Amazon HQ Will Scuttle Plans For 1,500 Affordable Homes: Report

LONG ISLAND CITY, NY — Plans to build 1,500 affordable homes in Long Island City will be spoiled thanks to Amazon's massive new headquarters coming to the neighborhood, according to a new report.

Two companies, Plaxall and TF Cornerstone, were prepared to develop nearly 6,000 housing units — 1,500 of which would have been set aside as affordable — on two sites that Amazon will now use for its sprawling campus, Politico New York reported Thursday.

Housing could still be built on a roughly two-acre piece of the 14.7-acre Plaxall site, but the firm hasn't decided how it wants to use the land, the story says. An Amazon spokesman told Politico its project will not include housing.

The revelation adds to concerns about how Amazon's new headquarters, which is expected to bring 25,000 to 40,000 high-paying jobs, will impact an exploding neighborhood and a city already struggling with housing affordability.

"The fact that massive public subsidies are helping eliminate affordable housing units is just the latest reason this bad deal needs to be torn up and thrown away," state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D), a critic of the project who represents Long Island City, told Politico.

Long Island City has already seen a recent development boom, with 3,000 units completed in the first half of this year and 3,300 more expected to hit the market by 2020, according to the data analysis website Localize.city.

The neighborhood's median home sale prices have also spiked 35 percent in the last five years, peaking at $435,000 in 2017, according to an analysis by the real estate website PropertyShark, a real estate website.

Amazon's move to New York City will be helped by nearly $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. The project is expected to generate more than $27 billion in revenue for the state and city, officials say.

Mayor Bill de Blasio argued the project will have a positive impact on the city's economy. With 400,000 people in public housing, 2 million in rent-regulated homes and an affordable housing plan that will touch 700,000, New York is better prepared than "places that have not done a good job of creating affordable housing" such as San Francisco and Amazon's native Seattle, he said.

The Amazon project will also help pay to support affordable housing in the city, he said.

"A lot of things we do to protect small businesses and small communities cost money, we have to have a tax base that provides for that," the Democratic mayor said on WNYC's "The Brian Lehrer Show."

(Lead image: A former dock is seen in Long Island City on Nov. 13, 2018. Photo by Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)