Rezoning leads to jobs? Don't believe the hype

From Progress Queens:

In the neighborhood rezoning of Long Island City, the promises of jobs creation are being made by a Municipal agency, the Department of City Planning, raising some eyebrows. Despite the making of promises of jobs creation by a Government authority, some community activists have expressed skepticism. At the Department of City Planning community event promoting jobs creation in Long Island City on Thursday night, an activist group, the Queens Anti-Gentrification Project, scheduled an event to draw attention to the false promises of jobs creation being used to promote large-scale real estate projects. In the description of their protest event on the Facebook social media Web site, the activist group cast disbelief on the promises of jobs creation, stating that there was no evidence of truth to the promises of the creation of high-technology jobs for area residents, noting that, "Those jobs are not for us. The only jobs we can expect to see will be a handful of service industry jobs that employ low-income communities to serve the rich, deepening the class divide. The city has lied time and time again about jobs. Why believe them now ?," adding that, "Workforce development is the carrot they dangle in front of us, trying to get us to agree to the gentrification of our neighborhoods and our own displacement."

For this report, the City Hall press office did not provide any statistics that were requested by Progress Queens to show the track record of past promises of jobs creation in connection with neighborhood rezonings. The Department of City Planning has announced that community events about jobs creation will continue to into the fall, yet the de Blasio administration is refusing to make any commitments about the number of jobs it intends to create for Long Island City residents. A press official with the Department of City Planning did not immediate answer a press request for information about the record of jobs creation statistics for neighborhood rezonings.