“My block is so quiet,” begins a joke that Moody McCarthy has added to his routine, “if there’s any yelling at night that means Ecuador scored a goal.”

. . .

In case you haven’t been to a comedy show in a while, comedians are still having little luck with the ladies. And living in Astoria isn’t necessarily helping.

A young, chirpy brunette showed us a model one-bedroom apartment that had a pressurized wall built in the living room so it could comfortably work as a two-bedroom. The unit had recently undergone luxury upgrades such as granite countertops, new appliances, posh lighting fixtures, a renovated bathroom and brand-new air conditioners. Even with the wall, the living room and both bedrooms were considerably larger and nicer than any apartment we had seen through Craigslist. We would have both a trendy East Village address and be surrounded by trees, green lawns, street hockey and basketball courts. It was the perfect surrounding to sit and study or play Wiffle Ball. Stuy Town felt like the college campus that NYU could never deliver.

Williamsburg is ground zero in the growing scourge of stalled construction that has left the neighborhood littered with 18 vacant lots and rusting steel building frames — more than in all of The Bronx, The Post has learned.

Block after block in the trendy Brooklyn community and a few adjacent streets in Greenpoint have been declared stalled construction sites by the city.

A team of building inspectors found 143 stalled sites around the city. But the cluster of lots in Williamsburg, where development was white-hot just two years ago, is the biggest.

By contrast, The Bronx and Queens each had just 14 stalled construction sites, and Staten Island had 13, city records show.

. . .

Philip DePaolo, who moved from The Bronx to Williamsburg in 1979, said the neighborhood looks like the arson-scarred streets he left behind.

“It looks like I never left,” said DePaolo, comparing his old neighborhood to Williamsburg today.

“The problem we’re having now is that we’re starting to get squatters in these buildings and lots,” said DePaolo. “Blight draws crime, and if you have blocks and blocks of vacant lots with no people, that creates a problem.”

DePaolo pointed to broken construction fencing surrounding some of the sites and piles of blankets and cardboard shacks left behind by homeless squatters who spend nights there.

Officials say they’re working on the problem as a growing number of developers struggle with financing in a slumping housing market.

Rumors have been going around lately that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are making a big move to New York. We heard it for the first time from Nat Hentoff, who told us a few weeks ago that he’d heard it from doormen on his block of west 12th Street in the Village.

. . .

During another visit we talked to a doorman in the neighborhood who said: “Can’t tell you who lives there. I would lose my job. But you know, we doormen know everything that goes on around here. I can tell you the owner won’t be there much because he’ll be filming in LA a lot, and I can tell you he bought the house for his wife, who was in a Broadway show.” The doorman smiled, “But I can’t tell you who it is. I could lose my job.”

City officials said the condos — which couldn’t attract buyers in the fizzled housing market — are part of an effort to help an “unprecedented” number of homeless families who have ended up on the street because of the tough economy.

Units priced at $350,000

It appears to be the first time a faltering upscale building has found a new purpose as a shelter, said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Neighbors were furious the 67-unit building on East New York Ave., where apartments were supposed to sell for $250,000 to $350,000, has been turned into a shelter.

“I’m a hardworking taxpayer, and I don’t think homeless people should be living better than me,” fumed Desmond John, 35, a window salesman who wanted to rent one of the fancy apartments. “They said it’s not for rent. It’s a shelter. I was shocked.”

Luxury brokerage firm HQ Marketing Partners started promoting the condos last summer — with the hook that buyers could custom design the units.

When the market started to tank in the fall — and his gamble on a fringe neighborhood didn’t pay off — developer Avi Shriki said he had to come up with a Plan B.

“When the market went south, we knew we had to do something different,” said Shriki, 44. “With the market being the way it is you have to be creative.”

This spring, Shriki signed a 10-year contract with the Bushwick Economic Development Group to turn the building into a homeless shelter.

Shriki wouldn’t say how much he gets paid — but he said he jumped at the chance to get people in his building.

“At least we still own the building and we are paying our mortgage, so that’s good,” said Shriki. “The outcome is not as bad as some people I know who had to surrender the whole building to the bank.”

City pays $90 a night

The city is paying Bushwick Economic Development Corp. $90 a night for each of the apartments, about $2,700 a month — a figure that also covers social services, housing help and job counseling designed to get families back on their feet.

The developers in similiarly overbuilt Long Island City should take notice — some of these rentals are way under $2700 . . .

For years, Halstead Property’s Richard Grossman has run a boot camp, teaching agents how to get buyers approved by co-op boards. In it, he presents four hypothetical applicant profiles. The first is a professional — a teacher, perhaps — with an average income but an outsize down payment. The second is a bonus-dependent candidate like a banker, who makes $80,000 and is putting down the minimum, but has a bonus three times his salary. The third, a non–Wall Streeter, earns somewhere in the low six figures and has a small bonus and a standard down payment, and the fourth, a first-time buyer with a good job, relies on relatives to cobble together a decent down payment.

