In 2009, a handful of blocks in Forest Hills – between Queens Boulevard and Austin Street, Yellowstone Boulevard and 72nd Road – were upzoned, to allow higher residential densities in the commercial core of one of Queens’s most desirable neighborhoods.
South Philadelphia-based developer Chuan Shu Wang is taking advantage of the new zoning, with a Tan Architect-designed seven-story residential building planned on the eastern edge of the rezoned area, at 109-15 72nd Road.
There, the developer is planning to build a 23-unit residential building, with condo-sized residences of nearly 1,000 square feet on average – four per floor through the sixth, and three units on the penthouse level. The ground floor will hold 5,000 square feet of retail space, with 12 parking spaces in the cellar – the minimum required by zoning.
Forest Hills is still majority white, but newcomers are predominately Asian, as are most of the neighborhood’s new condo buyers. Chinese and Bukharian Jews are the biggest buyers at the Windsor, a condo building two streets over at 107-24 71st Road that opened a decade ago, and units were resold in 2014 in the $600s, $700s, and $800s per square foot.
Tan Architect has another project nearby, at 97-30 64th Avenue, in Rego Park – another upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in central Queens seeing an influx of Chinese residents.
The lot is currently home to a two-family home that’s been heavily renovated into a commercial structure. It sold to the developer in December for $5.7 million – nearly $210 per buildable square foot, suggesting condos that are hoping to bump up against $1,000 a a foot.
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