TAKE ACTION to send your email telling representatives and City officials to vote no on the OneLIC rezoning unless the criteria listed below are met.

For eighteen months, the Department of City Planning (DCP) conducted a series of public meetings to find out what community members want to see developed in Long Island City. Community feedback has been clear: we need deeply affordable apartments, not more of the market-rate luxury towers that populate the LIC skyline; more public green space; protection for small businesses and artists from rising rents and displacement; and new schools and infrastructure investment, including upgrades of sewer systems, coastline flood protections, hospitals, and mass transit.

Unfortunately, virtually none of the community’s needs have been incorporated into this draft proposal. Though the median price of a 2-bedroom in LIC is an astronomical $5,300 per month, OneLIC contains no provisions for affordable housing above the legally-mandated minimum for private development. They are predicting 14,700 more apartments, 70 -80% of which would be high-end market-rate. The proposal includes no solid commitment to purchase waterfront land for a flood-mitigating public park, or recreational facilities for residents. The plan touts new schools, but these schools were already planned for the current overcrowding. No funding for new schools is allocated, nor funding for sewer upgrades or new public transportation to accommodate the approximately 40,000 to 60,000 new residents. This is not a comprehensive plan.

OneLIC is a massive rezoning, that would allow the building of many luxury towers all over the 54-block area. The rezoning would allow towers of as many as 100 stories on certain sites, including 75 stories right next to Queensbridge Houses. It would also allow for building on four precious publicly-owned sites by private developers for high-rise, mostly luxury buildings. Despite all this, the City claims that its rezoning plan “would not result in significant adverse impacts due to direct residential displacement” and “would not have the potential to alter the socioeconomic character of the area.” Years of rigorous analysis of past New York City rezonings proves otherwise. As we have seen time and again, rezonings of this scale cause rents to rise, supercharging displacement and deepening racial and economic segregation.

OneLIC should not be approved unless the following community needs are guaranteed:

• Affordable Housing: The City must create a legally binding mechanism for deeply affordable housing – far beyond what is required by the City’s insufficient Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program. We need increased percentages of deeply affordable units to counter the years of unfettered market rate development in LIC.
• Community-Driven Development of Public Land: The City must commit to keeping all public land out of the hands of private developers – and prioritize long standing community-led plans for these sites, such as the Queensboro People’s Space and the Hunters Point North Vision Plan for Resiliency. Any housing built on public sites must be 100%, deeply affordable.
• A Connected Waterfront and New Public Spaces: The OneLIC plan would bring in tens of thousands of new residents, reducing the amount of green space per capita. The City must develop a concrete land acquisition strategy to create a resilient public park connecting Anable Basin to Queensbridge, as laid out in the LICC/Hunters Point Community Coalition plan.
• Queensbridge and Ravenswood Houses Investments: Public investment in nearby NYCHA housing must be built-in and guaranteed, and all vacant units must be rehabbed and rented. No supertall, luxury housing across the street from Queensbridge – or anywhere else in western Queens.
• Investment in Sewage, Plumbing, and Resilience Infrastructure: The City must make a major – and binding – commitment of funding for critical infrastructure, including our crumbling public transit, schools and sewage that is at least proportional to the anticipated increase in population.