In yesterday’s Gotham Gazette, Murphy Adjunct Professor Sam Stein, along with CUNY Professor Tarry Hum, wrote an op-ed about the “under the radar” re-zoning of an area some are calling “Flushing West” (Flushing’s Affordable Housing at Risk, 5/2/16).
According to Stein and Hum, this re-zoning threatens to destroy existing affordable housing by incentivizing real estate speculation. They write:
This proposed rezoning would have a transformative impact on Flushing, a densely populated, pan-Asian immigrant neighborhood with a sizable Latino population and a small but historic African-American community.[…]
Rent regulation accounts for nearly all of Flushing’s affordable housing. The neighborhood’s white-hot real estate market, however, increasingly threatens these rent-stabilized apartments. DCP’s proposed rezoning – which links the production of affordable housing with the construction of thousands of luxury units – has only increased land speculation and, therefore, landlords’ imperative to deregulate their holdings. Though the rezoning has been paired with an increase in funding for anti-eviction legal services, it has already catalyzed a number of hyper-speculative real estate transactions in downtown Flushing, including within the rezoning area.
Meanwhile, the “affordable housing” that will be built as part of the plan will be meager and largely unaffordable to low-income residents:
With Flushing’s remaining rent-regulated apartments at stake, it is important to look at the balance of what is being offered now: the proposed rezoning will produce thousands of market-rate, luxury housing units; a mere 412 apartments will be affordable to average Flushing residents (and then only if the local City Council member and developers choose the newly added option); and nothing at all will be built for families making below-median wages.
The authors conclude:
City planners must stop acting as if the negative consequences of upzonings on rent-regulated housing will be mitigated by the paltry provision of new quasi-affordable units, or by increased investments in legal services (though the latter are, of course, important). Instead, we need to prioritize the preservation of rent-stabilized apartments and the production of truly affordable housing, decoupled from market-rate development and its attendant impacts on neighborhood land markets.
The piece, which gives an insightful account of land speculation in recent years in Flushing, is worth reading in its entirety. Head to the Gotham Gazette for more.
