South Ozone Park, Queens, New York City Of Yes

It’s a miracle on 126th St.  Looks like Santa Claus came to Queens early and visited The Habitat For Humanity Horror affordable housing grave and dropped a house on this corner after over a year and a half of utter negligence and indifference by the Mayors Office and district elected officials who appeared here celebrating themselves when this “Your Home NYC” program and Mayor Adams “Get Stuff Done” sloganeering campaign started.

Or maybe it was from my intrepid reporting that compelled the Mayors Office and it’s (Luxury Public) Housing, Preservation and (Over)Development Department into quickly expediting the development of this new house on this lot that was negligibly forgotten and abandoned by the city and let it turn into a ungodly apocalyptic dump on a residential street corner. To signify what a disgraceful embarrassment this is, this housing went up a month after I posted this on here and “X” and it came at the beginning of Mayor Adams machete austerity budget cuts in every municipality (except DOT but that’s another fucked up story).

It also got built right when Rosalyn Carter died, who co-founded Habitat for Humanity with her husband former President Jimmy Carter, so maybe they got a couple of phone calls to get this stuff done to paraphrase New York City’s troubled current mayor. Here’s the sign where the Habitat for Humanity logo once was, the brand got peeled off after being hung up for hundreds of days in the elements.

Lets look at the layout and “bones” of this affordable home.

It’s covered in some kind of housing wrapping, maybe when it’s done it will be more seasonal and have tannenbaum or jingle bell wrapping paper covering it. It’s not going to have a porch that’s for sure.

The door doesn’t leave much confidence for security, it looks like a door for a patio.  Hopefully it will be replaced with something solid and oakey.

 

 

Here’s the second floor. Looks like two rooms with two bathrooms. It also looks like this house was made with shipping containers, which would explain the swiftness of how it got developed.

Let’s go to the backyard. It’s actually very roomy for birthday parties for your 1.5 child and BBQ and kegger parties with friends, acquaintances and crashers. But judging by those leftover housing scraps it looks like a garage is going to be built or possibly a shed to rent out when the “City Of Yes” decrees it an “accessory dwelling unit” for other poorer rent insecure humans to habitat them.

As for inspections, it appears to have no violations for now, but it still has the demolition sign from 2022 from the old run down house and hilariously has a NYC Buildings Department certificate still up that was signed by former DOB commissioner and indicted pay to play skell Eric Ulrich.

 

Despite the stain of Ulrich’s presence on this development, at least the city finally cleaned up the grass and rain gardens surrounding the future home where it was inundated with the pestilence of junk, trash and two wrecked vehicles, one of them half covered in ivy.

On the subject of housing equity, will this home be affordable? Looks that way from this list of other Habitat For Humanity houses that were developed (or promised to be developed) in other locales in Southeast Queens. Prices ranging from 387 to 537 grand. This one here is just under $400,000, although like the housing connect rental lottery, the qualifying income levels are higher than what the average lower income worker make at 80% and over 20% the average median income level.  And why doesn’t people who make exactly the AMI don’t qualify? It looks like this is just the Century 21 version of the city’s illusory housing equity program. . Even though lower AMI people still have a chance to purchase it, the city is not going to resist juking the lottery to get a buyer willing to pay more.

So where did the money come from to build this two story home since this is a “public private” partnership program? Is this a taste of Mayor Adams City Of Yes doctrine to build housing everywhere and up to the sky without any regulations to mitigate the city’s infinite homeless and affordability twin crises? Does it matter as long as a working class couple finally gets an opportunity to own and invest in a house to raise a family in?

It shouldn’t matter especially to our feckless elected leaders, because when this has it’s first open house sale Mayor Adams and his kakistocracy team, Council Speaker Adams and Queens Borough Redundancy will have another big media photo op event and gaslight how they got stuff done and built for community and equity. But what should really matter and what working poor and middle class New Yorkers who are struggling to live in this city they call home should never forget is that this city and the developers they partnered with to mitigate the housing and homeless crises, even an internationally known charity, doesn’t have the will or intention to build housing for them all unless they are pressured and shamed into doing it after they have been exposed for the establishment liars they are and what a sham their farcical housing equity policies really are.