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Long Island City rezoning advances. What will it mean for housing affordability?
By
Arun Venugopal
Published Sep 7, 2025
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Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
By
Arun Venugopal
Published Sep 7, 2025
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A plan to rezone a large swath of Long Island City is now with the City Council after winning the overwhelming approval of the City Planning Commission. The panel’s backing hasn’t silenced concern the initiative doesn’t do enough to create or preserve affordable housing units.
City Planning Commission Chair Dan Garodnick said ahead of the commission vote that the rezoning would create nearly 15,000 new homes, “the most amount of housing generated by a neighborhood-specific rezoning in at least 25 years and very likely the most since the creation of the modern Zoning Resolution in 1961.” The commission advanced the plan in a 11-to-1 vote Wednesday.
The OneLIC plan would create 4,300 affordable units, but “how affordable?” remains an unanswered question and the subject of continuing negotiations. Council member Julie Won, who represents the area, said in a statement that she welcomed OneLIC but that it “cannot advance without meeting community-driven priorities.”
“The plan must guarantee permanently affordable, family-sized housing across public and private sites [and] transform city-owned land under the Queensboro Bridge into public open space,” Won said. “Without these commitments, this rezoning will not have my support.”
OneLIC would remake a 54-block area with the addition of more than 3.5 million square feet of commercial and industrial space, and generate 14,400 jobs, while creating a unified waterfront from Gantry Plaza State Park to Queensbridge Park, according to the planners.
The plan now heads to the City Council, which will hold a public hearing on Sept. 17.
City officials say the plan would help address the city’s housing crisis, although the neighborhood has already seen a level of housing growth that outpaces any other neighborhood across the five boroughs in the last year.
Mayor Eric Adams' administration said in a press release that OneLIC was one of five neighborhood plans that would collectively create nearly 50,000 homes across the city over the next 15 years. Other neighborhoods targeted for overhauls include the East Bronx, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, the Jamaica area of Queens and Midtown Manhattan,
“From a thriving industrial hub to a home for artists and entrepreneurs, Long Island City has led many lives over the years,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. “Our ‘OneLIC Plan’ will help Long Island City write the next great chapter in its history, making sure families can find an affordable place, businesses can find a good place to grow, and everyone can access and enjoy the waterfront throughout the neighborhood.”
Won said other community priorities include adding new schools to accommodate additional residents, new sewers and other infrastructure improvements.
Some community residents are urging the councilmember to push for more benefits for local residents.
Memo Salazar, the board co-chair of the Western Queens Community Land Trust, a group that advocates for economic and environmental justice, expressed disappointment in the plan, arguing that “the overall effect will be more market-rate housing most of us can't afford, and a continued displacement of the marginalized communities that have made Queens the great borough that it is.”
“So it's not an encouraging future,” Salazar said. “We can only urge our councilperson to embrace the research that has proven this and demand a more equitable plan for the community.”
All but one of the planning commissioners voted in favor of the plan. The dissenter was Juan Camilo Osorio, who also serves as an associate professor in the architecture department at Pratt Institute.
Osorio cited the final environmental impact statement, which found that the plan would result in “significant adverse impacts” on air quality, as well as public schools and libraries in the area. The impact statement also found that new construction would “extensive” shadows on existing open spaces.
He also said he “cannot support a proposal until there is a guarantee that if housing were to be developed here, in public land, it would be 100% affordable.”
In an interview, Garodnick said the plan was needed to address a 1.4% vacancy rate in the city’s rental housing market.
“It's even lower in Queens. People are struggling,” Garodnick said. “We need to add more housing at all possible levels. This helps to alleviate some of that pressure by allowing for a significant amount of new housing in a neighborhood that can accommodate it.”
Tagged
Race And Justice Unit
economy
housing
long island city
queens
Arun Venugopal
Arun Venugopal is a senior reporter for the WNYC and Gothamist Race & Justice Unit who focuses on issues of race and bias in our region. His reporting also tackles the topics of immigration, faith, and inequality. Arun serves as the regular fill-in host of the station's "U.S. of Anxiety" program. Arun was the creator and host of Micropolis, a series about race and identity. He is a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He has appeared on PBS Newshour, On the Media and Studio 360, and has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Salon. He also frequently serves as an emcee and moderator of panel discussions on race, religion, and identity issues and has been a guest host of NPR's "Fresh Air." He lives with his family in Queens.
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