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“We will need a quick response from the city,” Walsh warned in the e-mail, “before we hold off on a new round of demonstrations.”
And just like that, zoning issues that have been cooking on a high simmer for months at civic groups and community boards threatened to boil over into a political fight just in time for a local election year.
Spoiling For A Fight
Walsh’s organization, the Queens Civic Congress, is an apolitical affiliation of more than 100 neighborhood civic groups and homeowner associations across the borough. The diverse constituents of the Queens Civic Congress have mobilized effectively in the past, even on this same issue of zoning reform, and have helped extract hard-fought concessions from city bureaucracies and politicians.
Last summer, for example, hundreds of civic activists organized by the group took part in a large rally on the steps of Queens Borough Hall demanding an immediate commitment to action from the Bloomberg administration. The response from the mayor was swift: just weeks after the rally, Bloomberg made a speech on those same steps outside Borough Hall to affirm his strong support for residential rezoning across Queens.
“The longer we go without zoning review,” Bloomberg said at the time, “the harder it is to stop a process of neighborhood character change that nobody wants.”
At that speech, Bloomberg was flanked by City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden and Councilman Tony Avella (D-Bayside), the political patron of Queens rezoning. It was a strong signal that something would be done, that two forces often opposed would converge and cooperate.
But Walsh is concerned that too little progress has been made since then and said he fears that the momentum behind the civic groups may dissipate in a different climate. “This is election year,” he said this week, “and we want to make sure the mayor really responds and doesn’t just claim success and walk away.”
As Bloomberg prepares to face a rowdy camp of Democrats in his bid for re-election this November, behind approval ratings in public polls that are less than intimidating, politically active homeowners in Queens seem like a key constituency for the Republican mayor. They are the same partners targeted by the $400 property tax rebate, which Bloomberg has promised to deliver once again this year despite a projected budget deficit.
“This is the only time an administration is vulnerable and responds to the public,” Walsh said. “This R2A would never have been done if it wasn’t an election year. I believe that.”
R2A: The Inside Story
There is some evidence that the heavy hand of political calculation has already played a defining role in the outcome of the rezoning effort thus far. Those who followed the development of the new R2A zoning designation, created to close zoning loopholes blamed for McMansions, would be hard-pressed rule it out completely.
In the aftermath of Bloomberg’s speech on the Borough Hall steps last summer, an array of active zoning projects in Queens moved into high gear. For the most part, however, these projects affected small neighborhoods. The zoning map for the 350-block Bayside area, where skyrocketing property values collide with the trend of oversized residential construction, loomed as the proving ground for the new zoning regime in Queens.
The solution, crafted by City Planning in consultation with local activists, was the loophole-closing R2A.
But earlier drafts of R2A and repeated presentations in Bayside by Queens City Planning Director John Young drew scorn from local rezoning advocates, who worked for weeks to expose its shortcomings after details about R2A leaked out in mid-September.
Despite these early stirrings of opposition, Avella and Young staged a press conference Nov. 2 to certify Bayside’s new zoning map and officially unveil the R2A proposal. Not a single Bayside homeowner turned out for the event.
The six weeks that followed included formal protests from CB11 Chair Jerry Iannece, State Sen. Frank Padavan (R-Bellerose) and many of the local activists who first called for rezoning. As zoning activist Brixton Doyle recalled, “Politically speaking, Avella was in for an unrecoverable shock to the system if [R2A] didn’t change.”
By Dec. 20, John Young introduced a dramatically different version of R2A to local residents—just two weeks ahead of a CB11 vote.
Will Pressure Work?
For his part, Avella said he believes that R2A would have been revised in the due course of the lengthy public review process mandated by rezoning. Local pressure, he says, only sped up the changes.
“I think the corrections would have been made in anyway,” Avella said this week. “It is like a gray area. What’s political as opposed to just doing the right thing?”
Will stepped-up pressure from a broad coalition like the Queens Civic Congress move the Bloomberg administration to push harder for rapid rezoning solutions across the borough? Avella, a veteran of the still unfinished Bayside process, expressed his doubts.
“I do not like this sort of ‘Oh, we’ve got to force them to do something’ attitude,” he said. “This administration is doing more than the last two combined to change zoning and deal with these problems.”
But for Walsh, the need is too urgent to wait any longer. He wants to see an effort to impose the same reforms contained in R2A, which closes loopholes abused in the existing R2 zoning, across all the other major residential zoning categories.
Other residential zones “have the same exact problem the R2s have,” Walsh said. “So we’re saying look, stop doing this piecemeal. Convert all the R2s to R2A quickly and do something to fix the other residential zones from the same abuses.”
“We’re calling upon the mayor to respond, and we’re going to give him a chance to do so,” Walsh added. “I’d like to see something in the next 30 days from his administration.”
100 civic groups are waiting. |
