SUNNYSIDE RESIDENTS ORGANIZE AGAINST VISHAAN CHAKRABARTI’S MONSTROUS VISION by Lynn Ellsworth

Sunnyside is a neighborhood of Queens, adjacent to the sprawling railroad tracks called ‘Sunnyside Yards’.  Various entities, from the Big Real Estate Lobby to the the Regional Plan Association to Alicia Glen’s Economic Development Corporation to various Mayors (especially the current one) have long fantasized about spending up to $100 billion to deck over the tracks and build a new city on that deck, kinda like they did at Hudson Yards.  At over 180 acres, such a deck at Sunnyside would be almost 7 times larger than Hudson Yards and have a huge wall facing the rest of the neighborhood.  They would build around 30 new skyscrapers and 24,000 apartments, mostly luxury market rate units.You can imagine the real estate fantasies going on here. The skyscaper industrial complex has long been salivating over this idea. The masterplanning contract for this site has been given to who else but Vishan Chakrabarti, an ideologue for excessive Hong-Kong like hyper-density and overdevelopment (who also commutes by car to a beach house in Bellport, LI) and a former Bloomberg planning officials, whose architectural firms always seem to get the big contracts from the city.  Chakrabarti adores real estate developers, and once declaimed to a crowd of them “You are heroes, heroes, heroes!”

Stay tuned as neighbors organize for a better vision that Chakrabarti and his kind would be incapable of even imagining.  Follow the opposition here. Read Justin Davidson’s chilling mention of it here in New York Magazine. If this kind of horrible vision of a future city repulses you, and if you can imagine better ways to build the city, click here to take the Voter Pledge not to vote for politicians who take real estate money.  (Images from the Sunnyside Yard feasibility study)