Housing Should Match Neighborhood Character

A group of Forest Hills homeowners are fighting to keep a seven-story apartment building from rising on a site where a single-family home once stood. The group, the Kew Forest Neighborhood Association, contends that the building would be out of character with the rest of the neighborhood, which consists of one-family homes one and two stories high.

The association successfully fought to have an area bounded by 76th Drive, 78th Avenue, Kew Forest Lane and Austin Street, rezoned from R-6 to R-2. Under the old R-6 zoning designation, medium-density housing up to 12 stories high could be built in the area. An area zoned R-2, in contrast, can hold only single- and two-family houses.

Whether the Kew Forest group is successful in its battle to keep the projected apartment building from being built remains to be seen. The site's two owners are alleged to have done work on the foundation in defiance of a temporary restraining order and the attorney for the site's owners, who are also its developers, said that his clients are preparing to appeal the injunction and are contesting the 1920's covenant which bans all but single-family homes from the neighborhood. Both sides can find precedents to support their arguments. Similar situations exist throughout the borough; a representative of Queens Borough President Claire Shulman said at least 10 other such "downzoning" actions are contemplated.

It is inarguable that Queens is in desperate need of housing. Throughout the borough one-, two- and three-family houses have been illegally converted to house many more people than the structures were originally designed to hold. Such conversions are illegal and dangerous, sometimes even fatal, as several residential fires have proven. It is also unconscionable that the people who live in such warrens are forced to pay rents at usurious rates for substandard habitations.

At the same time, the members of the Kew Forest Neighborhood Association and their counterparts throughout the borough have right on their side, too. Multi-story apartment buildings, however luxurious their appointments may be, simply do not belong in low-rise, low-density neighborhoods. In many cases they bring about the same strains on the infrastructure and community services that illegal conversions do. They do not add substantially to the tax base nor to the quality of life.

Other neighborhoods have been overdeveloped in a different way: zoning regulations and custom permit buildings to be constructed that take up every available square inch of lot space. The only greenery in such neighborhoods is provided by the occasional stubborn street tree or grass pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk. The rest of the landscape, to use the term loosely, is taken up by asphalt, brick and concrete.

Every resident of the borough of Queens deserves a place to call home that does not force a choice between eating and keeping a roof over one's head. Every resident also deserves a quality of life that enhances one's physical and mental well-being. Housing there must be, but that housing must be a true home for the spirit as well as the body of anyone who dwells within it.