What the Coronavirus Has Done to New Development
The pandemic paused residential construction and stalled sales. Now developers in Long Island City and Greenpoint are scrambling to bounce back.
The New York Times article by Stefanos Chen and David W. Chen
July 3, 2020
Skyline Tower, the 778-foot luxury condo building in Long Island City that looms over western Queens, was built to break records.
It is the tallest building in the borough; the most ambitious, with sales projected to exceed $1 billion; and in February the developers claimed that it was the fastest selling, with contracts signed on a quarter of its 802 units, a massive supply for a single building.
It represents the pinnacle of construction near Newtown Creek, a grimy tributary of the East River that connects the neighborhoods of Long Island City and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two of the busiest real estate markets outside of Manhattan. Together, they have over 10,300 apartments in the works, almost 3,000 more than the mega-development Hudson Yards, according to Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider.
But even before the coronavirus gripped New York in March, the condo market there and across the city was softening. And as the sales and rental markets cautiously reopen, many of the surefire bets that fueled the last cycle of development are being thrown into question.
Read full article, here.
