BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
The city’s largest proposed rezoning in years is one step closer to becoming reality, after the City Planning Commission (CPC) held a public hearing last week on a plan to add more than 14,000 homes to Long Island City.
The proposal, known as OneLIC, would spur development across 54 blocks by relaxing current limits on how high and for what uses developers can build. It would also facilitate 3 million square feet of commercial space, and fund neighborhood amenities.
Supporters — such as local community boards, business owners, and pro-housing groups — say the rezoning would help address the city’s dire housing shortage, filling empty lots while making the waterfront accessible.
But others, notably artists and public housing residents, have argued the plan would only accelerate displacement and should include more parks and community spaces.
Supercharging a Hot-Spot
Although OneLIC officially kicked off its planning process in 2023, its basic contours have been debated for decades.
Long Island City was once a major industrial hub. In 1906, a businessman named Michael Degnon bought up much of the still-swampy land and created a manufacturing complex. Soon corporations were flocking to the neighborhood to produce neon signs, paint, baked goods — the first factory erected was that of the Sunshine Biscuits Company — and, when World War II broke out, weapons.
But in the late 1960s, as the economy tilted toward services, that boom began to wane. The city doubled down and passed a rezoning that restricted Hunter’s Point — the neighborhood’s southernmost tip — for industrial uses, to no avail. Abandoned factories accumulated graffiti. By 1993, city planners were reenvisioning Long Island City as a residential hotspot, replete with parks and unparalleled transit access.
They succeeded. Between 2010 and 2023, LIC saw its housing stock rise by 42%, the greatest rate of increase across New York City. Last year, it added the most raw units, too, with 1,859 new apartments constructed.
Now the city is looking to supercharge that growth. In many ways, OneLIC seeks to pick up where both the decades-old rezonings and scrapped plans from the 2010s left off: connecting the waterfront, preserving industry without making it the neighborhood’s core identity, and above all opening the doors to more population.
After an 18-month public engagement process, OneLIC is steadily progressing through NYC’s land-use protocol, ULURP (pronounced “you-lurp”), which lasts seven months and features five steps. The rezoning has cleared two — it was approved by Queens Community Board 2 (by a margin of 37-7) and Community Board 1 (22-11) earlier this year, and snagged Borough President Donovan Richard’s support last week. Next up: the CPC held a public hearing on July 30 and now has 60 days to deliberate, after which the proposal will pass to the city council and finally the mayor.
Affordable or Not?
But it’s not a done deal yet. At last Wednesday’s hearing, for instance, city officials pressed their counterparts as to why the plan didn’t include deeper affordability.
In one of the sharpest exchanges, Commissioner Leah Goodridge asked whether all of the housing built on a bundle of city-owned sites by the waterfront would be permanently affordable. A representative for HPD answered that the parcel of land at 44-59 45th Ave, which is currently operated by the DOT, would indeed be fully income-restricted. However, she explained that the plan for the two sites across the street — the DOE building at 44-36 Vernon Blvd (which was once set aside for Amazon, as part of a failed plan in 2019) and the mostly empty lot at 4-99 44th Drive — had not yet been ironed out.
“There are scenarios where market-rate housing could be used to offset some of the costs” of community resources, the EDC spokesperson offered, while noting that the mix of units was still “TBD.”
But Goodridge was not impressed. “In this neighborhood, about 40% of the residents are rent-burdened,” she stressed. “So sometimes even the affordable housing is too expensive. For me, I do think it’s important for the city-owned sites at least to be 100% affordable.”
“At the end of the day, this is the people’s property,” agreed Commissioner Orlando Marín. ”The concept of needing market-rate [units] to subsidize what is the city’s responsibility, and should have happened anyway, is not the way we should be approaching this. Public land should be affordable housing.”
Goodridge also questioned what would happen to the rezoning’s tenant counseling initiatives if the federal government made further cuts to funding. The response, in essence, was that it was unclear.
