If you think it cannot get any worse with the shit stained, disgusting smelling homeless crew at the Jamaica Center & Sutphin Blvd subway stations and on the E train, think again. It will get even worse with all the hotels popping up all over Jamaica near the Sutphin Blvd subway station (and other parts of Queens & Brooklyn) that eventually will be turned into homeless shelters that that the City will hand over money to the hotel owner. Only thing, that is our tax dollars being used for this latest scam by the powers to be.
Jamaica, the land of dumping shit that no one else wants.
On one hand the media and the powers to be are always talking about up and coming Jamaica and the next hot area, but that is in the world of unreality. In the world of reality, we all know that Jamaica is NOT the next hot neighborhood, nor a destination spot or anything for that matter, it is just a run down ghetto with lazy crooked elected officials and filled with plenty of bottom of the barrel folks.
So what is up with all these damn hotels in Jamaica, no one wants to stay here, I mean most of the hotels are in isolated areas, with little forms of transportation and not near anything, so who would even stay in these flea bag places……………………..but we know what is going to happen to these hotels…………….Jamaica, homeless shelter capital of Queens and other assorted shit like waste stations, crappy third world cheap apartments and tons of 99 cent stores. This is the new Queens, third world dreck.
The new hotel, at 140-17 Queens Blvd., between Hillside and Jamaica avenues, is being built on the same block where another hotel — SpringHill Suites — is also planned.
The 4-story Sleep Inn will feature 49 rooms and it’s slated to open by the end of the year, according to its owner, Raj Singh.
Singh, who also owns a Comfort Inn hotel in Ozone Park, said he chose the location because “it’s convenient for travelers.”
The hotel will be located two blocks from the Van Wyck Expressway and three blocks from the Jamaica-Van Wyck subway station. It’s also close to the AirTrain station.
The plans for that hotel, which will be six stories high and will feature 160 rooms, were approved by the Department of Buildings last month, according to city records.
Xu is also seeking to build two more hotels in downtown Jamaica — Courtyard and Fairfield Inn and Suites — on Archer Avenue, near 149th Street. The hotels would contain more than 330 hotel rooms, according to the developer.
A 24-story Hilton Garden Inn is also planned across the street from the AirTrain station.
This important city council meeting at City Hall which was cancelled January 28th due to the weather, has now been rescheduled for Friday, February 13th at 9:30am.
Talk about timing. As everyone is aware trucks driving illegally on residential streets in Jamaica, has garnered some media attention. Many of these trucks are Royal Waste Service and other waste facility companies that not only use our streets illegally, but poison our environment and pose major health risks, especially to those in close proximity to these locations. Southeast Queens and Jamaica, along with North Brooklyn and South Bronx have becoming huge dumping grounds for these toxic places. All of these communities happen to be black, brown and other people of color as well as lower economic people. Talk about how some people’s lives do no matter.
A new bill is being introduced (495) on this issue and one of the co-sponsors of the bill is our own, Councilman I. Daneek Miller, who will be at the hearing at City Hall, Friday, February 13th at 10:00am and a press conference preceding the hearing courtesy of New York Lawyers for Public Interest (NYLPI). In fact, Justin Wood, Environmental Justice Organizer from NYLP contacted me after reading some of my posts on the truck issue on 170th Street. Councilman Ruben Wills is still on the fence on this important issue.
If you can attend, please do so, you will also get an opportunity to speak at the hearing for two minutes about this issue. Also give thanks to Councilman Miller and keep him on track with this bill, since lobbyist from the waste industry will be there trying to sway elected officials.
Ask yourself why Forest Hills has none of these facilities.
Please pass this information on to others.
SUBJECT: Hearing on Intro 495 (Trash Caps: Protecting NYC Communities from Waste Overburdening
DATE: Friday, February 13th
TIME: press conference at 9:30am, hearing 10:00am
Place: City Hall, 260 Broadway, New York, NY
Royal Waste Disaster at the 170th Street/Douglas location where 3 workers were killed by toxic chemicals in 2009
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You can read more about this bill below.
