About That Weiner Report
About That Weiner Report
You may have seen a few stories in the press in the last few days that painted a very gloomy picture of Woodhaven's Business District. For example, here's one entitled Study Finds Woodhaven Worst With Vacancies:
A survey conducted by Congressmember Anthony Weiner of 10 shopping hot-spots in Queens has revealed that an average of 12 percent of all storefronts is either closed or closing . . . The neighborhoods surveyed include shopping strips in Rockaway, Rego Park, Flushing, Woodhaven, Forest Hills, Jamaica, Sunnyside, Astoria, Glendale and Bayside.
According to the study, Woodhaven had the highest vacancy rate, at 20 percent; Flushing had the lowest at 7 percent;
Doesn't look to good for Woodhaven, does it? Well, here's some good news -- the report is wrong, Anthony Weiner's Office has admitted their mistake and will be issuing a correction. Not only is the report wrong, folks -- Woodhaven's numbers are among the best, not the worst.
A similar thing happened over a year ago when Anthony's Weiner's Office reported that 23% of the businesses along Jamaica Avenue were shuttered. We took to the streets of Woodhaven to do our own survey and found that out of 378 places of business, 31 of them were closed which worked out to a percentage of 8.3% -- a whopping 15% difference from Anthony Weiner's report. We even drew a little map showing the vacancies:
We had a blog post up on this subject last February which you can read here. So, here we are a year later and we find ourselves in the same boat.
We spoke to a representative from Anthony Weiner's office -- and they also showed up at Woodhaven's monthly Town Hall meeting and explained that only a small portion of Woodhaven had been surveyed and, in fact, most of the data again came from Richmond Hill, which wasn't even mentioned in the report! Maria Thompson, Executive Director of the Greater Woodhaven Development Corporation and the Woodhaven BID reported at this meeting that Woodhaven currently has vacancy rates on the Avenue under 10%. That's quite a difference between 10 and 20 percent -- and paints a very different picture of our Avenue.
A correction from Anthony Weiner's Office is expected shortly.
If you have any comments, or would like to suggest other projects, drop us a line at info@projectwoodhaven.com or projectwoodhaven@aol.com .
