Dutch Kills Rezoning Plan Reaches Land Use Hearings
BY THOMAS COGAN

The Dutch Kills rezoning plan was an item at the Borough President's Land Use Hearings in the second week of July, sharing space with cases from Auburndale, Forest Hills and other parts of Queens- including Willets Point, some of whose advocates staged a protest by picketing in front of Queens Borough Hall and invading the hearings site, Room 213, just before the Dutch Kills hearing began. As John Young, Queens director of the Department of City Planning, was introducing Joy Chen, who would present the department's computerized review of rezoning in Dutch Kills, red-shirted members of the housing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) started chanting for housing justice in Willets Point. Being in charge of the day's hearings, Borough President Helen Marshall raised her own protest, telling the ACORN people they had to leave. They did, chanting their way out of the room, and the Dutch Kills moment was allowed to proceed.

Chen spoke of City Planning's "three years of close, cooperative work in the neighborhood" to establish the new zoning guidelines. Breaking the ban on residential expansion and improvement was one of the reasons new zoning was drawn up, she said. She showed how that prohibition led to abandonment of some houses (George Stamatiades of the Dutch Kills Civic Association and Community Board 1 added that the old zoning plan, put into effect in 1961, "condemned residents to death" and over the years emptied the local schools and houses of worship) and has allowed only one exceptional expansion of a local residence since 1989. But Marshall suggested that consideration of manufacturers in Dutch Kills had been largely overlooked by City Planning but was partially righted by Community Board 1 at its June meeting. The new zoning as drawn up by City Planning reduced the floor area ratio (FAR) for Dutch Kills manufacturers from 5 to 2. Community Board 1 raised the building height limit from 40 to 50 feet for manufacturers, and Marshall told Young such a step was necessary. Gale Baron of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation seconded Marshall a little while later.

Three main contending groups have emerged from the Dutch Kills rezoning history, two of them only recently. The Dutch Kills Civic Association, a residents' group, has been speaking up longest, and it is the DKCA that City Planning has worked with during the three years Chen cited. The industrialists in the area have largely neglected the issue or were oblivious to it, although several of them participated at meetings devoted to it, but they lacked definite organization until early this year when they considered the implications of downzoning and found an attorney, Eric Palatnik, to state their case. The third group emerged only in the spring. The residents of 32nd Street between 36th and 37th Avenues live in what appears on the zoning map to be a peninsula separating them from the residential area to the southwest that DKCA has made the source of its concern. They rallied behind the leadership of Chris Lundgren and formed the 32nd Street Block Association. They charged that the rezoning plan they were presented with left them in an "engulfment" between 31st and 33rd Streets. Surrounded by commercial owners and developers who are empowered to build far higher than they, the homeowners, would be allowed to build, they further charged that they are in a position to be literally obscured and ultimately taken over and wiped out. They are asking that their current M1-2/R5B rezoning status, allowing them to build only to a height of 33 feet (and blacklisting them from consideration for rebuilding loans, one homeowner said) be changed to M1-2/R6B, allowing them an additional seven feet. Their current status gives them a color code of yellow on the zoning map, while the commercial people's color code is red. "Look at this: we're yellow, surrounded by red," Dinesh Thakur of the block association declared at the hearings. "Why was this done?"

At the beginning of the year, DKCA was worried about getting the new rezoning plan approved in time to fend off the hotel builders that had come into Dutch Kills through a loophole and were putting up buildings much higher than the ones residents feared their local industrialists would be erecting. Now, after the addition of modifications by Community Board 1 inclined toward the industrialists, further modifications are asked by a rump group of residents. The next meeting in the approval chain is at the Department of City Planning's Manhattan headquarters on Wednesday, July 23, at which time the opinion of Borough President Marshall's office should be known and the procedure will move one step closer to final judgment by the City Council. Barring further complications, the Dutch Kills rezoning issue should be settled before the year is over.