Post-Amazon HQ2 Fallout, This Building Is LIC's Next Battleground

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — On the manmade inlet known as Anable Basin, a sleepy, six-story building on Vernon Boulevard has become an unlikely battleground amid the fallout from last year's collapsed Amazon HQ2 deal.

The building, home to 1,200 administrative employees for the city’s Department of Education, sits on public land promised to Amazon when it announced plans in 2018 to build a sprawling campus on the inlet. New York officials called the project the biggest economic development initiative in city and state history.

Then, faced with aggressive protests, Amazon reneged on the deal.

The breakup exactly a year ago created a power vacuum on this inlet, and now this building at 44-36 Vernon is the nucleus of a quietly simmering fight over an immensely valuable plot of land with no certain future.

As the developers who own 44-36 Vernon’s neighbors salivate over the possibilities for the area, a group of locals is organizing an unprecedented campaign to keep the public plots of Queens in the hands of the people, a concept that goes by the technical term “community land trust,” or CLT for short.

Their initiative, the Western Queens Community Land Trust, is home to aspirations that extend far beyond Long Island City, but 44-36 Vernon will be their first big test.

“This is what brought us all together,” said Western Queens Community Land Trust co-founder Memo Salazar.

If the group can eke out a win here, their logic goes, then what can’t they do?

It’s a Tuesday night in the basement cafeteria of Queensbridge Houses’ Jacob Riis Settlement, and a standing-room-only crowd throws around the acronym CLT like a group of impassioned urban planning students in a university classroom.

There are, in fact, such students here — they came from Rutgers University, several rivers over — but they’re outnumbered by the 80-some progressive activists drawn to this makeshift meeting place by the resolve to keep ahold of what’s already theirs: the plot of public land just a stone’s throw away.

The Western Queens Community Land Trust is making its first formal pitch: an organization governed equally by neighbors, stakeholders and advisors that keeps the community, rather than a for-profit developer, in charge of parcels of public land. Any use of the land would have to adhere to the CLT’s eight founding principles, which include giving back to the community and empowering low-income residents and other marginalized groups.

Their mission is particularly pressing for longtime residents as luxury residential complexes creep further into Long Island City, which has become one of the city's fastest-growing neighborhoods since a 2001 rezoning paved the way for a spate of high-rise developments. Now, Long Island City is close to becoming Queens' first million-dollar neighborhood.

For the Western Queens Community Land Trust’s first major undertaking, 44-36 Vernon, Salazar and his fellow co-founders envision a community hub with a new public school, affordable manufacturing spaces, art and music studios, a shared commissary kitchen for food vendors, a food co-op and a rooftop farm.

“These are real jobs for real people — people that live here,” Salazar said during the Jan. 21 meeting, an apparent snipe at the 25,000 jobs Amazon promised; critics claimed the high-paying tech jobs at the so-called HQ2 were unlikely to go to locals and argued that other positions weren’t exactly desirable, citing the company’s history of mistreating low-wage workers.

Under the CLT model, Salazar said, Queens’ own Hellgate Farms could grow 56,000 pounds of vegetables each year on the building’s rooftop, then bring the produce downstairs to the building’s food co-op to sell for affordable prices: “That’s the kind of synergy we’re trying to create.”

The group partnered with a class of Rutgers urban planning students to work on the nuts and bolts of bringing its 44-36 Vernon vision to life. The students, working under the guidance of urban planning professor James DeFilippis, calculated the project would cost $61.9 million, assuming the CLT acquires the building for free.

They also put together a detailed model to pay for it — an acronym-laden chart of loans, debt and equity that accounts for every penny of the cost to hire design and engineering professionals and renovate the building, with a pool of money set aside as a contingency reserve.

The students' attention to detail is as great as their professor’s enthusiasm for the project: DeFilippis grew up in an immigrant family in Flushing, so the battle to keep Queens affordable and vibrant is one that he said feels personal.

“This project is probably closest to me than anything else I’ve done in my entire life,” DeFilippis said.

Today's community land trust model dates back to the 1960s, when the activists Bob Swann and Slater King, a cousin of Martin Luther King, Jr., started developing a land-ownership structure that could ease the residential and economic plight of African Americans living in the rural South, the community land trust expert John Emmeus Davis wrote in a 2010 paper.

Under the name New Communities, Swann and King secured several thousand acres of land in a rural area of Leesburg, Georgia, but money issues caused the project to fall apart by the late 1980s.

By that time, the first urban community land trust had emerged in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded by the West End Alliance of Churches and Ministries in the city's impoverished and predominantly black West End neighborhood, according to Emmeus Davis.

The concept is only now gaining momentum in New York City, where a lone community land trust, the Cooper Square Committee on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has long served as the movement’s go-to role model.

At the end of 2017, the New York City Council paved the way for a growing CLT movement by approving legislation to codify community land trusts in city law and allow the city to form regulatory agreements with the groups, according to City Limits.

In his State of the City speech on Feb. 6, Mayor Bill de Blasio called community land trusts “one of the most promising ideas” to keep housing affordable and pledged to make it an official part of his administration’s housing policy.

