Long Island City could soon start building some 14,700 new homes — including in a waterfront area where multiple visions of development have gone to die.
On Monday, the city kicks off the process of rezoning a 54-block area of the Queens neighborhood. The changes will allow residential development in areas zoned for industrial use, while also encouraging more commercial and light industrial development in other parts of the district.
Residential construction will be allowed in 22 blocks of the rezoning area, where the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program will apply. The Department of City Planning estimates that after the rezoning is approved through the seven-month land use review process, 14,700 apartments will be built over the next decade, with 4,300 units set aside as income-restricted under MIH. The rezoning could also spur 3.5 million square feet of commercial development and 292,000 square feet of community space.
The rezoning includes sites that were once part of a megadevelopment envisioned by MAG Partners, Plaxall, Simon Baron Development and TF Cornerstone. That project, dubbed YourLIC, spanned 28 acres along the Anable Basin and would have resulted in more than a dozen buildings, with a mix of commercial, residential and community space. It also included the sites where Amazon once proposed building its new headquarters, before abandoning that plan in 2019. Developers withdrew their plan in 2020, after they couldn’t reach a deal to acquire city-owned sites that were part of the plan, the Long Island City Post reported at the time.
The rezoning includes the city-owned sites at 44-36 Vernon Boulevard, 44-59 45th Avenue and 4-99 44th Drive, which it plans to transfer to developers. The city is trying to acquire another site from Con Edison in an effort to create a continuous waterfront between Gantry Plaza State Park and Queensbridge Park.
Though other parts of the neighborhood have been rezoned and begun development, this rezoning area has largely been untouched. In a meeting with reporters on Friday, City Planning head Dan Garodnick said the project would be the most housing generated by a neighborhood rezoning in at least 25 years, and possibly since the creation of the city’s 1961 zoning resolution.
It is the fifth neighborhood rezoning initiated under the Adams administration.
“The numbers will speak for themselves at the end of the day,” Garodnick said. “We think we’re on a very good path to deliver very thoughtful and important opportunities to these neighborhoods.”
The Long Island City plan does not take advantage of the state’s removal of the cap on residential density last year, which permitted the city to map areas where residential space could be built 15 or 18 times the size of a development’s lot. The highest floor area ratio for residential space under the rezoning would be 12. So far, the city has pursued higher FARs of 15 and 18 as part of the proposed Midtown South rezoning.
The Long Island City rezoning benefits from changes under City of Yes for Economic Opportunity, which allowed for more commercial density and more flexible building shapes. The rezoning area also doesn’t have off-street parking requirements.
The plan includes an incentive for developers to include school space in their buildings. The schools, up to 150,000 square feet, will not count toward the building’s overall density, meaning that the building can be larger than permitted.
Rezonings don’t always go according to plan, as the 2001 rezoning of 37 blocks in Long Island City demonstrated. Those changes were expected to create a mixed-use business district, but developers heavily favored housing and office construction fell short of estimates.
The city’s projection of housing units doesn’t factor in outside forces like high interest rates, tariffs on construction materials or other details that influence developer behavior. For example, projects with 150 apartments or more in Long Island City are subject to higher construction wages under the property tax break 485x. Developers have already indicated that they are willing to build smaller projects to avoid these and other wage requirements.
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