Roxanne Earley
It would be great to have a full picture of what you mean when you say speaking with our neighbors. Current participation privileges folks who want to speak out in a comment section, take to twitter, or are on the Community Board (from last weeks presentation) and future participation via scoping and ULURP is biased towards folks who are comfortable (and able) to give testimony either in person, or written to the CB, CPC, NYCC etc. I'd really value a clear understanding of what your outreach strategy looks like, where and with whom you are gathering, and how these conversations shape outcomes etc, and I know my neighbors would too. Are there focus groups, are there committees/subcommittees? Who is representing and claiming to speak on behalf of members of the community? Participation is only meaningful if we can understand what it looks like, and if the final product is actually different as a result of it and I think it would be really helpful if that was laid out so we knew what to expect in terms of how we can engage here! Also, can you please post copies of the PAS here once filed?

Astoria has one of the most diverse food scenes in NYC.

Liz Bee
Food Halls are a terrible idea - - reminds me of a food court in a mall - NOT pleasant places to eat. Couldn't you instead have 2 sides of one of the open courts lined with real restaurants with outdoor seating the summer? Sounds much more pleasant. I don't know what restaurants are lacking in Astoria - we seem to have just about every cuisine possible.

The Children's Place on Steinway between Broadway and 31st Ave is my go-to for children's clothes.

Macartney Morris
this is a mini Hudson Yards that would transform one of the last remaining affordable parts of Astoria left. I understand why the landowners and landlords want this horrible, but no working family or tenant would want this to happen. This is disgusting and we'll fight you just like we fought Amazon.

Additionally, the station at Steinway/Broadway cannot handle 6000 new residents. Have you waited for a train on that platform during rush hour? If locals wanted to experience the Bedford MTA station every day, they would have already moved to Williamsburg to pay ridiculous rents and push out low-income New Yorkers. There is a reason we didn't.

Daniel Horn
This proposal is vastly out of scale for the neighborhood. The "vision" they outline would still work with max 6 story buildings with the same proposed uses.

I think there are multitude other ways to accomplish these things that do not include a development that would bring a complex of new high-rises to tower over our working-class neighborhood (where most buildings don't go past three or four stories, in case you hadn't already seen.) Astoria needs reasonable, REAL affordable housing, not lip service for a development that looks like our own version of Hudson Yards. The idea that 2000 new-construction, high-rise units - built by one of the city's largest developers - rented at market rate wouldn't drastically change the income demographics of our neighborhood and in turn, raise our market rate is Pollyannaish at best. (Astoria's rent already increased 33% from 2006-2018; many of us are rent-burdened enough as it is.) You say we need a hardware store, a grocery store and a barbershop? There is literally a grocery store and a hardware store on Steinway within a block of this proposal (Food Universe and Metropolitan.) The disregard for the existing businesses gives me no faith that these shiny, who-could-say-no things you are promising have any basis in reality. And the inattentive introduction of gargantuan high-rises to a low-rise neighborhood shows the level of care you have taken for regarding our community. I love the idea of revitalizing Steinway, creating jobs, real affordable housing and green space, but by way of this development? HARD NO.