Long Island City to get 15K new homes amid housing crisis

Long Island City’s largest rezoning in 25 years was approved by the City Council on Wednesday, and it’s set to transform the area in a massive way.

The result: A whopping 14,700 new homes on the docket, with 4,350 of those set aside affordable units — a record number for a single rezoning, according to Curbed.

The sweeping 54-block plan, dubbed OneLIC, is set to radically alter an industrial swath of the neighborhood, and designed to keep a slice of the increasingly popular neighborhood affordable. It all comes as the city voters flocked to the polls in droves for the recent mayoral election, in which housing and affordability were marquee issues.

Area median rents in Long Island City have surpassed $4,500, according to a recent Bloomberg News analysis. Despite adding nearly 7,200 apartments since 2020, vacancy rates, particularly for family-sized units, have taken a nose dive.

The close of campaign is a big win for Councilmember Julie Won, who’s spent two years in a delicate dance with constituents and the mayor’s office. The past decade has seen several projects to supercharge Long Island City fall flat, including the controversial push for Amazon’s new HQ in 2018. 

Long Island City is one of the darlings of Mayor Eric Adams’ rezoning push that began in 2021, clearing the way for well over 100,000 new units to be built across the city. Adams enjoyed another recent success in rezoning a swath of Jamaica, in a plan that will transform 230 blocks of the populous neighborhood.

New residences on private lots will abide by Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rules, which require a minimum of 20% to 25% of units set aside as permanently affordable.

In the case of OneLIC, these units will be deeply affordable, available to either households making no more than 40% or 60% of the area median income. That income range shakes out to a one-person household earning $45,360 up to a household of three earning $87,480, according to Won’s press release on Wednesday.

City-owned sites will offer up 1,000 of the affordable units promised, 500 of which will be slated for New Yorkers earning less than 50% of the median income.

The push for affordability in OneLIC is a bold course correction from recent years of rapid population growth and sleek high-rise developments. Locals say that the neighborhood’s sanitation infrastructure, school sizes and open space offerings simply haven’t kept up with the break-neck pace.

OneLIC is projected to inject $2 billion worth of investments into Long Island City.

Other projects in the mix include adding 1,300 new public school seats, a public waterfront connecting Gantry Park to Queensbridge Park, improvements and upgrades at Queensbridge Houses and the restoration of Queensbridge Baby Park.

The Queensbridge Baby Park project will be a $95 million undertaking, Gothamist reported. The site under the Queensboro Bridge, long used for city parking and storage, will transform into 5 acres of public space. Won’s office called the project “the largest expansion of parkland through a rezoning in the last decade.”

“Over the last three decades, the City has allowed developers to dictate what is built in our neighborhood,” Won said in a statement. “These past two years, thousands of residents came together to envision our future.”

Proponents of OneLIC paint the plan in stark contrast to previous rezoning efforts to rezone the neighborhood, frequently citing the ill-fated Amazon HQ plans in 2018 or the subsequent YourLIC megaproject that lost city support in 2020.