The city’s plan to rezone an approximately 46-block stretch adjacent to the rail line around the future Morris Park and Parkchester/Van Nest train stations is about to turn a corner. The project aims to create thousands of job opportunities and an estimated 6,000 additional homes in the rezoning area.
Mayor Eric Adams has positioned the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan as one of two significant neighborhood-level rezonings that could help boost his “moonshot” goal of 500,000 new units of housing over the next decade.
As the city faces dual affordable housing and homelessness crises, City Limits asked the candidates’ running in Tuesday’s primary for their stance on a number of key related issues. Are they a renter or a landlord? Do they support the idea of “member deference” on local land use votes? What’s the best route for funding repairs at NYCHA?
“Just Home”—a NYC Health + Hospitals (HHC) plan to convert an empty staff residence on the Jacobi Hospital campus into supportive housing for a few dozen people with serious medical problems discharged from Rikers Island—is a pressure cooker for many of the most fraught issues in the city: homelessness, mental health, development, and the risk of crime, whether real or perceived.
The latest version of the Innovation Qns plan features 1,436 income-restricted apartments, around 45 percent of the total. “We have set a new precedent for building affordable housing on private land,” the neighborhood’s Councilmember Julie Won said in prepared remarks ahead of the vote.
In a document issued Monday, Councilmember Jennifer Gutiérrez laid out her priorities for any new development that requires changes to the zoning code in one of the city’s most intense real estate markets. Under the City Council’s informal tradition of member deference, local members have effective veto power over land use applications in their districts.
Residential rezonings, including one approved this summer for Edgemere, are poised to bring thousands of new apartments to the Rockaways over the next decade, but just a single hospital has served the peninsula since 2012. A new task force is being asked to create a roadmap for expanding local healthcare services, including a facility that offers trauma care.
The question soon facing the City Council—and in particular, local member Julie Won—is how much affordable housing is enough to replace the Queens industrial scene with a complex three times bigger than One45, another Harlem development proposal recently squashed over affordability concerns.
The three Democratic candidates in the 34th Senate District find common ground in opposing a proposed supportive housing site for critically ill former Rikers detainees on the campus of Jacobi Hospital, and a 314-unit apartment complex planned for vacant lots along the Bruckner Expressway.
Just six units remain occupied at the Arlington Village complex. Now, those who remain worry about what the owners’ plan to develop the site will mean for them. “What exists now won’t exist.”
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