The City Council on Wednesday advanced the Long Island City rezoning, which is expected to create 14,700 new homes over the next decade.
The City Council Committee on Land Use and the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises voted in favor of the rezoning after the Adams administration promised to invest $1.5 billion in the neighborhood. The project is expected to net 4,300 affordable apartments and 3.5 million square feet of new commercial space.
The Long Island City proposal now heads back to City Planning for review before going to the full Council for a final vote.
The Council made a number of changes to the proposal before approving it, including requiring deeper affordability and limiting building heights in some areas. Developers building in the Queens Plaza West area must set aside 20 percent of a project’s units for households making an average of 40 percent of the area median income, with income bands capped at 130 percent AMI. That’s the “deep affordability” option under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. As part of the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, that option was made available to the City Council as something it could mandate, rather than offer up alongside other affordability levels.
For months, City Council member Julie Won has withheld full-throated support of the rezoning, making clear that her buy-in hinged on City Hall making several commitments.
Those commitments included “maximizing affordable housing on public and private sites,” and creating a contiguous waterfront park by connecting Gantry Park to Queensbridge Park. She also wanted investments in sewer and stormwater management infrastructure, as well as new schools and open space beneath the Queensboro Bridge.
The city’s financial commitment will help “fund a connected waterfront,” turn five acres under the bridge into green space, sewer upgrades, add more than 1,300 seats at new schools, as well as repairs to public housing at Queensbridge Houses.
As Mayor Eric Adams nears his exit from City Hall, his administration is poised to ultimately approve five neighborhood rezonings.
The City Council is expected to sign off on the Jamaica rezoning during its meeting on Wednesday, paving the way for nearly 12,000 apartments in the Queens neighborhood.
The approvals also come as City Council leadership ramps up its campaign against three ballot measures that threaten to weaken the body’s influence over certain housing and land use actions. The Council has framed the questions as a power grab by City Hall that deprives members’ leverage to increase affordability requirements and squeeze capital commitments from the city.
If Won opposed the rezoning, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams would have had an interesting choice. Adams has insisted that the Council does not always abide by member deference, the longstanding tradition of voting according to the local Council member’s wishes on land use actions. Following member deference on Long Island City would provide fuel for proponents of the ballot measures.
At the same time, Won’s demands for affordability and city investments are precisely the reasons the Council says it is trying to hold onto its power in the city’s land use review process.
During the subcommittee meeting, Won said the ballot measures would “make it impossible” to negotiate at this level. Only one of the controversial ballot questions would apply to a rezoning of Long Island City’s size. That measure would create a three-person appeals board that could override City Council decisions. The board doesn’t preclude the Council from pushing for investments, but the board could arguably decrease the Council’s leverage in negotiations over investments.
Won has had close calls before. In October 2022, the fate of Innovation QNS appeared precarious when Won emailed her colleagues and urged them to vote against the project. That may have signaled that the Council was prepared to override member deference. The Council ultimately approved the project with deeper affordability, but the development team has since broken up.
While much of Long Island City has been rezoned over the last 30 years, the latest plan focuses on a 54-block area that has been left out of previous initiatives and is zoned for low- and medium- density manufacturing. The changes allow for more residential, as well as retail and light-industrial construction in the area.
The rezoning includes city-owned sites at 44-36 Vernon Boulevard, 44-59 45th Avenue and 4-99 44th Drive, which will be transferred to developers.
The area has long been the subject of various development plans. The sites were once part of a megadevelopment envisioned by MAG Partners, Plaxall, Simon Baron Development and TF Cornerstone. That project, dubbed YourLIC, spanned 28 acres along the Anable Basin and would have resulted in more than a dozen buildings, with a mix of commercial, residential and community space. It also included the sites where Amazon once proposed building its new headquarters, before abandoning that plan in 2019.
The city is also working to take over a site from Con Edison in an effort to create a contiguous waterfront between Gantry Plaza State Park and Queensbridge Park. This week, Won accused Con Edison of delaying the transfer, but thanked the company on Wednesday for working with the city.
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