The Department of City Planning provided residents an online refresher course about zoning ahead of a Zoom town hall about proposed reforms of Downtown Jamaica and parts of Hollis, last Thursday.
During the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan Town Hall, people had questions about what will be developed in the area and if its needs will be met with the plan.
DCP agency reps said they hope to get more feedback from community members regarding the rezoning. The initiative would transform Jamaica Center, the downtown area where straphangers catch the E, J and Z trains, along with nearby regions stretching to the Jamaica and Hollis Long Island Rail Road stops to Hillside Avenue in the north and the Van Wyck Expressway to the west. Last Thursday’s event was designed to lay the groundwork for an environmental review of the plan. The proposal also calls for rezoning sections of Dunkirk and 160th streets and Merrick, Sutphin and Guy R. Brewer boulevards, according to DCP. There will be no zoning changes to single- or two-family areas, said Shavvone Jackson, a DCP representative.
More than 200,000 people who live, work or go to school in and around Downtown Jamaica would be impacted by the rezoning of the area, said DCP Borough Planner Alisa Nurmansyah, using data from the 2020 Census.
“Zoning is a set of rules that control how land in a community can be used,” said Jasmin Tepale, the senior program manager at DCP, who is overseeing the Jamaica rezoning plan. “It tells us what you can build and where you can build it ... this includes the type of uses you see in a neighborhood like residential or commercial zoning ... and what a building looks like and how tall it can be.”
The three main types of zoning districts include residential, commercial and manufacturing, or R, C and M zoning districts. R1 is a low-density residential district, while R10 is a high-density district.
The purpose of the rezoning plan is to build up Downtown Jamaica, which consists of mostly two- to six-story homes and residential, commercial and manufacturing buildings to create eight- to 16-story buildings to address the growing population and low housing production in the area, according to the DCP presentation.
Data from the American Community Survey, released in 2022, said that from 2010 to 2020, Jamaica’s population increased by 13.4 percent, higher than the rest of the city, which grew by 7.7 percent. Housing production in the area increased by 10.1 percent while housing production in the city grew by 7.3 percent, which is closer to the citywide population increase, according to DCP.
Profiles of Queens Community District 12 (Jamaica, Hollis and St. Albans) said the population was approximately 225,900 in 2010 and 248,158 in 2022.
U.S. Census data said that the city’s population was 8,804,190 on April 1, 2020. A World Population Review census said the city’s population decreased to 7,931,147, but is expected to be around 9 million by 2040, according to a Fox News report on March 28.
Blossom Ferguson, one resident who was on the Zoom call, asked if any of the housing will be available to people with low incomes.
A city Housing Preservation & Development spokeswoman said that if an area is mapped for mandatory inclusionary housing, its required that a share of new housing will be permanently affordable. If a developer comes in to erect a building with more than 10 units, a percentage of them must be permanently affordable.
“Do you plan on having condos or co-ops?” Ferguson asked. “Is that already established or still in the works?”
Tepale said that based on previous feedback, many seniors who would like to leave their single-family home have expressed interest in still owning property, and condos and co-ops are something that can be created in residential zones, along with other housing types.
Lisa Edwards, another resident, said that she believes the whole rezoning plan is simply gentrification and that the whole process for the initiative is undemocratic.
“This has not been properly publicized,” Edwards said. “It does not allow for community members to hear each other’s voices and discuss.”
Jackson, who spoke during the zoning refresher, said there are 38 people on the steering committee, 26 meetings were held and that DCP has reached out to more than 2,000 people since May 2023.
“We are going to continue to create opportunities for people to engage in this process,” Jackson said.
6 comments:
Avella & Graziano rezoning to the fescue?!
That area in the photograph needs to be demolished and re-developed.
They keep trying to build up Jamaica but yet it still stays a dump. Remember the multiplex they built over there? And all the nice stores they tried to build over there? I think the majority of them are now closed down.
That place looks like some old Soviet city in Siberia.
Sure, make the whole city like Cairo.
Apartment barracks with 2000 X 500 ft footprints 10 story's high that house 5000 people each like sardines, cant own a car, cant walk anyplace without another person being within 8 inches of you.
Horrid smells everyplace.
Hey, did you notice Flushing Hospital owner Medisys is now owned by TELUS Health whose "Chief Growth Officer" is named (get this) Juggy Sihota?? What a twist from Former MediSys CEO David Rosen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes which U.S Attorney Preet Bharara said involved Rosen paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to officials including the late Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio.
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