#De Blasio abruptly boots over 100 disabled people from Midtown shelter

With little warning, City Hall moved more than a hundred disabled New Yorkers out of their Midtown shelter to make way for the homeless who were booted by Mayor Bill de Blasio from an Upper West Side hotel.

Frustrated and fearful residents of the Harmonia, a former hotel located on East 31st Street, lined the streets with their belongings Thursday as they awaited their sudden transfer to other shelters in the Big Apple’s sprawling system — with some saying they are being moved to Brooklyn and Queens.

“We’ve been living here for two years. We’ve accumulated so much stuff and they want to just bring one bag. I feel mad,” said Moises Oliveras, 44, who suffers from a host of medical issues and lived at the shelter with his wife, Maria.

“They use us like chess pieces. Moving us around like that.”

The Oliverases only found out Wednesday that they were being moved, just a day after City Hall quietly acknowledged its decision to stop housing the homeless in the Lucerne Hotel.

“We’re human beings, man. And they treated us like garbage,” Oliveras added.

An undated fact sheet posted online reports that more than 170 families call the Harmonia home, though it’s unclear how many lived in the facility as of Thursday. The Post observed dozens of residents standing outside near the facility preparing to move.

“It’s unfair. It’s last notice. Everyone is running around. We were just told this yesterday,” said Lisa Feliciano, 49, a childcare provider who has lived at the shelter for eight months with her daughter.

“My daughter suffers from depression. This isn’t helping. She’s going to college! She’s supposed to take a class at six tonight.”

The clear-out happened despite de Blasio telling reporters three different times during his daily press briefing on Thursday that there was plenty of space in the shelter system to accommodate those who had been living in the Lucerne Hotel on West 79th Street.

“There was a lot more space in our traditional shelters,” Hizzoner said. “We had space available in the places where services are provided, where we expect to be able to do the best to support homeless folks. We never intended to be in hotels on a long-term basis.”

The Department of Homeless Services relocated 10,000 New Yorkers from congregate shelters where social distancing is virtually impossible to hotel rooms as part of an emergency $78 million effort to slow the spread of COVID-19.

That total included the nearly 300 recovering addicts moved to the Lucerne.

Complaints quickly followed as many in the posh neighborhood reported they spotted their new neighbors harassing pedestrians, panhandling, and even relapsing — using drugs, and sometimes overdosing — in public.

One group hired powerhouse attorney Randy Mastro, a former top aide to then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to make its case to City Hall.

Crime statistics showed jumps in reported robberies and burglaries in the neighborhood, though violent crime indicators remained flat or declined.

Still, with pressure mounting, de Blasio quietly toured the site and explained his decision to close it down Wednesday as a response to the conditions that he described as “not acceptable”.

City Hall’s about-face earned scorn of its own from Upper West Side politicians and residents, who argued that de Blasio folded and the campaign against the shelter was an affront to the famously liberal neighborhood’s values.

“We are deeply disturbed that the Mayor is caving to political pressure to move homeless New Yorkers out of temporary pandemic shelter at the Lucerne Hotel in a way that will displace 150 adult families living at the Harmonia, none of whom deserve to get caught up in this politicized process,” read the statement cosigned by a slew of prominent Manhattan Democrats, including Borough President Gale Brewer, powerful state Senator Liz Krueger and longtime Assemblyman Dick Gottfried.

And that’s not the last of the headaches. The Legal Aid Society threatened to sue City Hall on Thursday over the move.

“Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pathetic and shortsighted surrender to Upper West Side NIMBYism has unsurprisingly disrupted the lives of other vulnerable New Yorkers at various shelters around New York City, all in the midst of a public health crisis,” said the group’s top lawyer, Judith Goldiner.

The Department of Homeless Services defended the move in a statement late Thursday.

“We are coordinating closely with our provider partners, who are doing extraordinary work under challenging circumstances,” said spokesman Isaac McGinn. “No one will be turned out into the streets under any circumstance.”

 Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy and Julia Marsh