Opinion: Flushing waterfront rezoning reveals the failure of NYC's land use process

Photo courtesy of Shekar Krishnan

By Shekar Krishnan

As we face the unprecedented triple crises of affordability, public health, and racial justice, the proposed Flushing rezoning fails to address any of the urgent needs of our Queens communities. We must reject this proposal. We need to build a far better and more inclusive land use review process, one that evaluates residential segregation and centers decision-making around the voices and real priorities of our communities.   

The biggest failure in New York City’s current housing policy is the embrace of private developers to build so-called affordable housing. It never works. In fact, it greatly harms communities of color suffering from gentrification and displacement. The proposed rezoning of the Flushing waterfront is just another instance of this damaging practice.

The project calls for a rezoning of the Flushing waterfront to create a 1,700-unit housing complex with a mix of hotel and retail use, all located in a special waterfront district. This plan would be subject to the affordable housing requirements enshrined in Mayor de Blasio’s citywide Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy, a failure in itself. Nothing about this proposal takes into account the urgent housing problems in Flushing or across Queens. Instead, it reveals fundamental flaws affecting the land use decisions in our city.

First, under the federal Fair Housing Act, the city must affirmatively further fair housing when it rezones neighborhoods. This is not just about avoiding residential segregation, but proactively addressing it.

As a civil rights lawyer and the co-founder of a legal services organization dedicated to housing and racial justice, I know the effects of the city’s failure to meet its obligations. I’ve fought against discriminatory rezonings that have ravaged low-income communities of color for decades. The city never studies the fair housing needs of a community, as required under the law, or how a project will accelerate displacement. 

This proposed Flushing rezoning is no different. The city has not evaluated the fair housing impacts of the project. It has no clue how the proposal will worsen displacement in Flushing and in surrounding neighborhoods. No residential rezonings should be happening in NYC unless the City first studies their racial impacts. 

Second, this rezoning is being shepherded through a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) that is thoroughly broken. From start to finish, the ULURP process is designed to favor private interests at the expense of communities. The environmental reviews that kick off the process are filled with immense amounts of technical information.

Yet, missing from the hundreds of pages of reports is any analysis of the segregative impacts of a rezoning. A City Planning Commission consisting largely of mayoral appointees predictably approves projects that City Hall desires. And the City Council simply defers to the local member in whose district the project sits — a problematic practice known as “member deference.”

As a mechanism to approve land use decisions in NYC, ULURP must be repealed.

Instead, we need a comprehensive, community-rooted land use process that stops displacement and remedies racial and environmental disparities in urban planning. We need a moratorium on all luxury rezonings and development across the city until our rezoning process accounts for residential segregation. 

Housing affordability is among the most urgent crises in NYC and it is greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If we are serious about combating displacement, protecting tenants’ rights, and defending neighborhoods, then we need to radically adjust our perspective and processes on rezonings. The Flushing rezoning proposal doesn’t address any of these glaring underlying problems -- it is a product of them. It is not only harmful for Flushing, but for Queens and NYC more generally. This rezoning must be stopped.

Shekar Krishnan is a civil rights attorney specializing in housing discrimination and tenants rights and a candidate for CIty Council in Queens’ District 25. He is the co-founder of Communities Resist, a legal services organization that takes a community-rooted, intersectional approach to housing and racial justice, representing over 100 tenant associations in North Brooklyn and Queens