By Patrick Donachie
Concerned community members gathered outside the site of a proposed development in downtown Jamaica to demand that the residential units be 100 percent affordable for people living in the surrounding area.
The rally was organized by local members of New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit engaged in helping residents organize for community concerns. Attendees called for the site to be developed and managed by nonprofits that would ensure community members had input in the construction.
“We want people to stay in our neighborhood,” Izetta Mobley, a resident of Hollis, said. She was one of several speakers at the site near the corner of 168th Street and Archer Avenue. “We want our community to be uplifted, not pushed out.”
The site is currently used by the NYPD for parking, and the city’s Request for Proposals issued in February 2015 called for a dual residential/retail development. According to people at the rally, the proposed tower would be 14 stories high. A developer has not yet been chosen.
Jean Sassine, a resident of the neighborhood, said the development was indicative of a broader worry that the area’s longtime residents would be unable to afford staying in the area, making way for even higher rental prices and gentrification. He said southeast Queens suffered from foreclosures, predatory lending and red lining that discriminated against people of color. Sassine also noted that the rent burden for families in the area increased from 27 percent to 38 percent between 2006 and 2014, without a comparable rise in wages.
“Jamaica was built up on the blood and sweat of the people who came here,” he said during the rally. “Southeast Queens is always getting the blood sucked out of it, and we’re saying ‘enough.’”
The 59,500-square-foot site was included in the 2007 rezoning that encouraged high-to-moderate density mixed-use development in the downtown area. A retail component was required and the developer would be responsible for relocating the NYPD parking. Thus far, there has been no commitment to include affordable housing, according to the rally attendees, though the original RFP requires the development to adhere to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan.
But Sassine said the prices would need to be affordable specifically for residents of southeast Queens. The city qualifies affordability by utilizing the federal government’s Area Median Income, which takes the average of incomes from throughout the metropolitan area, from poor to affluent neighborhoods, to make a citywide standard of affordability. Sassine said this would lead to affordable apartments that were unaffordable for local residents and called for affordability measures in the new development to match the median incomes of the surrounding areas.
“These are the communities that need to be rated, not Bayside or Westchester or the Upper West Side,” he said. “We want the community’s voice. We don’t need a 14-floor tower here, but if it’s going to be here, we need to be able to live in it.”
Reach reporter Patrick Donachie by e-mail at pdona
