Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Mayor's Plan

From today's New York Times:

Metro Briefing - Queens: Mayor Seeks Plan for City’s Population Growth

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced an elaborate campaign yesterday to engage the public in devising an environmentally sound plan to address the city’s growing population and aging infrastructure through 2030...Mr. Bloomberg said the city would seek ideas to meet 10 main goals, including housing for almost a million people, more mass transit and the cleanup of contaminated land.

From today's Metro:

In three months, Bloomberg will present more detailed proposals to find “creative ways” to build affordable housing, ensuring that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, and increasing the region’s mass transit system to alleviate traffic congestion.

This doesn't bode well for Queens. We are losing green space day by day, not gaining any. We are inundated with illegal apartments that the city won't do anything about. This was one of the major reasons for this past summer's blackout in Astoria and Woodside. There, individual apartments have been illegally subdivided into SROs. The downzoning of many Queens neighborhoods has been put on the back burner in order to accommodate the upzoning of areas near the waterfront.

Translation: "We need housing for 1 million more people? Let's dump 'em in Queens!"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course! We've been Manhattan's dumping ground for more than 10 years. Remember that Flushing Meadows was once a dump and is quickly reverting back to that state!

Fed Up said...

Affordable? For who? 4 families in one apartment