Just over half of Hunters Point and Long Island City allows for grocery stores above 10,000 square feet as of right. Some of the rest doesn’t allow grocery stores at all. Most of what remains still needs a City Council vote to build big grocery stores.
Grocery prices continue to be in the news, as Trump’s tariffs continue to push food prices higher. In New York City, grocery stores bigger than 10,000 square feet cannot open as-of-right in most of New York City’s manufacturing zones, commonly where there’s room for larger stores. It needs a special permit from the City Planning Commission, and often a City Council vote.
That rule shapes where full-size supermarkets can go in Hunters Point and Long Island City, much of which sits in M1 manufacturing districts. A Hunters Point Ledger review of city zoning and tax lot data found that zoning changes going back to 2004, most recently touched by the 2025 OneLIC rezoning, have lifted that cap on just over half the neighborhood’s industrially zoned land. But the fix is partial, and uneven: some of it dates to the original 2004 Hunters Point rezoning, some to an older Queens Plaza Subdistrict provision, and only a small slice to OneLIC itself. The cap still applies to a meaningful share of Hunters Point and LIC.
Hunters Point / LIC — Where Grocery Stores Face No Size Cap
796 tax lots in Hunters Point/LIC (west of Van Dam Street) where a grocery or specialty food store faces no Use Group VI size cap, under any of three zoning provisions or Commercial District rules. Click any lot for its address, zoning, and the specific citation.
Why This Matters
New York City has been fighting about grocery prices all year. Mayor Mamdani has proposed city-owned grocery stores. Critics of that plan, including Stephen Smith, executive director of the Center for Building in North America, argue the city does not need public supermarkets. It needs fewer barriers to private ones.
In a January piece for Vital City, Smith called the 10,000-square-foot cap in manufacturing districts “the most egregious planning barrier” to opening large-format grocery stores in New York. He argued that national chains such as Aldi, Lidl, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s bring buying power, technology and lower prices that local co-op chains like CTown and Key Food cannot match. The cap, he wrote, forces those chains to seek costly special permits, dig basements to avoid the limit entirely, or skip a neighborhood altogether. He pointed to Williamsburg and Gowanus, where a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s each went underground rather than face a City Council vote.
Hunters Point and Long Island City sit almost entirely in M1 districts. If Smith’s argument holds anywhere in this city, it should hold here.
The Mechanics: How OneLIC Changed The Rule
Skip this section if you don’t care about zoning rules.
The grocery-size cap comes from Section 42-162 of the Zoning Resolution, which limits certain Use Group VI retail uses in M1 districts to 10,000 square feet per establishment. Three provisions in the Special Long Island City Mixed Use District override that cap for parts of Hunters Point and Long Island City:
Section 117-12, adopted with the original 2004 Hunters Point Subdistrict rezoning, lifts the size limit for food and beverage retailers in five paired zoning districts: M1-4/R6A, M1-4/R6B, M1-4/R7A, M1-5/R7X and M1-5/R8A. Together they cover most of the original subdistrict’s midblocks.
Section 117-311, covering the Northern Hunters Point Waterfront Subdistrict, and Section 117-511, covering the Queens Plaza Subdistrict, go further. Both remove the size limit for any Use Group VI retail use, not just food stores, anywhere within their respective subdistricts. Section 117-311 was added as part of the OneLIC rezoning approved by the City Council on November 12, 2025; Section 117-511 predates OneLIC and applies to the area around Queens Plaza.
A fourth path applies outside the M1-specific rules entirely. Under Section 32-161, grocery and specialty food retailers carry no size restriction in Commercial Districts, C1 through C8. Where a C1 or C2 commercial overlay sits on top of an otherwise capped lot, or where a lot is zoned straight commercial (as parts of Court Square are, under C5-3), that overlay or base district’s use rules control, and the 10,000-square-foot limit never applied there in the first place.
How this affects our neighborhood
The Ledger checked 1,503 tax lots in Hunters Point and Long Island City west of Van Dam Street, the rough boundary between the neighborhood and Sunnyside.1 Just over half the neighborhood, about 53 percent, already allows a large-format grocery store as-of-right. Of the rest, 320 lots (21 percent) are confirmed capped and would need the special permit process Smith’s piece singles out for criticism. Another 199 lots (13 percent) sit on zoning the city hasn’t mapped closely enough to say either way. The remaining 183 lots (12 percent) are zoned purely residential, where a grocery store isn’t allowed at all, permit or no permit.
Among the 320 confirmed-capped lots, 211 have no overlay or special district touching them at all, plain M1 zoning with nothing to fall back on. They include large parcels along Thomson Avenue, Review Avenue and Queens Boulevard, near the edge of Sunnyside Yards, as well as smaller, more central sites like 54-08 Vernon Boulevard.
Neighborhood by the numbers
- 430 lots (29 percent) are exempt under Section 117-12, the Hunters Point Subdistrict.
- 152 lots (10 percent) are exempt under Section 117-511, the Queens Plaza Subdistrict.
- 39 lots (3 percent) are exempt under Section 117-311, the Northern Hunters Point Waterfront Subdistrict.
- 175 lots (12 percent) are exempt through a C1 or C2 commercial overlay or straight Commercial District zoning, where the cap never applied in the first place.
- 318 lots (21 percent) remain capped at 10,000 square feet, with no exemption of any kind.
- 199 lots (13 percent) could not be confirmed either way. These sit on zoning designations created for the Northern Hunters Point Waterfront or Queens Plaza West Subdistricts, but the city has not digitized either subdistrict’s boundary, and no further primary source was found to resolve them.
- 182 lots (12 percent) are zoned purely residential, with no retail use allowed at all regardless of size.
| Zoning Basis | Governing Section | Lots |
|---|---|---|
| Hunters Point Subdistrict | §117-12 | 430 |
| Queens Plaza Subdistrict | §117-511 | 152 |
| Northern Hunters Point Waterfront Subdistrict | §117-311 | 39 |
| Commercial District (overlay/C5-3) | §32-161 | 175 |
| Total | 796 |
Data
Zoning and lot data from NYC Department of City Planning MapPLUTO, current as of July 2026. Lots were assigned to one exemption category based on primary and secondary zoning designations, commercial overlays and special purpose district fields. A subset of M1 pairings using contextual zoning suffixes not explicitly listed in Section 117-12 or 117-311, including M1-5/R7-3, M1-4A/R8A, M1-2A/R6A, M1-3A/R7A, M1-3A/R7X and M1-5A/R8, could not be confirmed against the Northern Hunters Point Waterfront Subdistrict’s mapped boundary and are conservatively counted as capped pending further verification. ↩
