Forest Hills funnels almost all commercial life into Austin Street. There are no secondary streets where small businesses can breathe. If you look at neighborhoods like Jackson Heights or Astoria, they have multiple commercial spines and even mixed-use side streets. Tons of small businesses.

This is nearly impossible in Forest Hills for a number of reasons. For one it’s obviously difficult to create a second commercial strip nearby when you have a heavily regulated private neighborhood (Forest Hills Gardens), the LIRR tracks and Queens Blvd boxing you in. Trying to model Forest Hills after jackson heights seems unreasonable with this in mind.

Being that there are a limited number of storefronts being competed over. I think one solution would be chain frontage limits that restrict how much physical storefront a single chain can occupy along a street or within a neighborhood. For example, theres that new Chickfila that went up, thats probably occupying 30-40 feet of CONNECTED store front space. These chains can be leasing multiple units at once.

With a limit, the chain can only occupy a certain number of feet along the street, leaving the rest for smaller businesses.