WILLETS "ON-POINT" HOUSING
Transforming an industrial area to a residential neighborhood.
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Background

Willets Point is an industrial neighborhood near Citi Field in Queens that is currently going under redevelopment. The neighborhood was previously home to hundreds of auto shops, many of which have recently relocated from the neighborhood after being bought out to make room for the redevelopment project. The redevelopment plan called for new retail and residential areas, which includes 1,925 affordable housing units. However, the city changed plans— affordable housing will no longer be guaranteed, and instead, land developers want to build a shopping center. This is a big problem because many residents have been promised affordable housing for a long time.

And so, our team aims to bring affordable housing to Willets Point to create a better neighborhood for all.

Now let's analyze some data.

Why Willets Point?

To come up with our affordable housing plan, we analyzed several data sets.

A major strength of Willets Point is its accessibility to other neighborhoods such as Flushing and Corona, since it is surrounded by the Whitestone Expressway, Northern Boulevard, and Van Wyck Expressway. This means that it has the potential to be a commercial hub in addition to providing housing. We looked at various sets of data and created our own maps to determine what Willets Point has access to and what could be worked on. In the maps below, Willets Point is colored in blue.

Our Plan

Our plan focuses on the inner triangle of Willets Point.

How do we want to incorporate affordable housing into Willets Point? Currently, the area is under cleaning before any building can begin. When clean up is done, Willets Points needs to be rezoned from its current zoning, commercial district C4-4, to allow for more housing to be built. We want to layout Willets Point with a main residential area as well as a commercial buffer area. Click on the map to explore each part of our plan.

Commercial Area

We decided to follow the layout of many other 7 train stations and have the commercial area be closest to the subway stop. This will allow for the stores in Willets Point to be more accessible to outsiders, making the area more convenient. This side is closest to the Citi Field and Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and works as a commercial buffer area between the residential area and the busier surroundings. The area is shown in green in the map.

Residential Area

We want to rezone Willets Point to higher density zoning so that affordable housing can be more easily built. We would like to implement the 80/20 government program and have 40% of the future housing units designated for affordable housing. The inner corner of the triangle (in dark blue) will be R7D zoning, which will have 10-story apartments. The northeastern part of Willets Point (in light blue) will be R6 medium density housing, with 6-7- story apartments. We chose these zonings because they had the cheaper rents in Flushing.

Walkways and Schools

Along Northern Blvd and Roosevelt Avenue across Flushing Creek, we hope to build pedestrian walkways to help better connect Willets Point with Downtown Flushing (the black lines on the map). We also want to build a new elementary school (shown by the marker), so that younger children who cannot commute far alone can have access to education close to home.

Attributions

A list of resources we used for our project.

Data and Research

311 Complaints
List of Libraries
List of Public Schools
Location Affordability Index v 2.0
80/20 Housing Program
Supermarkets from Yelp
Rent Prices from Zillow

Coding Resources

Start Bootstrap
Leaflet.Sleep.js
Census Tracts GEOjson
Python3 (folium, pygeocoder, scipy)

Willets "On-Point" Housing Project was made for MHC Seminar 4 of Spring 2017

Thank you to our wonderful instructor Professor Katherine St. John at Lehman College

WILLETS "ON-POINT" HOUSING PROJECT by Ahalya Sanjiv, Jane Chen, Jamie Fung, Vincent Yu & James Wong
View Project on GitHub