The Orchard is set to be the tallest building in Queens, after topping out at 823 feet this summer. The amenity-rich rental tower in Long Island City is expected to open in early 2026, with 824 units, a third of which will be designated as affordable housing.
“The tallest, biggest, newest, best” — that’s how Lloyd Goldman, the president of BLDG Management, the developer behind the Orchard, described it over a recent video call. Mr. Goldman rattled off an almost comically long list of amenities, including a fitness center, a basketball court, swimming pools, theater rooms, fire pits, a dog park, a golf simulator, steam rooms, a podcast room, an arcade room and, of course, an orchard. “I’m sure I’m leaving something out,” he added.
A representative for BLDG Management said that the developer could not “comment on pricing specifics at the moment.”
The building is part of a new phase for the borough. Long Island City, in particular, has seen a large wave of new development in recent years, with the rise of several high-end residential buildings, restaurants and shops. It is home to the borough’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, Meju, which opened last year, and will soon get an outpost of Butterfield Market, the upscale Upper East Side grocery. Since 2019, over 9,000 new rental units have been added to the neighborhood, according to the Corcoran Group.
The neighborhood’s waterfront, proximity to Manhattan and accessibility via multiple train lines have all made it prime territory for developers. “It is clearly a place that has good views of Manhattan, but it has always been kind of semi-industrial and a bit forlorn,” said Daniel Safarik, the research director at the nonprofit Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
That’s why Mr. Goldman — whose family has owned the property since the 1960s, when it was a site for industrial buildings — didn’t want to redevelop it until recently. “I wasn’t going to be a pioneer,” he said. Now, however, “the area around it is, I wouldn’t say fully mature, but there’s a good streetscape. There’s grocery stores, there’s drugstores, there’s a lot of restaurants.” Construction on the Orchard began in 2022.
Though height can be an impressive bragging right for a developer, what matters more to the typical residential customer is the views that come with it, Mr. Safarik said. “The reason to go as tall as they possibly can is probably to get privileged views that are unlikely to be eclipsed at the top rental floors,” he said. “So in some ways, they’re using height to market it, but I don’t think it’s so much to say, ‘I live in the tallest building in Queens,’ but it’s like, ‘I have commanding views of everywhere from Hell Gate to the Statue of Liberty.’”
What does the Orchard mean for the character of Queens, a sprawling and diverse borough known for its working-class and immigrant neighborhoods?
In Queens, as in many other parts of the city, housing costs have been rising. According to Realtor.com, the median rental asking price in Queens was around $3,350 in September, nearly $280 more than the same time last year.
And the rental market is especially tight. The city’s Housing and Vacancy Survey for 2023 showed that the rental vacancy rate had dropped to 1.4 percent, the lowest it’s been in over 50 years. Even among the city’s most expensive units, the vacancy rate was low, at 3.4 percent for apartments that cost $2,400 or more.
While introducing more housing stock can help alleviate pressure in the market, some affordable housing advocates are wary of high-end development.
“Luxury housing doesn’t do much to help the city’s housing crisis because there’s such a wide gulf between the high rents for those apartments and what would be affordable for most New Yorkers, especially those struggling in the current housing market,” said Emily Goldstein, the director of organizing and advocacy at the nonprofit Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, co-founder of the urban strategy studio Buscada and the author of “The Cities We Need,” said she was concerned about the “knock-on effect” of luxury skyscrapers: “These kinds of developments can raise both residential and small commercial rents around a neighborhood, which obviously leads to displacement.” And while the private amenities may be appealing for tenants, they don’t benefit the rest of the neighborhood, Ms. Bendiner-Viani added. “It’s not contributing outward to the neighborhood, it’s very inward-looking — this idea that you can come into a neighborhood but not really engage with it or add to it.”
Many community groups in the borough have resisted large-scale, corporate development in recent years. In 2019, Amazon canceled plans to build a new campus in Queens after facing backlash from residents and activists. Grassroots organizations, such as Stop Sunnyside Yards and Queens Neighborhoods United, have formed to fight displacement.
“It’s a classic New York hypocrisy in that it’s like, ‘It’s the most diverse borough, it’s what we love about New York,’” Ms. Bendiner-Viani said. “Officials can claim that and celebrate that at the same time as encouraging this kind of development, which is only serving a very small fraction of the population.”
Whether it’s welcomed or not, the new development has already profoundly shaped the neighborhood. In the past, certain residents were moving “to Long Island City and thinking they’d have to go back to Manhattan for the social aspects of their life,” said Jodi Stasse, executive vice president of Corcoran New Development. But now, “there’s enough bars and new restaurants and specialty stores that have opened.”
The Orchard occupies a full block on Jackson Avenue, which Ms. Stasse jokingly called “the Park Avenue of Long Island City.”
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