that led to no action; they learned about charges of sexual abuse by staff; and about a myriad other horrors in which Dasani and thousands of other children were living. They learned that New York City now has 22,000 children who are homeless, a historic high. The series was brilliantly written by Andrea Elliott, an investigative journalist. Eliott acknowledged that a large part of Dasani’s fate was caused by her dysfunctional parents, who were unemployed and fighting drug addiction. But she also blamed city policies, that had created the system in which the family was ensnared.

Mayor Bloomberg was asked to comment on the series, which stirred wide attention.

He said:

“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” he told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”

Bloomberg argued that New York “has done more than any city to help the homeless,” citing the city’s policies of subsidized health care, job training, and shelter counseling. “But if you are poor and homeless you’d be better off in New York City than anyplace else,” he insisted.

The New York Times series explicitly tied Bloomberg’s homelessness policies to Dasani’s destitute situation. “The Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant,” the Times’ Andrea Elliott wrote. “They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent.”

As a result, Dasani’s family and others like hers found themselves unable to escape the shelter system. Homelessness swelled by 60 percent during Bloomberg’s term, despite his vow to reduce the city’s homeless population by two-thirds in five years. The mayor told the New York Times last year that families were staying in shelters longer because he had improved them to be “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before” — a quote that stood in stark contrast with Elliott’s descriptions of Dasani’s decrepit shelter, which is still operating after inspectors cited it for violations 400 times.

Bloomberg went on to attack the media for not understanding how good Dasani and her family have it compared to poor people in developing countries. “I think one of the problems is a lot of journalists have never looked around the world,” he said, going on to tell the reporter that “your smirk shows you haven’t been outside the country and don’t know what poverty means elsewheres.”

In the Mayor’s words, it is God who decides who is lucky and who is not. That absolves public policymakers of changing the odds. After all, a Greater Power is Making the Big Decisions. Some people have $22 billion, some people live in rat-infested shelters. That’s life.

In the closing days of the Bloomberg administration, the Mayor is suing to block the City Council’s efforts to adopt a living-wage bill for people employed by developers and businesses to either $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits.

Let God handle it.