Opinion: Queens deserves more than just asphalt

Mets owner Steve Cohen is planning to develop the 50-acres of parking lots surrounding Citi Field. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye

By Tom Grech

For anyone who has lived in Queens, gone to a Mets game or flown into LaGuardia Airport knows, the 50 acres around Citi Field have been nothing but parking lots and wasted opportunity.

More than 80 years of waste, mismanagement, and neglect has left the area around Citi Field under-developed, isolated and strained.

Queens is known as the “World’s Borough” because it is the most diverse. And while we don’t always agree on everything, one thing we can all get behind is that these 50 acres aren’t serving the community.

There is a massive opportunity for Queens to re-imagine this area, and Steve Cohen is giving us a seat at the table and giving us a voice in the process.

Steve and his team are setting a new standard for community engagement and transparency. Since day one, they’ve been committed to putting community first and doing this the right way.

Over the past five months, they’ve held 10 community visioning sessions and workshops and continue to host more. Getting important ideas, feedback and priorities from more than 1,000 community members.

I’ve personally been to several of these sessions, and can say that he is doing this in a thoughtful and inclusive way.

These aren’t dog and pony shows. They are substantive, productive conversations where those who participate are the ones doing the talking, not the other way around. You can truly say that this process is bottom-up when you have Steve Cohen spending hours at these sessions just listening to the people who live and work here.

No other project has done this much work to truly partner with the community. And it’s this bottom-up approach that gives everyone a voice right from the beginning that works. We’ve all seen what happens when other projects come in with a top-down approach and blindside the community: they fail.

Over the past few months, I’ve been excited about what we have been hearing and encouraged by the potential of a vision that thinks big and will create something meaningful. We have long deserved a space in Queens that brings everything together - green space, 365-day-per-year entertainment, better connectivity and a real job creator for the area.

When Cohen bought the Mets he said that owning the team is a “civic responsibility.” He’s making good on that promise.

Queens deserve more than just asphalt, and by putting community first, we can all take part in building something that makes Queens proud.

Tom Grech is the president and CEO of the Queens Chamber of Commerce.