Borough Board approves plan to move forward with Willets Point redevelopment
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The Queens Borough Board approved plans to bring affordable housing and a school to the long-stalled Willets Point development. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
It’s taken 15 years, but the plan to redevelop Willets Point took a tiny, but important step forward Monday night when the Queens Borough Board voted in favor of a proposal to bring affordable housing and a school to the long-ignored industrial corner by 2024.
With a near-unanimous vote, the board approved plans put forth by the city’s Economic Development Corporation and the Queens Development Group to redesign a 6-acre section of the polluted south corner of Flushing Bay on May 10.
“This is a very historic step forward,” said City Councilmember Francisco Moya, who represents Willets Point in the city’s legislative body. “It has now been three [Queens borough president] administrations and we finally have movement here.”
The beginnings of the Willets Point redevelopment date back to the Bloomberg administration. Plans to transform the 23-acre, city controlled plot that sits in the shadow of Citi Field have come and gone – including a proposition to build a shopping mall which was struck down in court in 2017.
No proposal has made it as far as the plan that was approved by the Borough Board this week.
“As we continue to advance our long-term recovery efforts, we’re thrilled to restart and focus on affordable housing, a new public school and open space in the Special Willets Point District,” a spokesperson for the EDC said. “This will also include the necessary remediation and infrastructure investments to prepare for any future projects in this area.”
Under the new plan, the 6-acre section at the southeast corner of the neighborhood – known as Phase 1 of the development – will be leased for 99 years to the Queens Development Group, a partnership between real estate giants Sterling Equities and The Related Companies.
Under the lease agreement, the developers will build 1,100 units of affordable housing, a K-8 school, around 25,000 square feet of retail space, 3,000 square feet of community facility space and an acre of open space.
The developers will also be tasked with building new streets, sidewalks and utilities, including a sewage system, which the tenants of Willets Point, most of whom are auto shop workers, have long been without.
Phase 1 of the Willets Point redevelopment, outlined above in pink, is set to feature over 1,000 units of affordable housing and a new school. Photo courtesy of NYCEDC
The city was set to start remediation of the land – which has been polluted through a century of industrial use – last year, but was put on pause when the pandemic began.
The clean-up will begin in earnest this summer and is expected to be completed by 2023, according to Jana Pohorelsky, the assistant vice president of government and community relations at the EDC.
Ridding the land of pollutants was the only point of contention at the board meeting Monday.
Despite the EDC’s promise that the land would be remediated to the standards set by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, City Councilmember Robert Holden urged the city to take remediation a step further, especially on the grounds where the school will be built.
“We should have higher standards for the school,” Holden said. “I would rather err on the side of caution here. I would not put our children in harm's way and find out later, generations from now that there were problems with that school.”
Despite Holden’s abstention from voting, the plan and lease agreement passed with the condition that the board be updated regularly on the remediation process.
