Board 2 Votes On Hunters Point South
BY THOMAS COGAN

The fourth Hunters Point South (HPS) residential project meeting, held in late June at the new facilities of Sunnyside Communities Services, was designed to be conclusive. Since October 2007, representatives of the city Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development have repeatedly described and explained the two-part plan, which would be operated mainly under city auspices but in part privately, too, ultimately to provide more than 6,500 units of widely priced workingclass and middle-class housing in an old industrial area of Long Island City that overlooks the East River and Newtown Creek. The latest meeting was managed by Community Board 2. At the meeting, the board's land use committee presented an extensive report that went over the HPS plan and made several recommendations about such matters as community participation, affordable and inclusionary housing, traffic patterns and parking. But before the board presented the committee's report and voted on its recommendations, community, housing and labor activists spoke. They tended to admire the plan but not the planners' economic philosophy or their strategy.

"This is a great party but most of us are not invited," said Josepha Castro of the Diocese of Brooklyn, who observed also that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was out of touch with reality if he imagined when the city purchased the tract by the East River that was owned by Queens West, that the housing prices now being proposed could be afforded by average Queens residents. She urged the board to reject the plan. John Furlong of Habitat for Humanity also called for rejection if half the housing was not truly affordable and 20 percent of it was not feasible for persons making less than $25,000 annually. Margaret Chin of Queens Affordable Housing said she was thrilled by the public purchase of the socalled Site A, but was subsequently disappointed by the price structuring. As for Site B, the private, smaller parcel (1,650 units, in contrast to Site A's 5,000), she said there is no guarantee for the 330 low-priced or inclusionary units that are supposed to be built there in exchange for certain floor area ratio, or FAR, concessions. She predicted Site B's prices would skyrocket at the earliest opportunity. Bernard Caligari, a construction union official, said he wants to "make city agencies accountable" in matters of fair wages and working conditions. He said that Housing Preservation and Development "goes out of its way to evade" a fair system of payment and has laborers working for as little as $8 per hour. And Frank Carrado, who claims to know all the streets and traffic patterns of Long Island City, said any street plans thus far devised by the city agencies guarantee a crushing load of traffic on Vernon Boulevard. At the same time, Second Street as a designated thoroughfare would simply not be up to the task, he said.

Buildout and management of the city's Site A is to be handled by a non-profit 501(C) 3 entity, governed by a board of directors. In the report by the Land Use Committee of Community Board 2, the committee recommended full community board participation in this entity, knowing that the EDC had already agreed to it. The committee accepted the HPD/EDC plan to have 40 percent of the Site A apartments rented or sold at market rate, with 60 percent offered at middle-income rates. For the latter, however, it altered the agencies' breakdown (1,000 units for persons earning 80 percent of average medium income or AMI, 1,000 for those at 130 percent AMI and 1,000 for those at 165 percent AMI), calling for 1,500 units for persons earning 80 to 145 percent AMI, 500 units for those at 50-80 percent AMI, 500 units for those at 30-50 percent AMI and 500 units for those below 30 percent AMI. For private Site B's 330 low-cost inclusionary units, the committee recommended they be built on-site, or that those built off-site be built within the community board's district.

As for traffic patterns, the committee believed 54th Avenue should be designated a viable east-west connector, that Second Street be two-way rather than one-way and that no parking spaces be removed from Vernon Boulevard. More about parking: the committee wrote that there was "no question" there would be an acute need for parking spaces as a result of construction of Site A and Site B- but would those living in the affordable housing components that each site would contain be able to afford spaces in the indoor parking garage promised by EDC /HPD? The committee recommended parking prices in that garage be set at reduced rates lest inclusionary tenants owning cars be forced into the great hunt for street spaces.

There were many more recommendations about many important topics related to the building of Hunters Point South, such as parkland (which HPD's Tracy Sayegh described as a "signature public amenity"), public transportation, schools- even building height, which for Site A structures would be no more than 390 feet, the height of the City Lights tower at Queens West. The Land Use Committee made its recommendations as if it were speaking for the whole board, and the board finally voted either to approve or dispel the committee's assumption. The vote was unanimously in favor.

Whether or not the June 23 session will prove to be the last of the Hunters Point South meetings remains to be seen.