According to a report from RENTCafe, Long Island City has produced the largest number of rental apartments in the country since 2010. The Queens 'hood built a whopping 12,533 rental units; 66% more than the next ranked locale, Downtown L.A. The national apartment search website analyzed construction data from Yardi Matrix and Property Shark, in about 1,000 neighborhoods from coast to coast, to see which neighborhoods grew the most from a rental perspective.
LIC’s top placement shouldn’t come as a surprise to any New Yorker who takes the 7 train or anyone who has ventured to the East River waterfront. There, one can behold dozens of new towers producing a pop-up skyline of sorts that didn’t exist a decade ago. Several weeks ago, we took the 7-train and recorded its winding route through LIC’s Court Square and Queens Plaza neighborhoods. Check out the video below (pardon the bumps).
Row of new towers from Thomson Avenue; CItyRealty
The future of Long Island City will bring even more construction and understandably some challenges. An upzoning of the low, manufacturing parts of the neighborhood is slowly navigating through City Planning. With the city’s infrastructure in shambles and ever-escalating rents threatening to push out long-time businesses and residents, the rezoning may be a tough pill to swallow for many. As a response, the city is seeking to make LIC the first 21st Century mixed-use neighborhood to embrace a new set of design guidelines that allows for a greater mix of uses.
Earlier this week, at Urban Land Institute's panel titled Zoning the City, City Planning Chair, Marissa Lago said she hopes LIC could capture some of the economic effects of the new Cornell Tech campus rising nearby in Roosevelt Island. Possibly through zoning, she foresees that uses that can't typically afford space within new construction (i.e. light manufacturing) can be cross-subsidized by the new residential and commercial development.
Future Long Island City waterfront from 46th Avenue north to the Queensboro Bridge; via NYC Department of CIty Planning
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