Here's the EDC's "affordable" housing plan for Sunnyside Yard

Gothamist

The city has unveiled a massive plan to deck over Sunnyside Yard to make space for 12,000 affordable apartments in Queens.

A sweeping master plan for the project details a new development—which would take decades to complete—would include 100 percent affordable apartments across 140 acres of land. Some 115 acres of the land would be created by "decking over" the top of the regional rail yard.

The city sees Sunnyside Yard development as a "once-in-a-century opportunity" to bring thousands of new apartments to Queens, which currently gains 4,000 new residents every year, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants landing in Queens in the past several decades, according to the executive summary.

"If the borough is to remain an inclusive home to New Yorkers of all backgrounds, then it is imperative to plan for its future growth," according to the plan.

Of the 12,000 apartments, half would be for very low-income families, about 30 to 50 percent of the area median income (currently $29,000 to $48,000 annual salary for a family of three.) The units would be rent-stabilized.

The other 6,000 would be for moderate-income households through a "21st century version" of the Mitchell-Lama housing program, allowing for home ownership.

By decking over about 80 percent of the rail yard, allowing for rail operations to continue below, the project is seen as way of "creating" new land for housing, schools, libraries, and connecting neighborhoods currently separated by the yard. About 780 trains run through Sunnyside Yard everyday.

"We're running out of land in New York City, and it is harder and harder to find places for real affordable housing," the head of the EDC, James Patchett, told the Wall Street Journal. The total cost of decking, streetscape changes, and structures for utilities and below-deck train operations would be about $14.4 billion, according to the newspaper.

Working poor and the shrinking middle class have to wait 10 years for an affordable place to live? 

AOC drops out of EDC's Sunnyside Yards development committee

 

QNS


The Sunnyside Yards Steering Committee, organized by the Economic Development Corp. (EDC), officially lost two members in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Justice for All Coalition Chair Sylvia White.

The EDC is leading a multibillion-dollar effort to build new land atop Sunnyside Yards, a 180-acre rail yard considered one of the busiest in the country, partly owned by Amtrak, MTA and the city. 

They created the Steering Committee with citywide and local leaders to advise and guide them through their Master Planning process.

But after several months of the EDC’s community outreach portion of the process, many Queens residents and leaders are protesting the project and calling for the city to instead use the funds they want to allocate for the project toward the community’s more immediate needs.

Justice for All Coalition (JFC), a community organization based in Astoria and Long Island City, is one of the organizations leading the fight against Sunnyside Yards. In November 2019, they sent letters to several elected officials asking that they step down from the EDC’s Steering Committee.

In response, Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer and Ocasio-Cortez sent a joint letter, obtained by The City, in which they emphasized that their roles in the Steering Committee didn’t “imply endorsement of the project” and that the EDC’s current proposal “reflects a misalignment of priorities.”

Senator Michael Gianaris also sent a letter, stating that while his name and office appeared in the  Steering Committee, he never accepted the invitation. Gianaris added that although the planning process includes some public input, “that input does not appear to be reflected in the public facing materials released about the project and rather tinkers around the edges providing a few token benefits.”

On Jan. 24, Ocasio-Cortez sent the EDC her letter of resignation. She wrote that while she understands that the ambitious project requires a “lengthy, complex, and multi-stakeholder driven planning process,” she felt the need to resign due to the project’s proposal.

“Despite the many outreach meetings that you have cited, I have yet to see sufficient inclusion of the feedback from those meetings in the current plan,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in the letter. “This feedback, both from community members and from my office, includes but is not limited to community land trusts, truly affordable housing, and public and green infrastructure of the scale necessary to meet our 21st-century housing and environmental justice challenges.”

The NYC EDC must be stopped

Queens Eagle

From Coney Island to Sunnyside; from Jerome Avenue to Bay Street; from newly created districts to forgotten neighborhoods, New York City is being irreparably transformed by the corporate interests that run this city.  At breakneck speed, we are witnessing the mass displacement of long-time residents and small businesses that have made this city great because our elected officials have handed the reins of city governing — what we elected them to do — to corporations and corporate lobbies whose insatiable greed puts their shareholders’ interests above New Yorkers’ when it comes to rezoning, jobs and many other matters in NYC. 

Unfortunately for the 99 percent, this is not just a city “gone rogue”, but by design and courtesy of a city agency known as the Economic Development Corporation. This group of unelected and unaccountable men and women, most of whom are “prominent in the financial, commercial, industrial, [or] professional…community of the City of New York” as mandated by the EDC, act as kingmakers to decide which industries, neighborhoods and projects should stand or fall.  Ostensibly created to drive and shape New York’s economic growth, the EDC ironically siphons off money from the budget of the city’s Small Business Services, and then either stands idly by as our mom-and-pop shops fall like dominoes, or precipitates changes that ultimately destroy them, as they did to businesses in the Garment District in favor of the tech sector. 

For those who don’t know, the EDC turns out to be a pretty powerful tool for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who directly selects or approves all 27 members of its governing board — with one important exception.  EDC’s bylaws require our mayor to consult with a group called the Partnership for New York City (PFNYC) before he selects the EDC’s chairman of the board.  Who makes up this group that calls itself, “The Partnership”, and whose chosen member sits atop the EDC?  They are private equity firms like Blackstone, media conglomerates like NewsCorp, pharmaceutical giants like Johnson & Johnson, controversial consultants like McKinsey and about 250 other “CEOs from New York City’s top corporate and investment firms” that make up its bulk, according to 2017 tax filings.  

