On a sunny afternoon on 188th Street, a crowd passed around signs and gathered on a corner to deliver a single message in response to prospective plans from the owners of the surrounding Fresh Meadows Apartments to convert nearby parking lots into new high rise-rise housing.
“When they come back and offer us less apartments, what do we say?” asked David Stephan, a longtime resident of the complex who helps run one of the groups that organized the Sunday rally, the Committee for the Preservation of Fresh Meadows.
“We say no,” answered the group, having grown to some 50 to 100 people.
Back in May, the owners of Fresh Meadows Apartments started making rounds in the community to present a proposal that would add 2,000 new units to the development, including four high-rise buildings of 12, 14, 19 and 24 stories, respectively.
“They’re going to gentrify us, bring young people in and turn over our properties to the developers,” Maria DeInnocentiis, who has lived in the area for over 50 years, told the crowd at 188th and 64th Avenue. The threat of new housing in the neighborhood feels existential, DeInnocentiis said.
“We don’t want to see this change. We love the green space, we love our tenant neighbors and we want to make sure that our city stays suburban. We don’t want to gentrify, we don’t want to build up, we don’t want to look like main street,” DeInnocentiis told the Chronicle.
DeInnocentiis also sits on Community Board 8 and maintains a hard line on the idea of any new development.
“What we’re saying is no. We want it to stay the way it is. No changes at all,” she said.
The idea of maintaining the neighborhood’s character vis-à-vis the rest of the city was a popular one.
“I go to school in Manhattan every day and I see the stuff that they want to put here in Manhattan and it’s sad to see that our beautiful neighborhood is going to turn into something like Manhattan,” Anthony Felder, a high school freshman, told the group.
“I don’t want to see that; I want to see greenery, I want to see the sky when I walk outside,” he said.
Stephan, one of the organizers, said the idea of replacing parking lots with apartment buildings does not seem practical.
“We have a severe parking problem in this part of Queens, not just in Fresh Meadows,” he said.
In addition to targeting the development, the Committee for the Preservation of Fresh Meadows is also pushing voters to oppose three land use-related propositions that Mayor Adams’ Charter Revision Commission put on the ballot for Nov. 4.
Those proposals would, broadly speaking, lessen the power City Council members have to impact zoning requests.
“I want our Council member, Linda Lee, to be a hard no on any expansion,” Tammy Osherov, another member of Community Board 8, told the crowd.
A week earlier, Lee (D-Oakland Gardens) wrote on social media that “the proposal, as is, does not match the character of this neighborhood.”
In response to an email, Lee staffer Dan Sparrow added that “the developers have a responsibility to present a plan that prioritizes the Fresh Meadows community’s best interests and earns the support needed for any future project.”
A spokesperson for the building’s owners, Queens Fresh Meadows LLC, told the Chronicle in a statement that such a plan would be forthcoming.
“We greatly appreciate the thoughtful feedback we have received from the community and Council Member Lee,” the statement said. “Based on what we’ve heard so far, we have spent the past several months significantly revising our plan and look forward to presenting an updated version in the coming months.”