City Council To Vote on Landmark Zoning Change in Queens

The City Council will vote today on a new zoning plan for the Woodside neighborhood along Queens Boulevard that would be the first use in Queens of inclusionary zoning, which mandates that developers create affordable housing units.Created by a council member who represents part of Queens, Eric Gioia, the plan would offer private developers the right to construct larger buildings if they designated 20% of all residential units as affordable housing for the middle class. Although developers would be required to apply for the zoning change and therefore it is not yet known how much affordable housing Mr. Gioia’s plan would create, he said that it could open up hundreds of affordable units within an area that covers 20 city blocks and bring construction to an underdeveloped area.The focus on middle-income housing is an attempt to help a demographic that Mr. Gioia sees in his own family. “I think my model in my mind has been my sister and her fiancé,” he said. Mr. Gioia’s sister is a teacher, and her fiancé is in law enforcement. “A cop married to a school teacher should be able to live in our city, and right now too many people are being squeezed by the high prices of New York City,” he said.While he said he knows that the plan will not solve the city-wide housing shortage, he said he hopes that the precedents it sets — denser development as incentive for creation of affordable housing, and inclusionary zoning in Queens — will be “a model here that can be replicated city-wide and across the country.”Allowing denser development along Queens Boulevard might not bring the revitalization Mr. Gioia said he is hoping for, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who specializes in development, Julia Vitullo-Martin, said. She said she thought the rezoning was “a pretty good direction to be going in,” and that the proximity to public transportation and the need to make Woodside more attractive to developers made the area “a pretty good neighborhood for this kind of thing.” But she said she was worried that the rezoning plan was a “piecemeal” approach that addressed the immediate problem — lack of affordable housing — without looking at the wider implications for city planning throughout Queens.“This section of Queens Boulevard is going to end up with pretty substantial towers that are going to prevent any other use for the neighborhood,” she said.

City Council To Vote on Landmark Zoning Change in Queens

City Council To Vote on Landmark Zoning Change in Queens

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