TIME TO TAKE A STAND AND LET FOLKS KNOW THAT JAMAICA CAN NO LONGER BE A DUMPING GROUND FOR WHAT EVERYONE ELSE DOES NOT WANT! FIGHT BACK!
Trash Caps: Protecting New York City Communities From Waste Overburdening (Intro 495 of 2014)
New York City creates 35,000 tons of garbage every day. Nearly three quarters of this waste is trucked to waste transfer stations in a small handful of neighborhoods where it is loaded into long-haul trucks and transported to distant landfills and incinerators. This system pollutes our air, clogs our streets and highways, damages our roads, and threatens our health.
Impacts are greatest in the three communities where transfer stations are clustered – the South Bronx, North Brooklyn, and Southeast Queens. The half a million New Yorkers living in these communities suffer worse health outcomes such as high rates of asthma. Lung cancer is also linked to pollution created by trucks, and excessive truck traffic creates tremendous noise pollution – a significant quality of life issue that is linked to insomnia, stress, heart disease, and hearing damage.
The current system is fundamentally unfair – garbage is trucked to these three communities regardless of where it is generated, creating excessive diesel truck traffic throughout our city and severe concentrations of trucks in overburdened neighborhoods.
For example, businesses from as far away as downtown Manhattan and South Brooklyn have their waste
trucked to the “American Recycling”* waste transfer station in Southeast Queens, bypassing closer transfer facilities. Similarly, waste from throughout the City is trucked to transfer stations in in North Brooklyn and the South Bronx.
NYC’s landmark 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) includes measures to make waste
collection less burdensome and more equitable:
The City is constructing barge- and rail- based transfer stations for waste export, eliminating
nearly 6 million truck miles in NYC every year.
Siting these facilities in all five boroughs will help ensure that each borough handles its fair share of residential waste.
Intro 495 will realize the SWMP’s long-delayed commitment to reduce the amount of waste handled in these overburdened communities, and ensure that no other communities suffer this burden in the future. Specifically, the legislation will provide:
• Relief for Overburdened Communities by reducing the daily tonnage of waste handled at transfer stations in the South Bronx, North Brooklyn, and Southeast Queens by 18 percent.
• Protection for All NYC Communities by capping the percentage of the City’s waste that any
community can be permitted to handle at 5 percent.
• Truck Relief by tying capacity reductions to the opening of the City’s marine transfer stations, where waste will be barged out of the City, eliminating thousands of long-haul truck trips in NYC every year.
• Maximized Public Health Benefits by focusing reductions on bad-actor facilities, based upon public health criteria (the proximity of a transfer station to homes, schools and parks), the station’s environmental track record, and the station’s worker safety track record.
Intro 495 will provide significant, but modest relief for overburdened communities. After reductions, these communities will still handle the bulk of NYC’s waste.
For more information contact:
Gavin Kearney (gkearney@nylpi.org), Justin Wood (jwood@nylpi.org) or Erin George (egeorge@nylpi.org).
*Despite its name, “American Recycling,” like most NYC transfer stations, does very little recycling. Less than 1% of the 237,000 tons of waste received by this facility each year is recycled. [Source: NYS DEC 2013 Transfer Station Annual Report] Under NYC law, waste haulers are required to report customer addresses and waste destinations to the Business Integrity Commission.
How dare the media and the powers to be even talk about Jamaica being the “next hot” neighborhood or being revitalized. Everything I have seen in this shitty community is the complete opposite of this, illegal truck driving on residential streets, garbage waste stations dumped in residential areas, garbage, crime, fires, shooting, bottom of the barrel people and more hotels turning into homeless shelters. Certainly not the stuff of the next hot neighborhood, just the continuation of the GHETTOIZATION of Jamaica pandering to the lowest common denominator.
If it is shitty, then no doubt it will be put here. But then what do you expect, we have shitty leaders, all who have allowed this to happen over the years.
The only hope, complete GENTRIFICATION MAGNIFIED ten times!
A former Quality Inn hotel in Jamaica is currently used to house homeless people.
