By Alex Robinson
A second house is about to spring up on a Flushing block where neighbors have been raging over another recently constructed, two-story dwelling which they said dwarfs the size of their own homes.
The new house, at 146-21 56th Road, like its predecessor three doors down, will replace a one-story dwelling that was built in 1935 in a row of attached houses, according to city Department of Buildings records.
“I’m gonna fight like hell to stop what they’re doing up there,” said Mildred Higgins, who has lived on the block for 38 years with her husband John. “I was so upset when they put up the crane to rip out the front of that first house, I almost had a heart attack.”
Neighbors have said the new houses will completely change the character of their Queensboro Hill block and have caused a number of residents to sell their longtime homes.
“I don’t have any problem with people building,” said Daniel Powers, who grew up on the block and whose mother put her house up for sale as soon as construction on the first two-story home began. “I don’t have any problem with affordable housing, but I do have a problem with these houses, which my grandparents, [who were] World War II vets, lived in and bought in the ’30s and ’40s, being desecrated like this. I think it’s wrong.”
City Councilman Peter Koo (D-Flushing) has called for a moratorium on any more houses being built on the block before the Department of City Planning conducts a zoning study of his district, which he has requested but the department has not committed to.
Koo’s office is set to meet with Planning officials in August over the issue.
“These row houses are designed to be lived in by one family, not designed to build big mansions here,” Koo told reporters outside the house Friday, flanked by state Sen. Toby Stavisky (D-Flushing), state Assemblywoman Nily Rozic (D-Fresh Meadows) and Dan Capalbi, president of the Queensboro Hill Civic Association. “It’s out of context and it’s not good for the whole neighborhood.”
Min Lin, owner of the first two-story house on the block to go up, said a zoning change would not be fair to people who have bought houses on the street with the intention to build.
“If they want the city to change the zoning, they should get a vote from the neighbors,” she said.
Since the early 2000s, a coalition of civic leaders called the Queens Civic Congress has successfully worked to rezone large swaths of northeast Queens to prevent out-of-scale houses from being built. As part of that push, the group requested a zoning change in parts of Queensboro Hill, which City Planning failed to finalize a few years ago.
The group has also been pushing the city over the years to create a separate zoning district for single-family attached houses, such as the dwellings on 56th Road, as they currently fit into designations for multi-family units.
Urban planning experts have said because the new houses on 56th road are only two-stories high and the row of houses are attached, the only thing that could be done to prevent houses of a similar size being built on that block would be to rezone it from its current R4 designation to R3-2.
Reach reporter Alex Robinson by e-mail at arobinson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
