Following a stormy Dutch Kills Civic Association meeting 10 days earlier, the Department of City Planning held an environmental assessment hearing just before Thanksgiving. The meeting, held in the school auditorium of Evangel Church on Crescent Street, was the latest part of the long process toward completing the Dutch Kills rezoning project. It lasted several hours, providing an opportunity for Dutch Kills residents and developers who are currently busy in that neighborhood to address a City Planning panel that was headed by Robert Dobruskin, the department's director of environmental assessment and review.Dutch Kills Questions Rezoning Plans
Decades of forbearance seemed worthwhile as long as Dutch Kills remained substantially intact, until hotels a dozen stories high and built as-ofright transformed the neighborhood into a highrise area despite the new zoning.
The last speaker was Pastor Robert Johansson of Evangel Church. Johansson has been at Evangel for 20 years and he believed that the rezoning was a plan the neighborhood "could live with". He wondered aloud why a stop-work order was never instituted while the rezoning plan was instituted. "There is something wrong," he said, with a plan that allows 200-foot-high buildings to go up in a neighborhood where, for one thing, nothing nearly that high had ever been built before and where, for another, construction would not be permitted higher than 35 feet once the new zoning is finally in effect. He appealed to the Planning panel before him to institute the new zoning before its requirements have become worthless.
It is not solely up to the Department of City Planning to determine when the new zoning will be effective. The channels that the zoning plan must go through might take it at least another year. It could be an interesting year for Dutch Kills.
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3 comments:
I don't know where in the hell they get the new zoning will limit the buildings to just a few stories. Like everything reported by NY press on development, you have to take everything you read with a healthy grain of salt.
The new zoning will allow monster 12 story buildings on Northern Blvd. Totally out of scale.
It is true, for a small part of the new zoning, where quaint two story homes exist, they can built four stories, about double what was there before.
THAT was dangled in front the the folks in Dutch Kills, and THAT is why they went in for new zoning. Greed, the favored tool of western Queens 'planning'.
Now they got burned. Now they woke up too late.
BTW, for you central Queens folks that got flooded recently (because they never put in sewers in your communities). Guess what? Your taxes paid for a nice sewer system for the developers in Dutch Kills instead. For years that community was torn up for a massive sewer project. The one that should have been built in your community.
Those pipes were not intended for 120 year old cottages. No sir! The city was planning for massive development in that community for years.
Now the birds come home to roost. A cautionary tale - if just the truth can get out.
Just like the Con Ed taking our money from our rates and investing it not back in Sunnyside and Astoria but in Queens West.
I demand our politicians and press report that last summer they were hardly effected while we fried.
Let the truth out!
Stay on this Crappie! I think there is something here that will tick a lot of people off.
How are our taxes being spent. For the rich?
Why are our communities being starved and hollowed out?
What is the agenda here?
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