New buildings along the Hunters Point South and Long Island City waterfront have taken an average of 2.33 years from first construction permit to certificate of occupancy, based on a review of Department of Buildings records for 11 residential towers built since 2012.
The finding comes a day after our report on HPD confirming the Parcel E development team, one of two large undeveloped waterfront sites in the neighborhood. The timeline offers a rough guide to how long residents might wait between a site breaking ground and its first residents moving in.
New York State and private developers have rebuilt Hunters Point South and Long Island City waterfront in phases since the 1990s, when the state’s Queens West project began remediating former industrial land along the East River. Construction accelerated in the early 2010s with the buildout of Hunters Point South, and again after 2019 with a new wave of towers along Center Boulevard and, most recently, Malt Drive.
Individual buildings varied widely. The fastest, 45-60 Center Boulevard, took 1.75 years from permit to occupancy. The slowest among verified buildings, 52-03 Center Boulevard, took 2.84 years. HPL excluded two buildings from the average as statistical outliers: both pulled construction permits in 2008, years before the 2012 to 2013 recession-delayed towers they belonged to were ultimately completed, a gap that reflects stalled financing rather than active construction time.
The Long Island City Neighborhood Plan, known as OneLIC, passed City Council in November 2025 and is now in its implementation phase. If recent construction timelines hold, buildings that break ground on newly rezoned sites could see their first residents within two to three years of permitting, not counting the additional time needed for site acquisition, financing, and the permitting process itself.
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Methodology
HPL identified residential buildings along the Center Boulevard, 50th Avenue, Borden Avenue, and Malt Drive waterfront corridor using NYC Department of Buildings permit and certificate of occupancy records. A building was included only if both its first construction permit (of any type, including equipment and foundation permits, which represent real construction activity such as crane mobilization) and its certificate of occupancy were confirmed in DOB Open Data. Buildings completed before 2012 could not be reliably verified, since DOB’s certificate of occupancy dataset begins in July 2012; where a later DOB record existed for those buildings, it reflected a subsequent alteration filing, not original construction, and was excluded rather than misattributed. Eleven buildings met this standard. Two additional buildings with confirmed data were excluded as statistical outliers, having pulled permits years before construction began. Full building-level data is available on request.
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Randy Plemel
Publisher
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The founder and publisher of the Hunters Point Ledger, a newsletter covering Hunters Point South and Long Island City. He serves on Queens Community Board 2, and all views are his own.