DNAinfo.com/Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska
QUEENS — The city has taken over a number of rooms at a hotel near the AirTrain station in Jamaica to house homeless people — the latest lodging in Queens to be used to shelter the city’s booming homeless population.
The move comes on the heels of a resolution passed in December by a local community board, asking the city not to open more homeless shelters in the area, which already has the largest number of shelters in the borough.
It was unclear how many rooms have been booked by the city, and for how long, at the former Quality Inn hotel, at 94th Avenue and 143rd Street, two blocks away from the JFK AirTrain station.
“DHS has always used temporary spaces for families as they await eligibility determinations to come into shelter,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services said in an email. “This is a short term measure and ensures that no family is without shelter as the temperatures drop.”
DHS said that the number of people living in the city’s shelter system has risen dramatically in recent months, reaching nearly 59,000 residents as of last Friday. That’s about 20,000 more than a decade ago, according to city records.
Last year, the hotel was listed for sale by CPEX, a real estate firm, but on Friday a representative for the company said they were no longer marketing that property.
The hotel has also recently changed its name to “Retreat Inn.”
A person who answered the phone at the hotel on Tuesday said that the facility is currently under renovation and is not accepting guests.
A person who picked up the phone on Friday morning denied that the building is being used to house homeless people and said that it’s a regular hotel. The price for a standard room ranges from $100 to $110 plus tax, she said.
One of the homeless residents, who did not want his name to be used, told DNAinfo last Thursday that he has lived at the hotel for about two weeks and was transferred to Jamaica from a shelter on Randalls Island.
Yvonne Reddick, district manager for Community Board 12, said Friday that she was not aware of the arrangement at the hotel.
“When you put [homeless people] in this district, we want to know about it,” she said.
The board recently passed a resolution requesting a moratorium on building or expanding homeless shelters in the area.
Ten out of 22 homeless shelters in Queens are located within CB 12, which includes Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans and Springfield Gardens, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services.
“Southeast Queens remains committed to contributing our fair share of resources to the city, but once again it appears that we are being disproportionally impacted,” said local Councilman I. Daneek Miller.
“We are marginalized and disregarded when we are not informed in advance of who is moving into our neighborhoods and why they are here,” Miller noted.
In November, the city booked 100 rooms at the Radisson Hotel in Jamaica for a “government group,” but then filled the rooms with homeless people instead.
In another example of how ghettofied Jamaica is, we have the less amount of green cabs of anywhere in Queens with the exception of Ozone Park, which is ghetto just as well. Because of the unlicensed livery cabs and the dollar vans, many of them unlicensed, the civilized green cabs have a hard time in Jamaica. And that is shame because green cabs (which are the only cars I will step into in Jamaica) are licensed, cleaner and cheaper, but the ghetto folks would rather stick to dirty expensive livery cabs and those disgusting awful ghetto dollar vans.
Any talk of Jamaica being the next “hot”neighborhood is just that, talk and a a blatant lie. NOBODY wants to come to this shit hole, while others like me are planning on heading out, far out. It is too much of a big fucking mess meant only for the lowest common denominator and it seems our crooked and useless leaders like it that way.
QUEENS — Every day, dozens of cabbies drive down Jamaica Avenue, aggressively competing for passengers. As they travel with their windows rolled down along one of the busiest commercial thoroughfares in the borough, they constantly honk and yell “taxi.”
Most of them drive the so-called black or gypsy cabs, which carry no city logos and have no meters, but offer cheap fares, locals said.
There are also dollar vans, which take residents to Cambria Heights, Rochdale, St. Albans or Rockaway for $1.50 to $2.
But the green taxis, which launched in 2013 as part of the city’s initiative seeking to provide reliable cab service to the outer boroughs, are nearly absent from the neighborhood’s streets.
“Our district is saturated with commuter vans and dollar cars,” said Community Board 12 chair Adrienne Adams. “It has become part of the fabric of the community.”
Several green cab drivers acknowledged that they avoid Jamaica, because it’s hard to compete with so many other cabbies.
