Flushing community board faces contentious
vote on transformative waterfront rezoning
BY MAX PARROTT
As Community Board 7 gears
up to vote on rezoning the Flushing
waterfront next week, the
public hearings over the project
have made it increasingly clear
that the community board’s
concerns diverge from those of
the activist-led resistance to the
project.
The Community Board’s
Land Use Committee met
Wednesday, Jan. 29, and came
up with 13 recommendations
ranging from environmental
to traffic calming measures
for the proposed rezoning and
large-scale development project.
While the committee’s requests
were numerous, they signaled
conditional support of the zoning
amendment.
On the other hand, the development’s
opponents, led most
prominently by a tenant group
named the MinKwon Center,
say that they are not inherently
opposed to the redevelopment of
the Flushing waterfront, but are
particularly unsatisfied with
its housing offerings, which include
between 61 and 90 units
of affordable housing out of the
total 2,725 units. To them, the
plan’s potential for displacement
is a dealbreaker.
The developers, represented
at recent public meetings by
legal counsel Ross Moskowtiz,
have pointed out that the zoning
changes create no legal obligation
to provide affordable housing
in three of the four sites they
are proposing.
At the public hearing on Jan.
21, Moskowitz framed the rezoning
as a choice between two fixed
options: take the community
benefit of a new road system and
an expanded public waterfront
park or accept as-of-right development
with no public benefits
or affordable housing.
“I just want to make it perfectly
clear to you. It’s going to
be this type of development or
it’s going to be an as-of-right development,”
said Moskowitz.
A transformative proposal
The Special Flushing Waterfront
District (SFWD) proposal
would include nine buildings
in the area enclosed by 36th Avenue
to the north, College Point
Boulevard to the east, Roosevelt
Avenue to the south, and the
Flushing Creek to the west.
The application was prepared
by FWRA LLC, a joint
partnership of the three major
developers who own plots in the
area. They claim that all-told
the project would involve $1 billion
of private investment, and
would generate $28 million in
annual revenue.
These towers would add 3.36
million square feet of development
— the majority of which
would be residential units or hotels.
The 1,725 new apartments
would take up 46 percent of the
development, 879 new hotel units
would take up the 20 percent and
the remainder would go to office
space, retail, community centers,
parking and open waterfront
space.
Though the plan covers a
29-acre swathe of land, the proposed
rezoning is limited to a
small patch that is currently
zoned for manufacturing in the
north end of the project. Because
the developers are not attempting
to change the zoning in
three of the four proposed sites
that are already zoned for a mix
of commercial and residential,
they have avoided requirements
to build affordable housing in
these areas.
Mandatory Inclusionary
Housing laws only require them
to add affordable housing in the
one tower that is planned for the
northern plot of land.
Aside from the affordable
housing, the developers are
offering infrastructural improvements
that would not be
part of as-of-right development.
According to Moskowitz, the
partnership between developers
involved collaborating on
elements of the plan like a continuous
plans for roadways and
waterfront park space.
TIMESLEDGER | QNS.4 COM | FEB. 7-FEB. 13, 2020
In between the towers, the developers
have proposed to build
a new street system that would
open the area up to pedestrian
and vehicular traffic. Though
the streets would be publicly accessible,
the developers would
maintain private ownership of
the roads, which would be managed
by a homeowners association
.T
he new district would contain
a contiguous waterfront
walkway that would be double
the amount of open space of what
would otherwise be required in
an as-of-right plan.
“This is not a new project”
As Moskowtiz pointed out in
his presentation to CB7, neither
the plans for this project, nor the
resulting fight over the future of
downtown Flushing are new.
The push to develop rezone
downtown Flushing and develop
the waterfront property dates
back to several planning and environmental
impact studies that
various city entities have conducted
over the past 16 years.
The city created Downtown
Flushing Development Framework
in 2004 – a land use planning
strategy for the area. In
2010, the Flushing Willets Point
Corona Local Development Corporation
(FWC LDC), helmed by
former Queens Borough President
Claire Shulman, secured a
Brownfield Opportunity Area
grant that studied how to redevelop
the land and propose a
rezoning.
These studies culminated
in the Flushing West plan, a rezoning
that spanned an 11-block
area and proposed to build an
estimated 3,316 new apartments.
But because the Flushing West
plan proposed a more expansive
rezoning than the SFWD
proposal, it meant that the MIH
requirements for affordable
housing were also significantly
higher. It included about 515 to
619 affordable units, as opposed
to the 61-91 in the SFWD plan.
Political pressure mounted
against the 2016 plan–first from
Senator Tony Avella and Assemblyman
Ron Kim who cited
transit congestion and environmental
concerns, as well as the
limits of MIH to provide deeply
affordable units.
It was finally shelved by the
Department of City Planning after
Councilman Peter Koo came
out staunchly against it in a letter
he wrote to the city, citing
similar concerns as Avella and
Kim, in addition to noting that
Flushing’s schools were already
overcrowded.
Community board
concerns
In its recommendations to
the SFWD on Jan. 29, the community
board hit familiar concerns
to the 2016 Flushing West
plan. The biggest flashpoints for
the Land Use Committee were
the creation of a new school,
traffic congestion and environmental
impacts.
Of the 13 recommendations,
three concern vehicular traffic,
three concern environmental
impacts and two concern education.
Several of its most concrete
and immediate recommendations
involve asking several specific
changes to the road system
and asking for the expansion of
the main street train station to
Prince Street.
Of all the recommendations,
however, only one concerns
housing. The committee asked
to ensure that community district
residents are allotted 50
percent of the affordable units
— a requirement that is already
enforced by the city.
The recommendations would
also require the developers to research
and design a new school
to accommodate children in
downtown Flushing–a point that
Moskowitz disputed at a recent
public hearing on the rezoning.
“The analysis that we’ve
done does not warrant the
need of a new school,” said
Moskowitz.
Councilman Koo was in attendance
at the committee’s
last meeting to listen to the discussion.
He will have a 30-day
period after the full community
board votes on the plan, to
reach a decision on whether to
advance zoning in the ULURP
process.
Tenant-led resistance
At the four meetings on the
project over the past month, protesters
with MinKwon Center
and other local organizations
have been a constant presence
at the community board’s meetings.
A foundational issue for the
protestors is that they feel like
they had no voice in the planning
process leading up to the
current special district proposal.
A statement that MinKwon
releases asserts that the board
began the ULURP process without
prior community notice or
feedback.
“The massive rezoning of the
Flushing waterfront will exponentially
speed up the process
of gentrification and displacement,”
said MinKwon organizer
Seonae Byeon.
The protesters have also
found an ally in Assemblyman
Kim, who has come out
against the SFWD plan, in a
move consistent with his opposition
of the Flushing West rezoning.
“Adding thousands of
luxury condos is simply about
extracting as much value and
profits as possible out of our
communities,” wrote Kim in a
statement.
The Community Board will
vote on the plan at an upcoming
public hearing at 7 p.m. Feb. 10.
Courtesy of FWRA LLC