New York State finally has a plan to turn the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center into thousands of units of housing. It will also have full power to approve the plan — angering neighbors who feel they’ll be sidestepped on a project that could transform the low-density neighborhood in eastern Queens with “tall monstrosities” up to eight stories high.
Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled details this week of her plans to redevelop 58 acres of the state-owned Creedmoor site, a sprawling project that will likely span into the next decade.
The blueprint, developed in large part by the state-controlled authority Empire State Development (ESD), would create a new residential community that includes 2,873 units of new housing and 14 acres of amenities, including a daycare center, neighborhood retail, open space, and set-aside locations for a potential school and recreational center.
For decades, the century-old, 125-acre mental health care campus has been largely underutilized except to inpatients at a Creedmoor Psychiatric Center tower, outpatients in a handful of supportive housing complexes and newly arrived migrants in a congregate tent shelter.
“This would represent the area’s single largest new investment in housing since Glen Oaks Village in the 1950s and its largest single expansion in homeownership opportunities since the construction of North Shore Towers in the 1970s,” the master plan reads.
Among the thousands of new housing units proposed, 1,633 will be co-ops, triplexes and two-family homes the state hopes to set aside for future homeowners. The remaining 1,240 proposed units are either intended as income-restricted rentals geared toward seniors or included in the city’s affordable housing lottery, or supportive rentals for tenants with mental illness. Veterans will also be given preference in about 13 percent of the affordable lottery apartments and 25 percent of the supportive housing rentals.
But the state has yet to determine the units’ level of affordability in relation to the area’s median income, said ESD project manager Doug McPherson in a community webinar Wednesday night — except for 200 homeowner units that will be developed first.
Those units will target households earning 80 to 100 percent of the area median income — or $90,400 to $113,000 a year for a two person home, which is, according to the report, “approximately the starting salary for a Creedmoor Psychiatric Center registered nurse, raising a single child on their own.”
The announcement follows ESD’s months-long campaign to engage local residents and civic associations — who came forward with a vision for low-density development and objections to developing buildings taller than four stories on the site. Multiple buildings under the state’s current plan announced Wednesday, however, will be six to eight stories tall.
“I know height will be something that is an issue,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards during Wednesday’s webinar, who emphasized the dire need for affordable housing and more robust infrastructure in the area. “But once again, I will say we are trying to solve a myriad of issues and we have to make the financing work.”
The project will be developed in phases once the state completes an environmental review that is slated to begin early next year with the drafting of a “General Project Plan” proposal.
That plan, McPherson said, would allow the state to pursue land use changes on the state-owned property without the city’s multi-layer land use review process, known as ULURP, which involves advisory input from the local community board and the borough president. ULURP also gives up-down voting power to the City Council and mayor to nix or approve the project.
For Creedmoor, only the state will have that power.
“I am concerned without the ULURP process,” said Queens Community Board 13 chair Bryan Block, who represents the area including the Creedmoor site. “Since that’s been taken away from us, and taken away from the community, we have a problem with that.”
The proposed building height and development density is “just not acceptable for the community,” Block told THE CITY. The community board’s land use committee, he added, would have been able to put in conditions for advisory approval for the project — though not without the ULURP process.
But Emily Mijatovic, an ESD spokesperson, told THE CITY that the local councilmember will be consulted on the plan, and that it would go before the Public Authorities Control Board — a state watchdog for public financing and borrowings for large development projects that lawmakers have leveraged to derail unfavorable plans in the past, including the controversial Amazon HQ2 proposal for western Queens.
Councilmember Linda Lee (D – District 23) declined to comment on the master plan, as her spokesperson Daniel Sparrow said the office is “still awaiting further information.”
Meanwhile, ESD will also be forming a body called the Creedmoor Community Advisory Committee to solicit input and guidance. The committee will be composed of local elected officials and their nominees, as well as ESD appointees and community board members, McPherson said.
But “I don’t know if the advisory board will have the same teeth as the ULURP process,” said Block. “That’s my concern.”
No ‘Tall Monstrosities’
Block’s parents had moved to the Cambria Heights neighborhood near Creedmoor from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn in the late 1960s for a backyard and a standalone house without a neighbor or building overhead.
“And that’s what we found here,” said Block, who said ESD’s proposal would threaten the low-density character that drew many families to the area in the first place. “You don’t want tall monstrosities for your children to grow up around. This is why our parents moved out here and they struggled. I mean, that’s the story you’ll get from everyone out here.”
One guiding principle for the state plan, said McPherson, is to keep denser buildings away from the areas adjacent to the site as much as possible. Most six- to eight-story buildings in the plan currently are clustered toward the site’s interior — with triplexes, two-story semi-detached houses, and three- to four-story co-ops lining up around the site’s perimeter, which borders many of the neighborhood’s existing one- or two-family homes.
But Corey Bearak, acting president of the North Bellerose Civic Association and a member of Community Board 13’s land use committee, argued that it would nonetheless be a “drastic” change to the neighborhood. And, he added, it’s a change that’ll push away New Yorkers seeking a suburban lifestyle to Long Island, Westchester, or even Rockland County.
“Do we really want to lose those people?” said Bearak. “It’s not the first time that the government came in and said, ‘We have this beautiful puzzle, and we’re going to try to squeeze it into this box.’ But maybe this box doesn’t fit this puzzle.”
Mijatovic, the ESD spokesperson, said the state plan “reflects needs that ESD has heard from community members and the vast majority of requests from local civic groups” and added that “there will be continued opportunities for input from the public.”
But some who have been advocating for homeownership on the site saw the plan as a welcome commitment toward more affordable housing from the state — and a promising solution for Black and other non-white New Yorkers now leaving the city because they cannot find affordable places to live.
Among those advocates is Rev. Patrick O’Connor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, co-chair at Queens Power, a member organization of the community organizing coalition Metro-IAF that has built almost 5,000 affordable homes in places including East New York, Spring Creek and Brownsville.
“When you own, it gives you a chance, as you pay it, to be able to create equity and wealth for yourself,” O’Connor told THE CITY, noting the racial wealth gap in the city and elsewhere.
He applauds Hochul’s effort to allot 55% of Creedmoor’s units for homeownership rather than rentals — including the 200 affordable units of mixed-income co-ops financed by the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal that will be built in the project’s first phase.
But O’Connor is also looking for commitment from the state to make sure that the rest of the remaining 1,400 homeowner units will, too, be affordable, since the state has not yet announced affordability levels beyond the first 200 homes.
“Part of the Creedmoor story is that some of the neighbors have been antagonistic to development of that size, yet they benefited from the GI bill provision and from federal policy which allowed their developments to be created,” O’Connor told THE CITY. (The GI bill excluded Black veterans, and Glen Oaks Village, a 3,000-apartment complex sprawling 110 acres near Creedmoor, was built as affordable rentals for World War II veterans.)
He continued: “Creedmoor is just another example of what good government policy can do — and it should be done for all New Yorkers, not just a particular racial group.”