From the Times Ledger:Developers of the $3 million Willets Point project are not contractually required to build affordable housing in part because the city wants to shield itself from a potential lawsuit.
The Bloomberg administration did not want to risk paying out legal damages to the developers — Related Cos. and Sterling Equities, the real estate arm of the New York Mets — should the city fail to build additional ramps off the Van Wyck Expressway, an essential precursor to constructing the housing component of the project, officials and the companies said at a recent meeting.
“If for some unforeseen reason [the ramps] didn’t get built, they didn’t want us to have a right to sue the city,” Glen Goldstein, president of Related Retail, said at an April 25 meeting with Community Board 7. “It was done so there would be no liability from the city to the joint venture.”
After passing the City Council with much fanfare over the affordable housing component of the project in 2008, the 62-acre project was subsequently split into two phases by the Bloomberg administration.
The first phase was then split into two more phases by the joint venture, which inked a contract with the city in August 2012 to develop 23 acres.
The first phase entails cleaning the historically contaminated soil. Then the Queens Development Group will build a hotel and small retail stores along 126th Street across from Citi Field, a temporary parking lot behind that and a 1.4 million-square-foot mall west of Citi Field in a parking lot leased to the Mets.
The housing component, including affordable units, is slated to be built on the temporary parking lot in the second phase beginning in 2024, but there is no guarantee that will happen. The ramps are required to start, yet the city is not required to build them.
7 comments:
"The ramps are required to start, yet the city is not required to build them."
WTF?
IMPEACH BLOOMBERG NOW (before it's too late)!!!
IMPEACH BLOOMBERG NOW (before it's too late)!!!
Talk about closing the barn door after the horse is out.
This tells you that the only promises made during a developer project that are honored are the promises made to the developers.
Your elected official will get off the hook (reelected and always attended to by a bowing and scraping public in every appearance out of the smoke filled room)
And the Queens weeklies will be filled with pictures of school kids, restaurant ads, and photos of your local benign politico father bestowing some useless trinket on a grateful peasant.
Keep up the great job of kicking ass,
Willets Point United.
A project delayed is a project defeated.
Even the powerful Donald Manes couldn't have his way with Willets Point.
That diminutive demon, Wellington Z. (Zhou) Chen, will have to cry his way all the way back to his Little Neck home when his pals at TDC won't be building there.
There's no need to impeach Bloomberg.
Just hold your breath until November and he's gone!
Anyway, these impeachment moves usually go nowhere.
But--BE SURE--not to elect a devil worse that he is.
Whenever I take the 7 train, I can barely stand the stench of Willets Point during low tide due to the garbage that washes up onshore. That area has been a dump for over a century. Now they want people to live there?
Willets Point: home of a future slum
there is an off ramp from the van wyck, but i'm still not telling---also the stench at low tide is probably from the garbage held in by the water break from the airport----dredging the water ways in the area was recommended about 50 years ago by the army corp of engineers, but why listen---it would have kept the neighborhood a fishing/boating community--two marinas in the area are also useless, with boats sitting in mud,---and dredging would reduce street flooding--(duh--big hole, water goes in)--sorry, just ruined someone's committee------------
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