Shelter Bait-and-Switch

Bronx residents and elected officials are up in arms over developer Mark Stagg’s bait-and-switch involving a Kingsbridge apartment complex whose market-rate housing has suddenly become housing for folks transitioning from homelessness.

It’s not Stagg’s first bait-and-switch. According to leaders in Wakefield, he touted two buildings in their neighborhood as 80/20 market-rate to low-income. Today, both are 80 percent ex-homeless (albeit former residents of family shelters).

Thursday, the city will belatedly present the local community board with an essentially done deal — and take no responsibility for Stagg’s “trojan horse” play.

Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, for one, is furious over the deception: “That’s not the way things should operate.”

Yet it seems the city Department of Homeless Services thinks it has no other choice as it works to get families with children out of shelters, cluster sites and motels.

Giving neighborhoods just 30 days’ notice plainly limits local opposition, feeding the community’s sense of outrage.

Then, too, the whole city may feel betrayed if the homeless wind up with too much of the “affordable housing” Mayor de Blasio vows to provide.

A mayoral spokesman insists that won’t happen, noting that the 6,533 new apartments for homeless families are a fraction of the nearly 78,000 affordable units built or preserved under de Blasio. But what’s the impact of letting the homeless jump the line? And what other developers will also belatedly convert affordable housing to shelters, which mean worry-free, guaranteed rent rolls?

The episode also bodes ill for the mayor’s plan to spread 90 new shelters across the city, placing families in their home neighborhoods. DHS says the Kingsbridge area isn’t serving its fair share of homeless Bronxites — which apparently justifies playing along with Stagg’s games.

What other tricks are ahead?