Data provided by the Taxi and Limousine Commission leaves little doubt that green cab drivers favor neighborhoods like Long Island City and Forest Hills, while others, like Jamaica and Ozone Park, are left out.
On June 24, 2014, the most recent data available, out of nearly 18,000 green taxi pickups, only 168 took place in Jamaica (in the area covered by four ZIP codes — 11423, 11435, 11432, 11433).
And most of them were near the transportation hub on Sutphin Boulevard, which connects the Long Island Rail Road, the E, J and Z trains as well as the AirTrain.
In other neighborhoods, the figures were even more dismal. In Ozone Park, only 13 pickups were recorded on that day.
That presents a stark contrast to other portions of the borough. There were 406 pickups in Forest Hills on that day, 711 in Elmhurst, and 581 in Jackson Heights.
But drivers said that every neighborhood has its own unique character.
In areas like Ozone Park, they said, where there are no big shopping centers or trendy bars, it’s nearly impossible to find passengers, because residents rely mostly on car service companies.
Many drivers also said that another reason preventing them from going to certain neighborhoods is lack of taxi stands.
In Jamaica, they said, the taxi stand in front of the Sutphin Boulevard station is reserved for cabs affiliated with Queens Village Car Service.
The arrangement was implemented in 2011, in an effort to improve safety and reduce congestion in the area.
But numerous gypsy cabs continue to illegally pick up passengers in front of the station, as do some green cab drivers, including Gurnam Singh, 60.
Singh, who lives in the area, said he has no choice, because “there is no [other] taxi stand here.”
Singh also said that green cab drivers often feel harassed by “black car” drivers.
“Black cars dominate here, and they don’t even have TLC plates,” Singh said. While green cab drivers often get tickets for waiting in front of the station, black cabs just drive away, he added.
Singh said he believes that taxi stands should be placed in front of all major subway stations, like Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, where drivers also pick up passengers illegally, or at Lefferts Boulevard and Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park, where the A train has its last stop.
Drivers who don’t want to cruise around often congregate at the very few taxi stands available in the borough, the most popular being the Forest Hills one, where cabbies have a large designated space.
Local residents had mixed opinions about the green cab service.
Kevin Rosado, 24, an accounting student who lives in Queens Village, said that “green cabs are cheaper, more affordable to use and more convenient [than livery cabs].”
“[Livery cabs] sometimes can charge you twice more than you are supposed to pay to get to a certain destination.”
He said he uses green taxis mostly on weekends. “I usually rely on the MTA service but when I go out with my friends or I have an emergency, it’s late at night and I have to go home, I take the green service,” he said.
But others were less enthusiastic. Muriel Williams, 75, who lives near the LIRR train station in Downtown Jamaica, said that she doesn’t “like green cabs.”
“I don’t think we need them,” she said, adding that she uses mostly buses or trains. She said she calls a car service when she needs to go to the doctor. “This area is already too congested.”
“If you look at some of the fees that are charged by the livery [cabs], they are outrageous in comparison [with the green cabs],” he noted.
A car service company would charge $25 to $30 for a trip from Jamaica to JFK, Miller said. The same trip “with a meter” would cost about $17 to $18, he said.
“It should be an opportunity that should be brought to the community,” he said.
This article is the third in a series examining how well the Boro Taxi is serving New York City’s neighborhoods. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Next meeting of the Southeast Queens for Community Action is this coming Monday, Feb. 9th – 7 p.m. – JFK Marketing Bldg on the corner of 94th & Sutphin Blvd. Learn how to start or grow your own small business courtesy of the South East Queens Chamber of Commerce.
If you think it cannot get any worse with the shit stained, disgusting smelling homeless crew at the Jamaica Center & Sutphin Blvd subway stations and on the E train, think again. It will get even worse with all the hotels popping up all over Jamaica near the Sutphin Blvd subway station (and other parts of Queens & Brooklyn) that eventually will be turned into homeless shelters that that the City will hand over money to the hotel owner. Only thing, that is our tax dollars being used for this latest scam by the powers to be.
