BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
LONG ISLAND CITY — Around 9 p.m., three hours after the hearing at LaGuardia Community College began, the chair of Queens Community Board 2 was starting to mix up speakers’ names.
You couldn’t blame him: despite the rain, over 180 residents signed up last week to testify both for and against OneLIC, the city’s proposed rezoning of Long Island City, which would add over 14,000 apartments to a formerly industrial neighborhood that has become defined by high-rises. And while individual faces blurred with the passing hours, the overall takeaway was clear — nearly two years into the planning process, the community remains sharply divided over whether the rezoning should move forward.
While the centerpiece of OneLIC is housing — if passed, approximately 4,300 units would be designated as “affordable” — the proposal also aims to add schools, improve infrastructure, and increase waterfront access by connecting Gantry State Park to Queensbridge Park.
Long Island City is no stranger to rezonings. “Since the 1990s,” wrote local CM Julie Won in a letter to her constituents, “land use changes in LIC have led to rapid residential growth without equally matched investments from the City. Repeatedly, our community has suffered as constant delays and empty promises resulted in undelivered new schools, infrastructure updates, and critical services and amenities. In the last fifteen years alone, LIC has been the site of repeated unsuccessful rezoning efforts. Each of these attempted plans ultimately failed to pair development plans with a robust set of community-informed strategies to address existing needs in the neighborhood.”
On the surface, this proposal seems to be taking those past critiques into account. OneLIC’s planning process launched all the way back in October 2023. Since then, Won has partnered with the Department of City Planning to hold 16 public events featuring roughly 2,000 participants, not to mention more than 5,750 comments submitted by residents. The public hearing at LaGuardia Community College last Wednesday was the last opportunity for locals to share their thoughts before Community Boards 1 and 2 vote on whether to advise the city to pass the proposal. CB1’s nonbinding vote is on June 17, and CB2 will vote on June 18.
Yet at the hearing, many residents said that the community engagement process was cosmetic, and that their feedback wasn’t incorporated into the final plan.
“As participants of numerous town halls from the very beginning,” testified Carol Wilkins, president of the Ravenswood Residents Association, “we were appalled at the fact that so many brilliant ideas were discussed from community members, and none of them seemed to be reflected within this plan.”
Wilkins was one voice in a chorus claiming these ideas — ”public indoor recreational spaces, community industrial kitchens, urban farms to feed the community, a public pool, private 1-family homes to promote home ownership, more public green space and so much more” — had been sidelined, and decrying the fact that Queensbridge Houses and Ravenswood Houses were excluded from OneLIC’s study and context area, respectively.
“We spent the last year and a half giving feedback. None of the feedback ended up in the proposal, not in any concrete way,” agreed Memo Salazar, a filmmaker who co-chairs the co-chair of the newly created Western Queens Community Land Trust. Nina Young from Sunnyside concurred, saying that the community engagement was “at the tokenism level” and worrying that many of the infrastructure benefits, such as additional schools, had no enforcement mechanism to ensure they are built.
But others praised the comprehensiveness of the plan, and struck a note of urgency regarding building more apartments. “It’s unacceptable that the most transit-rich and high-opportunity parts of this country are warehouses and car repair shops,” said Vishnu Radi of Sunnyside. “It’s unacceptable that there’s a huge vacant lot next to the Queensboro Plaza subway stop, and it’s unacceptable to deny New Yorkers homes.”
OneLIC is pivotal to the city’s professed goal of building more than 80,000 units within the next 15 years under the banner of the City of Yes. Similar plans are in the works elsewhere: on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, for example, DCP is looking to build 4,600 homes over a 13-block span with the AAMUP rezoning, while facing community backlash over fears of gentrification. But the Long Island City plan involves far more units than are being proposed for any other neighborhood rezoning, raising the stakes for both residents and city planners.
Not everyone agreed with the premise that the rezoning was needed to address the housing crisis, however.
“What are we doing here? This is another gentrification project — we’ve seen this time and time again,” said Dannely Rodriguez, an eviction lawyer from Astoria. “This is not for the working people in the city. The median income of LIC is $67,000, so the vast majority of the apartments here are going to be [for people making] well over $66,000. And who here can afford a one bedroom for $4,000?”
Jonathan Suarez, a resident of Hunters Point South who has lived in Queens for 40 years, supported the proposal. He said that he had moved to the neighborhood several years ago with his wife and two children; he wouldn’t have been able to afford a $4,000 one-bedroom, he acknowledged, responding to Rodriguez, but thanks to the affordable housing lottery his family found a $1,000 two-bedroom apartment in LIC. “Yes, luxury buildings will have a lot of wealthy families,” he argued, but with rent-controlled units “it will have a lot of low-income families as well.”
Many members of the local Bangladeshi community testified in favor of OneLIC, citing the influx of investment it would bring. Yet other residents wondered whether building skyscrapers on the waterfront was prudent, given rising sea levels: Missy Mary, who had come to the hearing with her eight-year-old daughter, said she was firmly against what she called “a disastrous up-zone with no promise of resiliency.”
