Well, they’re talking. As the Daily News reports today, Councilmember Hiram Monserrate is meeting with Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Lieber to discuss the NYC Economic Development Corporation’s redevelopment plans for Willets Point. Monserrate, responding to appeals from housing groups (especially Queens for Affordable Housing and its members) and unions (via the Central Labor Council), has told the Mayor’s office that he won’t back the City’s proposal, which has to go through the City Council as part of the Land Use Review Process, unless it includes affordable housing, aid for existing businesses, and “livable wage” jobs (that’s the CLC’s preferred term).
Monserrate doesn’t sit on the committees that will vote on the Willets Point redevelopment plan, but typically Council votes on land use defer to local members’ wishes, and Willets Point is in his Queens district. As Monserrate made clear in a Feb. 8 letter he sent to his 50 fellow councilmembers, he’s especially distressed at the plan’s lack of specifics on many key questions of public interest, especially exactly how the City intends to help workers whose businesses will be displaced and how much affordable housing will be included among the project’s thousands of apartments.
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Development watchers should pay close attention to what happens over the next few months in Willets Point, Queens, where the New York City Economic Development Corporation wants to demolish a hardscrabble haven for auto-repair shops and other modest industrial-service businesses, building in their place a convention center, hotel, housing, retail, and other components of a sparkling new neighborhood, to be constructed by a single developer yet to be selected.
That project is about to go through the City’s land use review process, and a number of community organizations — including Asian Americans for Equality, Queens Community House and ACORN — are looking to bargain for affordable housing, well-paying jobs, pedestrian access and other benefits from the development. The groups brought workers in Willets Point and residents of surrounding neighborhoods, including Corona, Flushing and East Elmhurst, together for a series of brainstorming sessions, whose recommendations are compiled in a new report (careful — that’s a PDF).
Meta-disclosure: The sessions and report were facilitated by the Pratt Center for Community Development, which sponsors this website as an independent news source on development in New York City. I’m mentioning the Willets Point project here because groups all over the city should watch it carefully: it’s poised to be perhaps the greatest test yet of the extent to which neighborhood groups will be able to influence a major development project. The Daily News picked up the story today, and as ULURP proceeds — especially as the transformation plan for Willets Point heads toward the City Council — there will be a lot to discuss about how much the public can and should expect when a neighborhood goes through an extreme makeover.