A win for Flushing
Council panel OKs waterfront redevelop
A key City Council committee easily signed off on plans Wednesday for a dramatic redevelopment of the Queens waterfront in Flushing, potentially putting more than a dozen high-rises with apartments and hotel rooms on land currently used for storage and parking lots.
The vote came after the project’s developers struck a deal with two powerful unions — the Hotel Trades Council and Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ — guaranteeing that the workforce staffing the buildings would be organized.
“At a time when so many other neighborhoods are struggling, this project would provide an economic lifeline in the form of union employment and tens of millions of dollars in additional tax revenues to the city of New York,” said Councilman Francisco Moya (D-Queens), who chairs the Land Use Committee.
The committee backed the plan by a vote of 5-0, moving the proposal on to the entire council, which is expected to easily sign off on it as soon as Thursday.
Developers plan to build 13 highrises — some as tall as 20 stories — on the 11-acre site that will include 1,700 apartments, nearly 900 hotel rooms and 700,000 square feet of commercial space.
In exchange, developers promised they would clean up the facing Flushing Creek and build an esplanade that opens the waterfront to the public.
However, critics charged that wasn’t enough — and focused their ire on the developers promising only that 61 of the new apartments would be rent-regulated and reserved for tenants at certain income levels.
The local councilman, Peter Koo, celebrated the win for the project, which he has backed throughout the process.
“This was a hard-fought agreement, but at the end of the day the applicants and the labor groups were able to arrive at a place that will include good-paying local jobs for the Flushing community,” Koo said.
The council committee’s signoff comes after a month of delays that made it seem as if the project would join the list of recent redevelopment efforts torpedoed by progressive activists — including Amazon’s bid to build a new complex in Long Island City and the effort by Industry City in Brooklyn to get its decades-old land-use regulations tweaked so it could make use of all its buildings.