“We're going to start with 3,000 New York families who will get affordable housing through community land trusts and we can expand that to tens of thousands of other families in the coming years,” he said.

Leading today’s local community land trust movement is a Bronx-based group known as the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, which is now advising the Western Queens Community Land Trust on the process.

Similar projects are also underway in Jackson Heights, East Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights, and a group called the Interboro CLT aims to take the model citywide.

The Western Queens Community Land Trust aims to build on the groundwork set by a progressive activist group called the LIC Coalition, which started in 2016 and has spent years lobbying to turn 44-36 Vernon into a community hub.

"I hope that the CLT is going to unite all of us," Sabina Omerhodzic, a member of the LIC Coalition, said during the Jan. 21 meeting. "If we do this right, anybody can do this right."

First, the Western Queens Community Land Trust will have to face off against a number of powerful developers who have their desired site cornered — literally.

The summer after Amazon backed out, four developers who own waterfront property in the area — TF Cornerstone, Simon Baron Development, L&L MAG and Plaxall — assembled a coalition called “YourLIC.”

The New York City Council had charged them to collaborate on an “inclusive, equitable plan,” in the developers' words, for the 28 acres of land on and around Anable Basin that Amazon would have occupied.

Included in those 28 acres are two plots of city-owned land surrounding 44-36 Vernon, currently home to a Department of Education parking lot and a Department of Transportation facility, and the 44-36 Vernon building itself.

The coalition has so far hosted three community workshops on the planning process, drawing about 100 attendees each time and "strong" turnout from nearby NYCHA complexes, according to a YourLIC spokesperson. (Bishop Mitchell Taylor, an influential figure in the Queensbridge Houses community, is an advisor to the coalition. Taylor did not respond to Patch's request for comment.)

That public engagement process, which includes an online portal to submit ideas and two upcoming workshops, is meant to inform the eventual development plan for the area, according to the developers.

"Through our public engagement process, Long Island City residents have talked about the need for sustainable waterfront open space, opportunities for economic empowerment, schools, and more," YourLIC spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet told Patch. "We are committed to ensuring this land is used for public good and responds to the diverse priorities voiced by the community."

But the developer-led setup worries the Western Queens Community Land Trust’s members. Salazar, who refers to the YourLIC coalition as “not-really-your LIC," said the workshops don't include much in the way of discussion.

The group's greatest concern is that, by controlling the process, the developers will succeed in getting the city’s Economic Development Corporation, a powerful middleman that negotiates development deals between the city and private entities, to hand over the 44-36 Vernon building.

"I'm sure anybody with money would love to get their hands on it," Salazar said.

New York City has a history of these types of deals, according to the advocacy group 596 Acres, which mapped the city’s empty public lots and found that, from 2014 to 2018, city officials had sold more than 200 city-owned lots to developers for just one dollar.

“Developers are moving really quickly to grab this land,” Jenny Dubnau, a member of the activist collective Artist Studio Affordability Project, said during the CLT’s Jan. 21 meeting.

One of the coalition's four developers, TF Cornerstone, seems to already have a hold on the two pieces of city-owned land next to 44-36 Vernon.

Back in 2017, before talk of Amazon’s HQ2 upended plans for Anable Basin, the Economic Development Corp. awarded a long-term lease for those plots, including the abandoned pier once home to the restaurant Water’s Edge, to TF Cornerstone for an undisclosed sum.

TF Cornerstone’s plans called for a 1.5-million-square-foot mixed-use development with 1,000 apartments, including 250 affordable units; a 600-seat school and 25,000 square feet of art space.

Under that deal, the city would still own the land, according to spokespeople for the Economic Development Corp. and the YourLIC coalition, but the exact terms of the lease are a mystery.

The Economic Development Corp. spokesperson declined to comment on the lease amount and would only say that the agency has "continued to have discussions" with TF Cornerstone about the parcels.

“We agree that the land awarded to TF Cornerstone by the City must be used for public good and serve the priorities voiced by the community, such as resiliency, public open space, job-generating uses and more,” Fauconnet, the YourLIC spokesperson, said.

That leaves 44-36 Vernon.

None of the four developers in the YourLIC coalition has control over the fate of the building. That will fall to the Economic Development Corp., which has no set plans for the building, according to the agency’s spokesperson.

If the building changes hands, the spokesperson noted, it will displace more than a thousand employees who work for the Department of Education’s school facilities, nutrition services and pupil transportation divisions.

But the Department of Education had already planned to evict and relocate those workers when Amazon was set to take over the space: “We’ve notified staff and will work closely with staff throughout the transition process,” Department of Education spokesperson Will Mantell told the New York Daily News in 2018.

City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, whose backing is critical to the success of land-use proposals in Long Island City, told Patch he supports the community land trust.

"I support the use of a community land trust to develop affordable uses for Western Queens both generally and specifically at the Department of Education building on Vernon Boulevard," Van Bramer said in a statement. "Public land should be for public use and benefit."

Other elected officials have privately signaled support for the project, according to the Western Queens Community Land Trust's Salazar, but that won't stop his cynicism.

"You couldn't choose a more bound-to-lose project," he told Patch. "We have a big mountain ahead of us."