Jackson Heights Life

I have to agree with the people who say this isn't a great neighborhood for younger single people, especially if they're dating. The people I know who are younger, dating and going out, are all doing it in Astoria, LIC and Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. To be young in JH seems to mean being on the train a lot going to these centers of gravity where all your friends are. This is a neighborhood for people who go home to their families after dinner, or for ... whoever goes to those bars on Roosevelt, always a mystery to me.

Jackson Heights desperately needs open space—and I’m happy to see people make the best of 34th ave—but wouldn’t 37th ave be the smarter street to close down (to non commercial traffic)? The sidewalks there are horribly overcrowded, and double parking is a mess that brings traffic to a halt anyway. Why not open it up, give the restaurants more outdoor breathing room, allow for more room to roam, and more space to play and hang out?

37th Avenue can't be closed because key major 37th Avenue business owners are steadfastly against it. The ones with the constantly double-parked mid-day delivery trucks, and also the ones with the double and triple-parked out-of-town SUV shoppers. 37th is actually not a truck route, but is used as a truck route thoroughly and frequently.

34th never had that level of constant commercial traffic; it also has the median, the shade trees, the multiple schools and the park. So 34th can function as an extension of the park, solve some of the issues with schoolkids crossing the street (especially with the IS230 building layout), etc.

There are some bigger issues around the assertion that "you can't have groceries in the neighborhood without double-parking tractor-trailers in the middle of a busy street at midday" that really nobody at any level of city management or design wants to have to even think about. Obvious answer is to make each block in front of a grocery store a loading-only zone, but for some reason no, that's not a thing we can do.

For anyone genuinely wishing to understand and empathize with people hesitating to give up masking and other pandemic behaviors, this is a good article:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yye8/pandemic-safety-mask-lockdown-cant-quit-grief-trauma-anxiety

That's an absolutely terrific article.

it's like a group of people who oppose disease. and communist takeover of public land.

I think Communists are just fine with public land. That's the entire base point of Communism, that land should be publicly held and not privately held.

I'm against the dumb corrupt cronyist AirTrain too, but don't bring the Communists into it. They have enough problems.

If someone were to set up a neighborhood rule where  if you were parked here, and your car alarm went off for more than 20 minutes, your car should have damage exacted upon it worthy of that alarm, I'd be fine with it. Maybe a scratch or two to start off with,  a broken windscreen for an hour, all the way to a burned out shell of a car for 2h plus.

Perhaps someone can set up a darknet market to pay for alarm revenge?

Seriously: People: fix, or better yet,  disable your car alarms. They don't do anything except annoy the living ***** out of entire neighborhoods.

It should be a towing offense. Worried that your car isn't safe? In the impound lot it's REALLY safe.

Just putting this out to gauge folks interest in community broadband.  Certainly at scale, for example, 500 MBS - 1 Gig service can be provided well through pricing of any current providers (probably $30-$50 a month, maybe less). For comparison, and this could happen in the US, South Korea has the fastest broadband in the world for $30 month.  As background, our building is exploring alternatives to traditional telecoms, and perhaps a JH based community broadband could be offered through a newly created non-profit to scale initiatives neighborhood wide.  Anyway, just curious.

You may want to contact the NYC Mesh people to compare notes - https://www.nycmesh.net/

Quote from: theplanesland on February 17, 2021, 08:45:04 AM

Quote from: stevn on February 16, 2021, 11:55:48 PM

Quote from: JA on January 13, 2021, 01:43:40 PM

I don't understand how people can still be complaining about the supposed lack of good grocery stores in the 80s. We have amazing green grocers, great butchers like Boina Roja, a bodega on every other corner for basics, the natural market on 84, and Mi Tierra.

People like to complain. They don't realize there's fresh food galore in JH, and they lament that frozen meal purveyor Trader Joe's won't return their calls.

I know, but I always love to poke the "why won't X upscale chain open in Jackson Heights" (for any value of X) folks. The answer is usually "for the same reason normal people can actually afford rent here."

I imagine rents in Rego Park are not that different than rents in Jackson Heights, yet Trader Joe's built a store there.

Also, I assume you're referring to Trader Joe's as being 'upscale' but not sure what you mean by that. If you mean that their products are reliable, fresh, innovative and the stores are clean and have excellent customer service, then I would agree. However, if you are equating upscale with expensive, then I don't agree at all. Trader Joe's prices are more reasonable for quality goods than anywhere else I could think of shopping -- including the stores here in JH (with the exception of the produce markets).

And since this thread is about the new grocery store and not Trader Joe's, I should mention I took a swing through and took at look at the one product that I know how to do price comparisons for, the large Quaker Oats canister. At this new store it costs $6.99. At C-Town it's $6.49. At the market that used to be called Fruta Dona on 37th and 83rd, I recently bought it for $3.99. At Target it's $3.49. So that leads me to the conclusion that the prices are not much of a bargain here. I'm sure they have some loss leaders and sales, so if you're shopping for something else, perhaps you'll find a decent price.

You'd be surprised. On statistical measures, we come out as a low income area. Our median household income for 11372 is $60659 with a median of $41852 in one-earner households and $84745 in dual-earner households. Down in Rego Park it's noticeably higher: $66795 overall with $60767 in single-earner households and $116047 in dual-earner households. East Elmhurst is in between. I like to hammer on this, but the population of this board and our neighborhood online groups isn't statistically representative of the overall population of the neighborhood, which is *much* lower income and *much* higher percentage Latino than tends to be represented here.