When New York City's Department of Homeless Services was temporarily without beds for a group of local homeless people this month, it did a pretty cool thing: booked 100 rooms at a Radisson in Jamaica, Queens and told the hotel's management they were for a "government group."

Pierre Merhej, the hotel's manager, was none too happy about the apparent bait-and-switch. DNAinfo reports:

Still, Merhej said he would not allow DHS to book rooms at the hotel again, even if the city offered more money.

"This is a hotel, not a shelter, and we want to keep it this way," he said. "We have a business to run and a reputation to keep and we intend on keeping it."

Merhej admitted that the hotel's use as a temporary shelter didn't "really have an impact on our regular guests," and was unsure how many homeless people actually stayed in the rooms during the 10-day period for which they were booked.

It's not the first time the city has housed homeless people in a hotel, which, when you get down to it, is an enormously cost-ineffective band-aid for New York's 58,000-strong homeless population. Good for DHS for engaging in a little light trickery to make sure those people weren't spending the night in the cold, but spending some money on figuring out permanent housing would be even better.