Next week a City Council committee is expected to vote on Flushing Commons – a major development located at the site of Municipal Lot 1 in downtown Flushing – but in the meantime, the city and developers are continuing a dialogue with members of the City Council trying to address any concerns.
At a Land Use Committee hearing on Thursday, July 15, supporters and opponents of the project gave testimony while Councilmembers questioned the developers about issues ranging from parking concerns to construction mitigation.
“We were grateful for the opportunity to present our Flushing Commons plan to the New York City Council last week and we thought that the dialogue with the councilmembers was productive,” said Michael Meyer, President of TDC Development, who is developing the site in partnership with the Rockefeller Group Development Corporation.
“We are currently working with the City Council and the administration to resolve any outstanding questions or issues and we remain confident that Flushing Commons will prove to be an incredibly positive addition to the downtown Flushing community.”
Flushing Commons is a privately-financed development project that will be a vibrant, mixed-use, 1.1-million-square-foot, LEED-certified urban center with over 600 upscale residential condominiums, 275,000-square-feet of new retail space, hotel and/or office uses, a 1,600-space parking garage and a new state-of-the-art home for the Flushing YMCA.
The project is currently going though the Uniformed Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) together with Macedonia Plaza, a proposed 140-unit all affordable housing project being developed by the Macedonia AME Church. The Macedonia Plaza project will be located in the northeast corner of Municipal Lot 1, adjacent to Flushing Commons.
Queens City Councilmember Leroy Comrie, who chairs the Land Use Committee, said the Council is still speaking with developers about finding more on-street parking and using the existing YMCA space for additional parking. In addition, he mentioned making sure there were adequate plans in place to ensure existing businesses were not decimated by the construction of the project.
“We’re continuing to press all of the issues,” said Richard Lipsky, a spokesperson for the group opposing Flushing Commons. “We think the project is too large.”
The Council’s Land Use Committee is expected to vote on the project on Tuesday, July 27, and if it passes it would come before the entire council for a vote.
