By Eric Jankiewicz
Resistance is building in Queens against the city’s plan to rezone major swaths of New York City to include affordable housing.
Residents and officials in Queens are rejecting the city’s plans to change zoning rules and regulations in many neighborhoods. Even though the city has not identified any particular neighborhoods, many in Queens are worried that the character and comfort of their neighborhoods will be ruined by overcrowding.
The city released the Housing New York plan in May. In that plan, it identified the need for 200,000 affordable housing units over the next decade.
The plan argues for building and preserving affordable housing through a series of strategies like modernizing zoning regulations and promoting senior housing, according to the city Department of City Planning.
But members of Queens’ community boards are rejecting the city’s plans and characterization of their neighborhoods’ zoning rules.
“Our current zoning is not at all ‘outdated,’ but is actually the result of painstaking efforts within the last 10 years by DCP and CB 9,” members of Community Board 9, which represents Forest Hills and other areas, argued in a letter addressed to the city.
The letter continued, “They collaborated to update the 1961 zoning to achieve a contextual rezoning that recognizes and preserves the existing residential character of our community, while still allowing for future development of housing along dozens of designated corridors throughout the district.”
Members of the community board have not completely rejected the plans.
“While further ‘tweaks’ can be explored, our zoning has already been ‘modernized,’ and nothing close to the sweeping changes in the proposal is justifiable or necessary,” the members wrote.
Members of nearby Community Boards 7 and 8 have also expressed varying degrees of resistance to the city’s plan. Residents also complain that the period for public comment, which closed on April 30 for the environmental review, ended too quickly. Community Board 7 covers Flushing, Whitestone and College Point, while Community Board 8 includes Fresh Meadows.
A spokesman for City Planning said the deadline for comment had been extended from early April until the end of the month.
But the city argues that the rezoning – which has not yet identified specific locations – will benefit all New Yorkers.
The proposals, known as Zoning for Quality and Affordability, seek to create more flexible height limits for senior housing and future inclusionary housing developments in districts without height limits, according to the city’s documents.
Relative reductions in requirements for shallow, acutely angled or sloped lots, the reduction of parking for new low-income senior housing in medium-density districts and the elimination of the requirement in high-density districts would be allowed as well.
Queens politicians like state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) have also said they do not like the idea.
“I understand what the mayor’s goals are, but you can’t do it this way,” Avella said in a previous TimesLedger article. “If in fact that’s what he’s planning, unless you’re talking about existing higher-density districts, he’s going to have a major fight on his hand from every low-density neighborhood in the city of New York.”
