Development is slowly taking hold in the sleepy industrial area just south of Jamaica’s railyards. A new building application was filed Friday for a nine-story hotel at 145-07 95th Avenue, a block from the Jamaica LIRR and Air Train stations.
The 84-foot-tall development will have 48 rooms divided over 19,764 square feet of commercial space, which works out to an average room of 411 square feet. Each floor will hold five to six rooms, except for the ground floor, where there will be three rooms and the lobby. The cellar will include a breakfast room, exercise room and lobby.
The site, located between Sutphin Boulevard and Waltham Street, seems like an ideal location for a budget hotel that caters to travelers coming to and from JFK, between the nearby AirTrain and the E, J and Z trains at Sutphin Boulevard.
Permits list the developer as Jai Patel of Jamaica-based Pride Ventures LLC, and the architect of record is Manish Savani, also headquartered in Jamaica on Hillside Avenue. The 3,000-square-foot plot hasn’t sold recently, and the same family has owned it since 1972. Its current occupant is a vinyl-sided two-story frame house, which hasn’t gotten its demo permits yet.
The Bloomberg-era Jamaica Plan rezoning changed this swath of the neighborhood from industrial to high-density commercial zoning, allowing fairly tall towers without height caps. But in 2011, City Planning downzoned 530 blocks of South Jamaica, a low-density residential hood that begins a few blocks south and east of here. The contextual zoning—which imposes stricter building heights and lower floor area requirements—was intended to preserve the area’s character of one- and two-family homes. But it has also discouraged development in one of Queens’ few remaining affordable, working-class neighborhoods.
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