Overview of Key Project Ideas:

Project has focused a lot since the last update. The deliverable has been changed to be more feasible. We attended the Flushing Rezoning Community Alliance town hall meeting and learned a lot from the event organizers. After regrouping and discussing all of the data that we have collected, our focus has shifted slightly and has also gotten a little more specific.

Updates on Current Progress:

One of our key pieces of evidence for the project is using Skyview Mall as a case study for looking at how gentrification and development has affected Flushing. As one of the city’s plans for Flushing is the development of a waterfront promenade in the space across from Skyview Mall is, we are also considering using the waterfront development in Sunset Park to try to extrapolate what we see Flushing growing into. Our goal of raising awareness and educating the community about rezoning has not changed, but it has gotten a little more specific as we want to encourage more democratic participation in the rezoning process.

An update on the project deliverable: my initial plan to develop an interactive 3D environment of the rezoning areas in Flushing ended up being a little impractical. I wanted to build the environment with Unity, which is a game engine that has all the resources I could need for building a 3D environment, however, I have never worked in depth with models and am more experienced in the scripting side. So even though the 3D idea was scrapped, I still wanted to make a deliverable that is interactive and not just a flyer or brochure for someone to stare at. With our goal in mind of educating people, I proposed making a trivia quiz around the current rezoning issues in Flushing. The best way to learn is by making mistakes, and when people are presented with questions that they realize they do not have the answers to, they learn and hopefully get more involved with what is going on in their community. I met with Aaron on Monday to talk about the plans for the deliverable and we decided that the best way for me to go about this trivia quiz would be to make an eportfolio site to host the quiz. It was such a good decision to discuss our options with Aaron as I had totally forgotten about how Macaulay students could create eportfolio sites, I had anticipated and was dreading having to start a website from scratch and deal with a database. Fortunately, the Macaulay has purchased the license for the Gravity Forms plugin which makes the trivia quiz MUCH easier to do. One of the things I would like to do at the end of the trivia quiz is a visualization of the results globally so that a player can see how the rest of the people who took the quiz fared; there is leaderboards functionality in Gravity Forms that looks very promising. Another great thing about setting up an eportfolio site is that we can add additional material to the site and really make the entire thing a strong educational tool for community centers to use.

On April 12, 2016 four members of our group attended the Flushing Rezoning Community Alliance town hall meeting. For our group members that had attended the last town hall meeting we were surprised by the significantly lower turnout compared to the last meeting. It turns out that the last meeting had such a large turnout because Peter Koo and a few other important city figures were to be present. As a result, this meeting went a bit differently, starting with announcements and then the meeting broke into three different groups to discuss plans for different aspects of the Flushing Rezoning Community Alliance. We went into the rezoning group that was discussing whether rezoning should be passed or not. We met Carol Mcloughlin and Alexandra Rosa who were both very knowledgable about the rezoning and helped to answer some questions about the rezoning in Flushing. A majority of the attendees at the meeting were actually immigrants and needed translators so we decided to just conduct informal interviews with Ms. Mcloughlin and Ms. Rosa. At this point, gentrification of Flushing is unavoidable, Flushing is a hot (moderate by developer standards) area, and as an area gets more popular, things begin to redevelop to increase the economic capability of that area. Currently, because Flushing has already been rezoned once, developers can buy land and develop it right now and not have to include any affordable housing units. In order for the new MIH changes to actually be included, rezoning needs to be passed. The rezoning would also include greenspace requirements, which would improve the environment of Flushing. A senior expressed discontent with the rezoning plans because it would allow for a greater number of units to be built in a lot, a thus cause Flushing to be even more overcrowded. Within the group, when we took a vote, the overall consensus was that the rezoning should be passed otherwise developers could just build and build, the rezoning could help hold back the developers from building thing entirely devoted to profit.

Interesting Findings:

We were actually all misunderstood about whether the rezoning had been passed or not. It turns out that the decision that was made on March 22 by the city council was actually for MIH, adding a more deeply affordable housing option to MIH and that getting the rezoning to be passed is a whole other matter.

Eportfolios and Gravity Forms!

Challenges Encountered:

As we gather more data and attend more Town Hall meetings our focus seems to keep shifting. MinKwon Center does not respond to our emails, we approached Jung Rae who works at MinKwon Center to see if we could get results from a huge survey that MinKwon recently did, hopefully after meeting us in person we will finally hear back from them.

Remaining Tasks:

Attend the press conference that the Flushing Rezoning Community Alliance will be holding, presenting different strategies that they would like to see considered in the rezoning of Flushing.

Continue gathering data and refining what exactly we want to argue. Work on white paper.

Group Dynamic:

At this point all off our group members have attended at least one town hall meeting. We have been collecting data and our discussions about what our data means has been very important, as they reflect the process that happens at the town hall. Different views on what is happening allows us refine our argument. Christine will be doing the last project update.

Pictures from the Town Hall meeting