Community Board Meeting Devolves Into Philosophical Crisis as 2016 Arrivals Organize Against 2022 Arrivals
The Authenticity Defense: When the Newcomers Organize Against Newer Newcomers
A community group in Astoria, Queens called Preserve Astoria Now has launched a petition opposing the conversion of a two-story commercial building on 31st Street into a seven-story mixed-income residential development, citing concerns about neighborhood character, increased density, and ‘the kind of change that erases what makes Astoria Astoria.’ The petition has collected over nine hundred signatures from residents who moved to Astoria between 2011 and 2019 and who describe the neighborhood as authentic, diverse, and community-rooted in language that long-term Greek, Middle Eastern, and South Asian residents of the neighborhood — many of whom did not sign the petition and some of whom are selling their properties at the elevated prices that the 2011-2019 arrivals helped create — describe as ‘interesting, coming from them.’
‘Astoria is special,’ said Preserve Astoria Now founder Jake Morrison, thirty-six, who moved to the neighborhood from Park Slope in 2016. ‘There’s a realness here that you don’t find in other parts of Queens. Real community. Real culture. Real diversity. That’s what we’re trying to protect.’ A reporter noted that Morrison’s monthly rent of two thousand eight hundred dollars for a one-bedroom represents an increase of approximately ninety percent from what the previous tenant paid in 2014. Morrison said this was a complicated issue.
The Community Board Meeting
The Community Board 1 meeting at which the development was discussed lasted three hours and produced seventeen public comments of which six were in favor of the development, eight were opposed, and three devolved into discussions about the nature of authenticity and who has the standing to define it that the board chair described as ‘philosophically interesting and procedurally off-topic.’ A longtime Greek-American business owner testified that he supported the development because it would bring more customers to his restaurant and that the people opposing it on authenticity grounds were ‘the same people who made the restaurant too expensive for my original customers.’
NYC community board information at NYC Community Boards. Comedy: The Onion.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK