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The City Planning Commission approved a plan Wednesday to rezone a 54-block swath of the Queens waterfront neighborhood, to spur an estimated 15,000 new apartments over the next decade. Take a tour of the area on the verge of transformation.
The City Planning Commission approved a plan Wednesday to rezone a 54-block swath of Long Island City, to spur an estimated 15,000 new apartments in the waterfront neighborhood over the next decade.
The OneLIC Neighborhood Plan, as the project is called, will head to the City Council next for a final vote. Should it pass, it’s expected to create “the most amount of housing generated by a neighborhood specific rezoning in at least 25 years,” City Planning Director Daniel Garodnick said.
“With its central location, access to multiple subway and bus lines, strong local economy and excellent amenities. Long Island City is exactly where the city should be adding more housing,” he added.
The neighborhood has seen its fair share of transformation already: over the last decade, its population grew by 78 percent, with residents moving into a number of glossy new apartments towers that have sprung up along the waterfront (including those built as part of the city’s Hunters Point South project).
The OneLIC plan, however, targets a more industrial part of the neighborhood bound by Queens Plaza to the north, 47th Avenue to the south, 24th Street to the east and 5th Street and the East River to the west.
Garodnick described the area as “frozen” and “held back by outdated zoning that restricts new housing and business growth.”
“Even where housing is allowed, there are no requirements for affordability,” he said.
The rezoning would create an estimated 14,699 new housing units, 4,300 of them permanently income-restricted, officials said. That includes 320 affordable units at a city-owned site at 44-59 45th Ave., currently used by the Department of Transportation.
The city also released a Request for Information this spring asking developers to pitch their ideas for “adaptive reuse” of another city-owned building at 44-36 Vernon Blvd., most recently used by the Department of Education.
Plans for that location (pictured below) were a sticking point for at least one City Planning Commission member who voted against the rezoning. “I cannot support a proposal until there is a guarantee that if housing were to be developed here, on public land, it would be 100 percent affordable,” Commissioner Juan Camilo Osorio said during Wednesday’s hearing.
Osorio also cited “significant adverse impacts” mentioned in the project’s environmental impact study, echoing concerns aired earlier by some community members about the potential strain new development would have on existing neighborhood resources.
“The list includes, but is not limited to, public schools, libraries, open space and air quality,” Osorio said, also calling for the city “to strengthen flood resiliency strategies,” for the rezoning area.
City officials, however, touted a number of benefits they say the rezoning would bring. The plan includes creating 3.5 million square feet of new commercial, office, and retail space over the next 10 years, and approximately 292,000 square feet for community facilities (in exchange, the area would lose 790,000 square feet of industrial space). It’s expected to generate 14,400 local jobs, officials projected.
Additionally, the proposal would give developers a floor area bonus—in other words, more room to build—if their projects include publicly accessible plazas or squares.
It would also build new green space to link Queensbrige Park north of the rezoning area to Gantry Plaza State Park further south. That will create a continuous stretch of open space all along the neighborhood’s waterfront (ending with Hunters Point South Park, which reaches down to Newtown Creek).
“Part of that green stretch will be a reimagined Anable Basin that provides a considerable amount of open space, improved flood resiliency and easy public access to the water,” Garodnick said, referring to an inlet on the East River between 45th Avenue and North Basin Road (the site had once been eyed by delivery giant Amazon for its Queens headquarters, though the controversial plan fell apart in 2019).
Queens Community Boards 1 and 2, as well as Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, recommended approval of the OneLIC plan (though all three had conditions they want the final deal to include, like deeper levels of affordability for income-restricted units, new schools and a medical facility, as well as repair funds NYCHA’s Queensbridge Houses.)
“It is my belief that, as a whole, this proposal is a significant step forward in preserving the unique character of Long Island City, while ensuring the bright future of this community is one that can be enjoyed by all who currently call it home and those who will do so in the coming years—regardless of one’s place on the socioeconomic spectrum,” Richards said in his recommendation.
The plan will head next to the City Council for a final vote, where it’s fate will largely be in the hands of Councilmember Julie Won, since lawmakers almost always defer to the local representative on land use decisions in their district.
“I will fight to ensure the final OneLIC Neighborhood Plan delivers resiliency, sustainability, and longevity, through commitments on deeply affordable housing, pathways to affordable home ownership, thousands of additional school seats, a connected waterfront, new green spaces, and more,” Won said in a statement this spring.
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