Kiddie Land: How gritty Long Island City became an accidental haven for young families.
By Kate Hinsche
This article is part of an ongoing RentWire series that will feature a deep dive from a local reporter on our team covering the impact of rent -- up, down, but seldom steady. They examine how real estate affects the city and its inhabitants in different ways, from Jackson Heights, Harlem and Flatiron to Long Island City, the Upper East Side, Chelsea and beyond.
The kids were not part of the plan.
In 1990, the state came up with an idea to revive a gritty, polluted strip of waterfront on the East River, Long Island City. Thirty years later Long Island City is booming. But not by design.
Despite no one planning for them to be there, new parents and their young children dominate in this western enclave of Queens. Long Island City was supposed to be many things –– the 2012 Olympic Village, Amazon’s HQ2, even a cheaper neighborhood for young professionals. Since TF Cornerstone opened its first residential tower there in 2007, Long Island City has continued to fill in with more and more shiny residential towers and the families who populate them. Pediatric offices for dentistry and medicine with Manhattan branding (“Tribeca Pediatrics,” “Chelsea Pediatric Dentistry'') have popped up on commercial blocks, and nannies hover around playgrounds. New daycare centers open up every year, with competitive admission processes for limited seats.
The curiosity of Long Island City is that in a decade where there were fewer babies born, diapers changed, and strollers pushed across the five boroughs, the newborn and toddler population ballooned at a breakneck pace there.
“It’s hard for us to imagine when we’re in these pioneering residential communities that families would move in,” said Jon McMillan, a senior vice president at TF Cornerstone, the developer behind the physical transformation of the neighborhood.
Somehow, that’s exactly what happened.
In the 1980’s, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) saw potential in a forgotten corner of industrial Queens. The UDC, now known as Empire State Development, is a branch of New York State that operates as a public corporation under a team of executives appointed by the governor. The UDC spent much of that decade assessing what it called “vacant,” “underutilized,” and “insanitary” land –– a.k.a. the Long Island City waterfront between Anable Basin and Newton Creek. When the UDC conceived of its vision for this blighted industrial field, it had one mission: promote economic growth. The booming nursery neighborhood that cropped up in the aftermath of its work was essentially an accident.
The UDC made a crucial decision at the outset of the waterfront redevelopment project that decades later helped to create the economic conditions for a new family community to flourish. “It is not practicable for the Project to comply with City Zoning requirements,” according to the 1990 General Project Plan. City, Port Authority and UDC officials were in agreement that traditional zoning rules should be waived for the new development –– and they were. Another 13 years would pass before the state struck a deal with TF Cornerstone to purchase, remediate, and construct this new community, unhindered by traditional zoning. This fundamentally altered what would become of the Long Island City housing market, where most structures on residential streets cannot top 85 feet.
The legacy of this decision is a physical one. Walking inland down 47th Avenue, the buildings define clear lines between special zoning and traditional zoning, with three story homes in the shadows cast by high rise towers just a block away. Buildings containing thousands of units continue to rise along the waterfront, mimicking the modern styles of their counterparts across the water.
“It’s supply and demand,” said McMillan. He described the constant construction of new units as keeping pace with rising demand, ultimately keeping rent relatively stable in the new-build high rises.
The result is “a suburban-urban town,” said Ilana Maguire, owner and founder of Lolly’s Early Learning Center, located on 47th Avenue. “You’re going to walk into CVS and know five people.” Maguire opened Lolly’s in 2009, after encountering a mother struggling by herself to get a stroller up the stairs from the Vernon-Jackson Avenue subway stop. It was then that she realized the dearth of childcare options in the area. “There were tons of dogs and tons of kids, and no schools.”
For Maguire, Long Island City was a familiar neighborhood to start her business. Her father moved his construction business to the area in the 1980’s, and she still recalls her mother saying, “Do not move your business there, it’s dangerous, it’s desolate.” Now, the family jokes about how much money they could have made buying property back then, if not for her mother’s objections.
“There’s so many kids,” Maguire said, “that I never looked at another school opening as competition.”
Long Island City is not the standard. Birth rates are dropping nationally, and New York City is no exception. Since 2000, the recorded live birth rate in the city dropped from 15.7 to 13.6. While some of the decline can be attributed to a healthy reduction in teen pregnancies, it also represents the documented trend of Americans having fewer babies. A flurry of panicked reporting broke earlier this year, when the 2020 Census results revealed the U.S. birth rate had dropped to its lowest level in history by a dramatic four points. The question that echoed through every article, tweet, and podcast episode on the topic was: why?
Some institutions speculated a pandemic baby bust lay over the horizon when shutdowns began in March 2020. But the drop in births began long before coronavirus made its way around the world.
Are fewer babies a bad thing? Demographer Lyman Stone wrestles with this question in an interview with Bloomberg’s Ramesh Ponnuru. “We know from surveys that Americans actively intend and plan to have 2 to 2.3 children on average, yet at current rates will have just 1.64,” he said. “So it's very clear that low fertility is ‘bad’ in the sense that it is not what Americans say they want.”
A survey conducted by the Morning Consult for The New York Times polled thousands of American adults for insight into the decline. The answer, as it happens, is simple. Four of the five most-cited reasons for not having, or having fewer, kids are related to finances. People are getting priced out of having babies.
Expense as a birth deterrent in New York City makes sense empirically. NerdWallet’s cost of living database ranks the city as the most expensive out of the 268 American cities it tracks, but it only has the ninth-highest median income in the nation. New Yorkers stretch less income further to maintain the same quality of life as other urbanites across the country, leaving less leeway to cover the cost of a growing family.
It is true, at least by StreetEasy’s calculations, that median rent in Long Island City hovered around $3,000 for most of the last decade, only recently rising to $3,400 in the post-shut-down rent rebound. This makes it relatively affordable in the grand scheme of the city’s nursery neighborhoods. Tribeca and Battery Park City rank third in the city overall for birth rate, but the prize Manhattan real estate those babies are born into bears average rents of $6,750 and $4,455, respectively.
There is the rent, and then there is the park. Today, walking the wood-planked path that winds around Hunters Point South, it is difficult to imagine that the playgrounds full of children and walkways crowded with strollers were not planned. The park is gorgeous. Designed by Thomas Balsley of SWA/Balsley, the firm also responsible for Riverside Park South and Chelsea Waterside Park, its open grassy spaces fit neatly in between the iconic neon Pepsi Cola sign, restored gantries, and modern ferry landing. Hunters Point South opened in waves with new sections made public in 2013 and 2018, echoing the swell of new apartment buildings around the park the past ten years.
To walk among the high rises and the impossibly contemporary Hunters Point South is to forget the rest of New York City for a moment, and feel almost suburban. Only wandering back to the subway station to catch the Manhattan-bound 7 train will reveal a more familiar New York City –– taxi maintenance shops, a rough-around-the-edges Dunkin Donuts, a corner knick-knack store with its chain smoking cashier.
Conversations about gentrification and ever-rising expenses can be overheard. But then a daycare teacher walks by pushing a six-seater baby buggy full of chubby-cheeked two year olds, as if there is no place else they’d be but here.