City targets Queens districts with little affordable housing for fast-tracked development
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The Mamdani administration is targeting five Queens neighborhoods to build more affordable housing. Photo By Nelson Mejia Jr./Flickr
By Ryan Schwach
Five of the 12 communities in New York City that have seen the least amount of new, affordable housing over the past half decade are in Queens – and are now being targeted by the Mamdani administration for fast-tracked housing projects, angering some local legislators.
In Queens, City Hall and the Department of City Planning intends to speed up the process and build more housing in Community Board 4, home to Corona and Elmhurst; Community Board 5, which encompasses Ridgewood, Maspeth and Middle Village; Community Board 10, which includes South Ozone Park and Howard Beach; and Community Board 13, which features the Southeast Queens neighborhoods of Queens Village, Bellerose and Rosedale.
CB10 has built the third-fewest amount of affordable housing citywide in recent history, having only added seven units in the last five years. CB13 has only added nine.
DCP Commissioner Sideya Sherman said that the 12 districts being targeted citywide represent 20 percent of the city, but only around one percent of the housing.
No other borough had more districts on the list than Queens.
The World’s Borough is home to just one of the city’s top 10 most productive districts – Community Board 14, where a housing boom in Far Rockaway has led to a nearly 6 percent growth rate in affordable housing and more than 2,700 units.
“New York’s housing crisis is not going to be solved by asking the same neighborhoods to do all the building,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement. “Every New Yorker deserves a home they can afford, and every neighborhood must be part of delivering it.”
The city will be able to fast-track housing in the one dozen districts thanks to ballot proposals that passed during November’s election. The provisions allow the city to build more housing with less red tape, completely reworking the city’s ULURP housing approval process and defanging the City Council’s ability to kill housing plans.
Following the mayor’s announcement on Wednesday, Queens officials who represent the districts being targeted expressed frustration at being left out of the conversation.
“My biggest problem is that nobody from City Planning sought any input from my office until this afternoon, literally the day before the announcement,” Councilmember Phil Wong said. “You cannot call something community planning when the local communities and their elected representatives are brought into the conversation only after the decisions have essentially been made.”
Wong’s district overlaps with much of CB5, which only built 76 units of affordable housing in the last five years.
Councilmember Joann Ariola, whose district includes neighborhoods in CB10, had similar gripes.
“Building affordable housing should not come at the expense of community voices,” Ariola said in a statement to the Eagle. “We all want more affordable communities where generations can continue to grow and thrive together, but cutting the Council out of land use decisions takes away our ability to advocate for our constituents and ensure that new projects actually fit with the unique demands of each neighborhood.”
The Republican member argued that if housing is fast tracked, vital considerations will be missed.
“Are there enough police in our precincts to accommodate the new residents? Is fire or EMS coverage adequate? What are the environmental impacts? All of these things matter, and need to be accounted for before any major developments get underway,” she said. “Getting a project approved faster matters little if those projects are only going to fail the people who will live there, and that's exactly what I fear will happen under this new fast track system."
Councilmember Linda Lee’s district in Eastern Queens has long been among the most notorious when it comes to a lack of housing construction.
In 2022, her 23rd District was flagged for building the fewest affordable housing units of any district in the city, with just 17 new units permitted between 2014 and 2021, a trend that has continued in the years since.
Lee, the chair of the powerful Finance Committee and a close ally of Speaker Julie Menin, told the Eagle in a statement that although housing needs to be addressed, she wants a “community-led and community-driven approach.”
She also touted the Creedmoor redevelopment plan as evidence of housing being built in her district.
“In my district, I worked with community members, local elected officials, and state leaders to finalize plans to transform more than 50 acres of land at the Creedmoor campus into much-needed housing, bringing community members and housing advocates to the table in good faith to find a plan that delivered housing and would meet the needs of the neighborhood,” she said. “This plan demonstrates that we can deliver housing while ensuring that the community has a meaningful voice at the forefront of the process.”
Last year, Lee was part of a coalition of elected leaders that lobbied the state to slash the Creedmoor plan by 850 units.
One councilmember with a unique place in this fight is Selvena Brooks-Powers. Part of her district lies in CB14, which has built Queens’ largest share of affordable housing, and CB13, which has built among the least.
She said in a phone call with the Eagle that she is not against housing development, and neither is the community, as long as it is done responsibly.
“The most important thing is not losing the fabric of what our community is, which is a low density neighborhood,” she said. “Development has to be done in a way that is not going to spur gentrification.”
Writ large, Southeast Queens has long been an area home to new affordable housing development. The Far Rockaway rezoning, passed by Brooks-Powers’ predecessor on the City Council, now-Borough President Donovan Richards, has revamped that community, and the recently approved Downtown Jamaica Rezoning aims to do the same there.
“We have been doing our part,” she said. “Southeast Queens is truly one big neighborhood, the fabric is the same.”
Councilmember Nantasha Williams, who serves as deputy speaker and represents the other parts of Southeast Queens in District 13 along with Brooks-Powers and Lee, declined to comment. But, a spokesperson for her office said the legislator’s office “will continue to stay engaged and ensure the communities we represent are informed and have opportunities to be heard.”
