The city Department of Buildings issued a stop work order as of Aug. 29 on the controversial development at 82nd Street and Baxter Avenue in Elmhurst after the application to have the plot rezoned was challenged in City Council.
Anti-gentrification group Queens Neighborhoods United and City Councilman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) praised the challenge, claiming the Target slated for the location was no different than any other proposal brought forward by the developers, Sun Equity and Heskel Group, which would only drive residents and business out of the community.
The area is zoned R6/C1-3 which allows for businesses that serve “local consumer needs,” such as laundromats and bodegas. The challenge through the DOB labels the development at 40-31 82nd St. as a “department store,” which is not allowed under the zoning.
6 comments:
Who needs a department store? I thought the stores were closing down these days due to increase rent prices and online shopping. So who needs it to begin with?
According to queens times. It was supposed to be a target store. Still, they have queens center mall around there so why is target really needed?
There's already a target a block away from Queens center.
Target is doing a thing with opening streamlined smaller stores. There are two in downtown Manhattan in the East Village and the Lower East Side inside brand new lux towers. It's like they are trying to put supermarkets and bodegas out of business.
didn't they, or aren't they, putting one of the Target "express" stores in the old Barnes and Nobel on Austin Street?
Target is a department store, so this seems pretty open and shut.
"This project is and has always been unwanted in our community and deeply unpopular among nearly every resident I’ve spoken with about it. ... “We know that, in Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, the small business community sustains over a third of jobs in the area. Why is the city allowing a new incarnation of Walmart to exploit these loopholes when they know it will absolutely drive out the small businesses that support our working-class immigrant communities?”
@JQ: That's exactly what these guys want - to erase any little small proprietorship that local citizens use instead of the Walmarts/Kmarts/Targets/Walgreens of the world. We have a Target. It sees use. Big-box stores belong on boulevards and major lots where there is appropriate space for them. Developers have a mania to push out small stores because they are in league with big corporations to kill competition. Any one with two brain cells can see this easily.
I don't mind Target - I live down the way from the one at Queens Place and patronize it occasionally. But I use local stores for hardware, homegoods and so on far, far more often.
#3 Anon - that Target express on Austin has been there at least a year now if not a little more. It is another blow to Austin street being an interesting and unique place. Forest Hills is a victim of its own "success", and its own residents apparently couldn't see that coming from 10,000 miles away. So now middle-class residents will be priced out (even homeowners, via property tax) for nouveau-rich who want to re-create the Upper East Side there. Good riddance...you need strong civic associations to combat that stuff right from the gate - and as this article shows, we in Elm (and Maspeth) still do. The clown Koslowitz is apparently useless as far as preventing over-development.
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