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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they come back and offer us less apartments, what do we say?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe say no,\u201d answered the group, having grown to some 50 to 100 people.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re going to gentrify us, bring young people in and turn over our properties to the developers,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t 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\u2019t want to gentrify, we don\u2019t want to build up, we don\u2019t want to look like main street,\u201d DeInnocentiis told the Chronicle.<\/p>\n
DeInnocentiis also sits on Community Board 8 and maintains a hard line on the idea of any new development.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re saying is no. We want it to stay the way it is. No changes at all,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The idea of maintaining the neighborhood\u2019s character vis-\u00e0-vis the rest of the city was a popular one.<\/p>\n
\u201cI go to school in Manhattan every day and I see the stuff that they want to put here in Manhattan and it\u2019s sad to see that our beautiful neighborhood is going to turn into something like Manhattan,\u201d Anthony Felder, a high school freshman, told the group.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to see that; I want to see greenery, I want to see the sky when I walk outside,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Stephan, one of the organizers, said the idea of replacing parking lots with apartment buildings does not seem practical.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a severe parking problem in this part of Queens, not just in Fresh Meadows,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 Charter Revision Commission put on the ballot for Nov. 4.<\/p>\n
Those proposals would, broadly speaking, lessen the power City Council members have to impact zoning requests.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want our Council member, Linda Lee, to be a hard no on any expansion,\u201d Tammy Osherov, another member of Community Board 8, told the crowd.<\/p>\n
A week earlier, Lee (D-Oakland Gardens) wrote on social media that \u201cthe proposal, as is, does not match the character of this neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to an email, Lee staffer Dan Sparrow added that \u201cthe developers have a responsibility to present a plan that prioritizes the Fresh Meadows community\u2019s best interests and earns the support needed for any future project.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the building\u2019s owners, Queens Fresh Meadows LLC, told the Chronicle in a statement that such a plan would be forthcoming.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe greatly appreciate the thoughtful feedback we have received from the community and Council Member Lee,\u201d the statement said. \u201cBased on what we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a sunny afternoon on 188th Street, a crowd passed around signs and gathered on a corner to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[288,10342,2907,10343,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-13650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-fresh-meadows","10":"tag-housing","11":"tag-land-use","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-queens","16":"tag-queens-headlines","17":"tag-queens-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}