Construction Maison

Bronx developer Mark Stagg’s “bait-and-switch” shenanigans are making a mockery of two signature Mayor Bill de Blasio initiatives : affordable housing and his “Turning the Tide” homeless plan. In Thursday’s Post, Carl Campanile reported that back in 2015, Stagg flipped a Bronx apartment building into a transitional shelter facility . Working-class residents of the Crotona Avenue building saw their dream of winning the affordable- housing lottery turn into a nightmare once Stagg’s nonprofit partner, Bronx Parent Housing Network , moved 44 homeless families into the 55-unit building in November 2015. The rent-paying residents say they have to put up with panhandling, fighting, all-night partying and even assaults. Stagg used his signature tactic of asking the city for a property tax break in exchange for keeping 20 percent of units “affordable” — and then leasing the remaining 80 percent to a homeless-services nonprofit. Tenants came forward with their tales of misery after readin...

Let’s face it: Nobody really knows what to do about the homeless crisis. The sheer numbers of 60,000 people in city shelters and nearly 4,000 more on the streets — many in the latter group psychotic, drug-addicted and violent — overwhelm the best-intended plans to help them. That said, there are better and worse ways to cope with the nightmare. It’s bad enough that the city now spends $2.3 billion a year on homeless services including $1.4 billion on shelter housing , twice what it spent just three years ago. But making things worse : City Hall is now paying landlords more money to put up the homeless than the property owners could make by renting apartments and hotel rooms to non-homeless people at ordinary market rates . Shouldn’t developers be incentivized to create actual affordable housing for permanent residents — not more shelters for transients with no links to a community? The hapless Department of Homeless Services has gone off the deep end at a site in The Bronx, whether ou...