What does this mean for us, and how are our needs being met in this supposed democracy? Well, while we go about our daily lives, “The Partnership” testifies on our behalf before the State Assembly that “gig workers” essentially prefer to live paycheck-to-paycheck rather than be hampered by health insurance, workers comp or other benefits that come with stable employment.  They also oppose commercial rent stabilization and aggressively promote real estate growth knowing that “truly affordable housing, schools and better transit has severely lagged the rapid pace of growth.”

Meanwhile, the EDC is busy deploying its 500+ employees to get the necessary “buy-in” from communities after it has decided how NYC should be shaped and supported with millions and billions of our taxpayer dollars, despite the fact that we may have other wishes for organic growth, or preservation of what is here now.  They hand out free canvas bags imprinted with not-yet-approved projects, such as the BQX in Queens, to signal to the community that such projects are “done deals” and that nothing can be done to stop them; they fill “steering committees” with our neighbors to get easy approval from those who would give it simply because of the involvement of a person they trust.  

Finally, without shame, the EDC holds public meetings encouraging earnest and unsuspecting community members to write their deepest wishes and darkest fears on yellow, pink and green Post-it notes, then uses them to build Trojan horses — “affordable housing”, “good-paying jobs”, “open spaces” — that instead deliver unobtainable luxury residential towers, part-time non-union jobs, and privately-owned public spaces, open subject to the whims of the private owners.

You see, if the EDC wanted to provide those things to us, they would have done so by now.  In a city teeming with global capital and tech start-ups, with city-GDP rapidly rising to an estimated $2.5 trillion by 2035, endless and unrealized promises of “good-paying jobs” from them sound hollow. They are shiny jewels meant to entice us into handing over more and more of our public land and resources for their investment and private use, until there is nothing left for us to control or enjoy.  

Alas, though our current system of governing may seem damaged and corrupt beyond repair, we can make our city work for us again.  We can dissolve the EDC. We can elect politicians who will take back the reins of city governing and listen to the people, not corporate entities.  We can do many things, but we should get started now and use the 2021 elections to get what we regular New Yorkers want.

Sunnyside Yard development meeting gets condemned by protesters

Queens Eagle

A public meeting Monday on the controversial Sunnyside Yard planning process featured plenty of community engagement, including dramatic opposition from opponents of proposed mega-development six times larger than Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.

The early portion of the Monday meeting, the third public hearing on the massive development plan, remained calm and organized as attendees milled about information stations. 

But members of Queens Neighborhoods United and other organizations that oppose the project soon took over the room, denouncing the plan to elevate the 180-acre yard from a sprawling network of train tracks to a brand new neighborhood, complete with housing, transportation and stores. Some activists stood atop cafeteria tables to address the attendees.

“These are plans made by property developers, plans for property developers,” said Rutgers University Professor James DeFilippis. 

“We don’t trust this process,” opponents chanted, while others shouted “Let us in,” outside the cafeteria as they tried to enter the meeting.

“#EDC employees didnt know what to do w/ themselves as we took over the #SunnysideYards public EDC meeting. They presented nothing new, nothing solid. #SSY will cost more than the $22 billion and take longer than the 100 years they're projecting. That's our money & public land!,” QNU later wrote on Twitter.

Even before the first public meeting regarding Sunnyside Yard in October 2018, community members raised concerns about displacement and accelerated gentrification related to the neighborhood-building initiative.

“I haven’t come across anyone in Queens who thinks this is a good idea,” steering committee member Melissa Orlando, executive director of Access Queens, told The New York Times last year. Orlando, whose organization advocates for better public transportation, said the project could increase congestion.

A line of people snaked around the schoolyard of Aviation High School in Sunnyside ahead of the meeting, as representatives from a host of city agencies and the New York City Economic Development Corporation prepared to explain the draft of the master plan.

“I’d like to see the creation of the things they say they want to create, essentially liveable neighborhoods, better connections across Queens, transit infrastructure, mixed-income housing, mixed-use development, and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods,” Gideon Shapiro, a historian of urban planning and architecture, told the Eagle.

Community meetings begin for Sunnyside Yard development.

PIX News

 If ideas begin at the drawing board, the tables in the cafeteria at P.S. 166 on 35th Avenue in Queens are a good place to start.


NYC Economic Development Corporation and Amtrak have scheduled four community forums about possible development at Sunnyside Yard.


The second public session was Tuesday evening in Astoria, Queens.


The 180 acres that run along the border of Long Island City and Sunnyside are the size of about 136 football fields.


Neighbors, business owners, community leaders and industry representatives participate in the brain-storming sessions. This is the midway point for an 18-month long master planning process.


Amtrak, MTA and NJ Transit use the facilities, which have been around since the early 1900s. There have been ideas for decades about building over the tracks.


" With Amtrak and MTA currently undertaking critical capital investments in its rail infrastructure, this is a unique moment for the City to coordinate long-term planning for the future of the yard," says the project website.


The public meetings begin with a presentation and a question-and-answer session. Officials want people to know this is the early stages of the project and it's too early to say how any plans would be financed.


A public-private partnership helped create Hudson Yards over the rail yard on Manhattan's West Side. That project was 15 years in the making. Residential and office buildings began to open a few years ago. Shops, restaurants, and public parks opened to the public this month.


Sunnyside Yard is 7 times larger.