The City Council on Wednesday approved the final neighborhood rezoning of the Adams administration.
The Council voted in favor of rezoning 54 blocks in Long Island City, a plan that is projected to create 14,700 new homes in the Queens neighborhood over the next decade. Of those units, 4,300 are expected to be affordable.
Council member Julie Won, who represents Long Island City, made clear that her support of the rezoning hinged on City Hall making several commitments. In response, the administration pledged around $1.9 billion to help create a contiguous waterfront, add more than 1,300 seats at new schools, repair public housing at Queensbridge Houses and upgrade sewer and stormwater management infrastructure. (Won and other Council members previously pegged the investment at $1.5 billion, but subsequently announced the amount was closer to $2 billion.)
Before advancing the rezoning, the Council also made several changes to the proposal, including requiring deeper affordability and limiting building heights in some areas. For example, 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.
Those restrictions are laid out in the “deep affordability” option under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. Under the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, that option was made available to the Council as something it could mandate, rather than offer up alongside other affordability levels.
Much of Long Island City has been rezoned over the last three decades, but those plans have not included the 54-block area. The latest rezoning allows more residential, as well as retail and light-industrial use, in an area zoned for low- and medium-density manufacturing.
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 sites were once envisioned as part of Amazon’s new headquarters, before the tech giant abandoned those plans in February 2019.
Thursday marks the seven-year anniversary of Amazon announcing that it had selected Long Island City as one of the two locations where it would build a new headquarters.
During a press conference ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Won noted the anniversary (though she appeared to mix it up with the date Amazon pulled out of these plans).
“Instead of a $3 billion handout to a corporation like Amazon HQ2, we’re now receiving $2 billion in investment,” she said.
The rezoning is the fifth neighborhood rezoning to be approved under the Adams administration, following Jamaica, Midtown South, Atlantic Avenue and areas around four planned Metro-North stations in the Bronx.
The Council’s vote comes after New Yorkers approved ballot measures that will change how certain housing projects are approved. Some projects will be able to bypass City Council review, while a newly-created appeals board can reverse the Council’s rejection of other housing projects.
Council leaders opposed the measures, arguing that they deny local members the ability to negotiate on behalf of their communities. Won has pointed to City Hall’s financial commitment as evidence that local members are key to securing benefits for their constituents.
If the newly-approved ballot measures had been in place before the Council voted on the Long Island City rezoning, only one would have potentially applied. That measure creates a three-person appeals board that can reverse the Council’s rejection of land-use applications that would create affordable housing.
It remains to be seen how drastically these measures change the city’s land-use review process and how they are implemented by the next mayoral administration.
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