As Queens’s booming Chinese community has overgrown Flushing, residents and developers have pushed out on all sides – east towards Bayside, north towards College Point, south along Main Street towards Jamaica, and west towards Elmhurst.
Today, permits were filed for a development towards the western edge of Elmhurst. Maspeth-based Architects Studio, led by Angelo and Anthony Ng, submitted an application to erect a 30-unit apartment building at 70-09 45th Avenue, just off of Queens Boulevard. They did so on behalf of developer Choi Yui Chan, who listed an address in East Flushing.
The seven-story, 78-foot-tall building will feature 24,299 square feet of net residential space divided over 30 units (the maximum allowed before parking requirements kick in; this development will have none). It will also include 5,122 square feet of commercial space, for a total gross construction area of 33,094 square feet. The 74-foot-wide parcel, which was divided into two lots housing a few one- and two-story mixed-use buildings, was picked up in two parts for a total of $3 million in 2013 and 2014, or around $100 per buildable square foot.
The development was made possible by a 2006 rezoning of Maspeth and Woodside (which also included a bit of Elmhurst, on the other side of the BQE), which allowed relatively high-density development along Queens Boulevard.
While the rule change was certainly a good thing for this developer, it isn’t clear whether it was, on the whole, an upzoning or downzoning – parts of Queens Boulevard were upzoned, but other residential areas were downzoned. The Department of City Planning never released statistics on the exact square footage of new development opportunities created and old opportunities eliminated.
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