The linchpin of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious affordable-housing plan – a proposed city-owned complex on the Queens waterfront – leaves out the poor and provides too little for middle-class New Yorkers, a city councilman charged yesterday.
“The Queens waterfront gives us a chance for a 21st-century Stuy Town, and we only get one shot at this,” said Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Queens), referring to the massive Manhattan housing complex built in the late 1940s.
The City Economic Development Corp. wants to build some 5,000 apartments on 30 acres in Long Island City. Sixty percent of the units would be reserved for the “middle class” – defined as tenants with incomes between $60,000 and $160,000.
The remaining 40 percent would rent at market rates, which are expected to be much higher.
But Gioia wants more units set aside for the middle class and 20 percent for the poor. The current plan includes no apartments for the poor.
“A cop married to a schoolteacher ought to be able to live in Queens,” he said at a rally at the project’s site.