South Ozone Park, Queens, New York.

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams enthusiastically announced plans for the city to build 100,000 affordable apartments in the next 5 years in his “City Of Yes” program. The City Of Yes program/doctrine will make it easier for the NYC housing and building departments to expedite building permits faster with little regulation and even community input under the rubric for the need to stem the housing affordability and homeless crises in the five boroughs. While noble and necessary, it still needs to be ratified into law by City Council.

But it was only a year and a half ago when Mayor Adams and his “team” went to Southeast Queens to announce an affordable housing program initiative to give opportunities for lower income earning residents to own their own houses. Partnering with Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity, the city’s Housing and Preservation Department took over 16 houses that were neglected and then abandoned by the notorious NYCHA  and had them demolished so they can build new environmentally sound “green” houses in their place. During the presentation which also announced new infrastructure to mitigate constant flash flooding from extreme storms, early SE Queens native Mayor Eric Adams promised that these homes will revive the neighborhoods that were neglected by past administrations.

One of those homes is this corner on 126th and 116th avenue.

Promises made, promises slept.

Promises made, promises slept.

This is what this property looked like the day after Mayor Eric Adams made his grand announcement for the housing program:

 

What once stood a dilapidated home enabled by landlord and city neglect, now lies a hollow pit of despair surrounded by weeds and tall grass. The plywood fence encircling this property to keep out squatters has become warped after standing in the elements for 6 seasons.

This municipal government funded habitat of depravity’s pestilence even spread to the curbside garden.  A tire, a vehicle boot, a cabinet and pile of large filled trash bags all forgotten by our sanitation service as it lays on the dirty grass. Also forgotten were a couple of car wrecks left parked by the vacant blighted lot, one of them covered in ivy spread from the rain garden next to it.

 

Some of the NYC Department of Buildings permits are faded but still legible, but all expired. Notably the signature of the recently departed and multiply indicted commissioner Eric Ulrich, who earned his position by being an advisor to Eric Adams during his primary in 2021. Adams was so enthralled with Ulrich, he anointed him with the buildings job without doing a thorough background check on him despite past allegations of associating and gambling with gangsters and being an alcoholic. Ulrich also used his brief time as buildings commish to not only put his name on failed projects like this, but ironically managed to get affordable housing of his own by getting a rent discount from a developer in his luxury apartment building in Rockaway Beach on the promise that Ulrich would machinate building violations for a supportive housing building across the street.

 

Besides the departure of hapless convicted dope Ulrich, Adams pick for housing commissioner Jessica Katz bailed out of his administration surely sensing the futility of his housing policies and promises of false equity and maybe a bit of self-conscious guilt for her own role in Bill de Blasio’s administration that produced 80% of new luxury public housing tower apartments for rich folks in his own bogus affordable housing connect program.

And this not the only one, there’s another empty lot about a mile away on 143rd St and Foch Blvd in South Jamaica with the same Your Home NYC and Residential building sign displaying the same green house. It’s not as blighted as the subject home here but it’s still validates the Adams Administration’s failure of this forgotten program.

It’s going to be very interesting to see Mayor Eric Adams build a City Of Yes when he let his very first affordable housing program, complete with hope, platitudes, and fanfare swagger turn into this shit. What’s really stupid is the real estate pitch on the Your Home NYC poster. What it doesn’t tell you is “buy it”. Which in this ludicrously overvalued housing market, only those with millions in savings or capital investor money can get and afford it. Even in a middle class enclave in Southeast Queens.

By integrating this with infrastructure improvements, which new developments are supposed to require, it looks like the entirely of the 50 million dollar budget went to rain gardens like the unkempt ones on the corner of this walled off open grave. It’s amazing how the Adams Administration couldn’t build a decent affordable “green” house here with the help of the internationally renowned charity run by a former President of the United States. Or wouldn’t because there just might be a bit of budgetary malfeasance going on. What’s ironic is how Mayor Adams justified sending the NYPD and the Sanitation Dept to destroy homeless encampments by calling them inhumane yet did nothing to help humanity get housed. Also ironic is how the City of Yes is planned to induce development on any public space available and imaginable yet this corner lot that was earmarked and funded for housing development was left to decay. Proving city government doesn’t have the will or intent to end the infinite housing crisis.

It is really not much of a revelation at all to see why Housing Net Zero amounted to nothing but a giant hoax. It’s going to be very interesting what the “City Of Yes” will bring forth to the open grave housing pits in Queens and the other four boroughs gets ratified by the regulatory captured YIMBY cucks in City Council. It’s always been suspected that the city didn’t have the will nor the balls to actually build housing for the thousands that truly need it, this zombie property is proof. We always had a City Of Yes for hyperdevelopment for housing for rich people that don’t exist in New York City, but none for the people that have to scrape by to live in places they can barely afford.