The Eminent Domain

As the Bloomberg administration begins to consolidate its legacy of reshaping New York City’s landscape, labor and community groups are moving to set precedents for the future, and nowhere more aggressively than in Willets Point.

The rezoning of industrial Willets Point into a new hotel, convention center, housing and retail complex — developer yet to be determined — is proceeding, with the blessings of labor unions and Community Board 7, which on June 30 approved the city’s plan 21-15. The Central Labor Council and NYC Economic Development Corporation agreed that construction and security jobs will pay prevailing wage — the highest industry standard — while retail will pay at least $10 an hour. Community Board 7’s vote in favor came despite the presence at its meeting of hundreds of protestors from groups that included the Willets Point Industrial Realty Association, New York Immigration Coalition, ACORN, NAACP, and Centro Hispano “Cuzcatlán,” demanding affordable housing and stronger protections for some 1,700 workers at Willets Point’s existing businesses, many of whom will lose their jobs as a result of the area’s redevelopment.

Said Pastor Lancelot Waldron of Queens Congregations United for Action, “The mayor’s plan is not adequate for Queens. There isn’t enough affordable housing.” EDC has committed to make 20 percent of the apartments affordable, under the widely used “80-20″ federal tax exempt bond program. Maximum income for that program is $61,000 a year for a family of four, meaning that the new “affordable” housing will likely be unaffordable for more than half the families in Queens.
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If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from us in a few weeks, it’s because The Eminent Domain has been part of a major citywide effort to bring New Yorkers together around a shared agenda for how development should proceed in areas like Willets Point — with affordable housing, living wage jobs, and careful attention to what amenities neighborhoods need.

One City/One Future is a collaborative venture between dozens of community, labor, environmental, civic, immigration and other organizations around New York City, including many we’ve been covering here on The Eminent Domain, to set the course for New York City’s future economic development. One City/One Future is based on four basic goals:

• Create and maintain good jobs for a strong economy.
• Make and keep housing affordable.
• Grow the city greener.
• Strengthen local quality of life, neighborhood character, and diversity.

This fall, the One City/One Future Blueprint for Growth will outline strategies that can make those goals a reality in Willets Point and in all of New York City’s development decisions, following models that have proved successful elsewhere. The Eminent Domain will provide a space for discussion of those policies and the possibilities for making economic development work for New Yorkers. We’ll also continue to take a close look at development policies in action and ask tough questions about who wins, who loses and how development could be done better. For more information on One City/One Future, contact Sadaf Khatri at NY Jobs with Justice, sadaf@nyjwj.org.

The Eminent Domain extends a huge thank you to volunteer Danyelle King, who reported this summer from Willets Point, Coney Island and other hot spots undergoing redevelopment. She’ll be returning to Brown University this fall, where she’s majoring in urban studies.

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.