In the past, says Grossman, agents invariably picked the financier as the most board-worthy, thanks to his bonus. At last month’s seminar, however, the answers were unanimous: “Go with the teacher.” And that is a big change. “If you were bidding against someone from Wall Street who had this kind of bonus history, you couldn’t compete. First of all, they were willing to outbid you, and second of all, the sellers were willing to take them over somebody else,” says Gumley Haft Kleier president Michele Kleier. “Bonus used to be the favorite word in everybody’s vocabulary. Now salary is a much more attractive word.” Admits one Upper West Side board member: “We’re definitely cautious across the board now, especially when someone’s touting their bonus.”

“It’s like Yankee Stadium,” Antony, a security guard, said over his shoulder, leading the way through the thumping entrance of what used to be the original East Side location of Scores strip club.

Scores lost its battle with the state over its liquor license last year. Since then, the Las Vegas-based empire, Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, has moved in, and last night was their official opening in New York.

Sapphire made sure to bring yards of neon sapphire blue back-lighting, a fluorescent, engraved pompadour-shaped ice-sculpture, plushier (much plush-ier, according to the dancers) leather chairs, new carpeting, a concierge service, and a new chef — Jayson Margulies from Robert’s Steak House at the Penthouse Executive Club.

Antony, like other security guards on Thursday night, wore a dark suit with an aquarium blue skinny-tie.

“Yankee Stadium,” he continued dreamily. “That’s what it’s like with this particular venue. This is the granddaddy of gentleman’s clubs, For years when I was growing up they were called strip bars or something else, some less politically correct kind of word, you know what I mean. But you walk in here and you are called ’sir’ or ‘ma’am,’ and you get the white-glove treatment from the minute you walk in the door. That’s how this franchise does the thing.”

Sapphire’s main room looks largely identical to the old Scores, largely because there were no actual construction renovations done. The layout, too, is similar: bar to the left, mirrored wall and couches on the right, the stage front and center.

A Manhattan woman has been arrested for allegedly trying to scam thousands of dollars in fees by placing a bogus ad in a newspaper offering cheap rents in fancy apartments, authorities said yesterday. Raadiya James, 22, is accused of buying an ad in AM New York on Dec. 2 that mimicked an official announcement from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offering cheap apartments on West 57th Street.

In exchange for a $5 application fee, the home-seekers were offered a shot at studios for $538 and two-bedrooms for $823.

Over the next few days, more than 1,000 money orders poured into a post-office box.

But authorities picked up on the alleged scam and when James came to pick up the loot, she was arrested.

And then there are professionals:

“Of course, honey, we’re in a recession,” replied Jackie Sim, the building’s [Avalon Morningside Park, a new 20-story monolith capping Columbus Avenue at 110th Street] leasing agent, when asked whether units had been going more slowly than anticipated. “People are shopping around more.”

. . .

Ms. Sim would call the Avalon a “luxury” building rather than “full-service” — in fact, she did slip up a couple of times — if 20 percent of it didn’t fall under the city’s 80-20 affordable housing guidelines. Developer AvalonBay secured $100 million in tax-exempt bonds to keep 59 units rent-stabilized at “affordable” rates (studios for about $620, $922 for a three-bedroom). Though the apartments aren’t quite as swank — Corian countertops instead of granite, for example — AvalonBay won’t have problems filling them up: HPD was still inundated with applications for the lottery.

“Everyone applied,” said Kelly Garcia, owner of the overstuffed Hardware and Houseware store on 109th and Columbus-including him. “Nobody has said they got in. What I think is they keep it for their own people.”

Finding a cheap apartment on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg? Priceless. Paying $550 a month to sleep inches from a toilet? A little disgusting.

Nonetheless, just such a humble abode turned up on Tuesday morning on Craigslist — with pictures, no less, of a room that fits little more than a bed, a sink, a shower, a mini-fridge and hotplate and, yes, that toilet, all inches away from each other.

Oh, and one more detail: there are no windows.

“Room is in basement,” the listing reads. “There is no separation between the bedroom and the bathroom.”

What did you expect for $550? A gap of more than six inches from the foot of the bed to the toilet? Are you some kind of Rockefeller?

If not, join the club. The landlord’s housekeeper, who showed the room to The Brooklyn Paper on Tuesday afternoon, said there has been lots of interest in the listing.

“We’ve gotten a lot of e-mails today [to come see the apartment],” she said.

But by sunset, the listing for the “prison chic” unit had been “flagged” by Craigslist for further investigation, possibly because a basement apartment with no windows is illegal.

Illegal or not, there could be another reason why the listing was de-listed. “The apartment has rented,” the landlord claimed when contacted by The Brooklyn Paper on Wednesday.

Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.

What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an “attic-like space.”

In a $31 million suit, Vavilov says the purchase — which would have represented the second-highest amount for a residential sale in New York City history — was the result of a bait-and-switch scam. Unlike The Plaza hotel of the children’s story “Eloise,” where rooms “embodied the height of elegance and sophistication, the same cannot be said of the penthouses,” said lawyer Y. David Scharf, who filed the suit Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.

“The disparity between what they were supposed to get and what [developer] El-Ad was planning to deliver to them is outrageous.”

Vavilov’s wife, Russian actress Maryana Tsaregradskaya, “burst into tears” when she first saw the finished unit on June 28.