Can Middle Class Afford Hunters Point South?
BY THOMAS COGAN

The latest meeting about the proposed Hunters Point South housing project that is supposed to cover the peninsula where Newtown Creek and the East River meet was held shortly after the city sanctioned the uniform land review process

ULURP) that will now govern construction. Later was better: where a previous meeting in October was held in a hole-in-corner area of the Citi tower on Jackson Avenue, this one was held in a handsome auditorium in the new Citi building at 2 Court Square. On stage as a visual aid to the speakers from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the city Economic Development Corporation were some pretty artist's renderings of what the project would look like some day, with tall, medium and low buildings and green parkland, situated beside two glassy waterways flecked with small pleasure craft, doubtless environmentally friendly. The meeting that followed accepted, even welcomed, the coming of the project but denigrated the visual idyll shown in the illustrations. Some of the attendees even challenged what they saw as the assumptions of the affluent and the middle classes regarding socalled affordable housing.

The city's story was begun by Ruthanne Visnauskas, an assistant commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and continued by Tracy Sayegh, an assistant vice president, development of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Visnauskas said that the main part of the plan is a 30-acre site, called Site A, on which 5,000 housing units are to be constructed. Adjacent to and east of that is a seven-acre site, called Site B, on which 1,650 units will be built. Site A was purchased by the city from Queens West and, Visnauskas pointed out, is now the largest municipal housing construction project in 30 years. Site B, called "the Budweiser site" because of an Anheuser-Busch facility there, is and will remain in private hands. Referring to commentary on the previous exhibition of plans, Sayegh acknowledged that complaints about the lack of a transportation scheme or a connection between a newly created neighborhood and Long Island City's vaunted transportation hub were justified. But she had nothing to offer in reply to them other than vague promises about bus line extensions. In the related matter of parking she said that the site's water table rendered an underground garage impossible, but an aboveground garage could be "wrapped" by the retail stores to be built, so it wouldn't be like the exposed garage at City Lights. She spoke also of a 1,600- seat school and showed more artist's renderings of streets redesigned to become "view corridors" from which to behold the Manhattan skyline just over the water. When the two city officials were asked just when they hope to see construction begin, Visnauskas said the first building should be started in late 2009 and reach completion by 2011.

Community Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley said he was glad the city bought the Hunters Point South (formerly Queens West South) site because with the mayor in charge, all procedure there would be a community matter, as it has not been at Queens West. Community figures and groups were there to prove it, advocating everything from affordability to dog runs. One man spoke for artists, saying that many of them have been priced out of their dwellings and have left the city, never to return; so can those who remain hope to see affordable housing? Union official Bernard Caligari wanted to know "dollar amounts" on rents and what opportunities there would be for union construction workers. Gert McDonald, a longtime area activist, said that police protection and firefighting seem not to be considered (though Congressmember Carolyn Maloney and Assemblymember Catherine Nolan sent statements about public safety, and about schools and the need for a library. But a challenge to the definition of affordability came from two groups, Queens for Affordable Housing and Queens Community House. Speaking for the former was a woman who said no housing she'd heard described at the meeting could be called affordable. By the presenters' statistics, she said, half of Queens would be economically barred from Hunters Point South. The builders, as she knows them, have no experience with low-income housing and won't build any. But the right "political and technical will" could create a mix of middle class and lowincome housing without social friction, she asserted. The Queens Community House contingent came from Jackson Heights. One of its members, Denise Prescott, observed that the presenters spoke of $700 studio apartments in the new buildings as affordable for persons they saw as $60,000 earners. She said such reasoning wouldn't recognize the existence of a $24,000 worker, to whom it is not affordable, particularly with dependents. The proletarian approach of these two groups, and the presence of many immigrants in Queens Community House's ranks, promised to complicate the issue by bringing in the wide-scale problem of housing in a borough that is rapidly taking on population, domestic and foreign.

A final consideration came from Frank Corrado, who is 78 and a lifetime resident of Long Island City. He is a man who claims intimate knowledge of every street in the area and its dynamics and thus felt it crucial to point out to the HPD and EDC spokeswomen that a new community such as that proposed would find itself hopelessly trapped in traffic jams and unable to function if something were not added to the plans. That, he said, would be a traffic bridge from 2nd Street to Jackson Avenue that would vault the Long Island Expressway and allow people to get in and get out- something he is certain they will not be able to do if everything is carried out as currently planned.