Muss Development might be billing its new Sky View Parc condos as “luxury residences,” but there’s nothing upscale at the moment about the 14-acre Flushing, Queens, site where the waterfront complex is slated to rise.
Across the street heading east is the Bland Houses housing project. To the west sits the Van Wyck Expressway and the olfactory assault of Flushing Creek. Rumbling aboveground just north of the property is the 7 train. Just south is the Long Island Rail Road. Overhead, jets out of LaGuardia Airport roar past every several minutes.
As for the actual construction site, it sits atop a former brownfield that required environmental remediation before development was possible.
So, this isn’t exactly a bucolic paradise.
Waterfront property is waterfront property, though, and Flushing and its sleepy neighbor to the north, College Point, lately have seen a number of developers lay stake to spots along the shorelines of Flushing Creek and the East River.
By the time Sky View Parc is complete, Muss principal Jason Muss says, landscaping will hide the surrounding train track. A waterfront esplanade will sweep residents into the Flushing Meadow park. And 1,100 luxury apartments will rise above an 800,000-square-foot retail center.
“At the end of the day, the site is going to be totally transformed,” he says.
So far, people seem to be buying the pitch. Since going to market in mid-February, the development has sold roughly 100 units at around $650 a square foot – about $150 more per square foot than is typical for the neighborhood.
Wells Fargo employee Bo Chen already owns a condo in central Flushing, but after looking over plans for the project at Sky View Parc’s Web site, he decided to buy one of the development’s two-bedroom units. He’s excited about the complex’s future retail center, where there’s talk of a supermarket, a home-improvement store, music and home-furnishing big-box stores and restaurants.
“Right now we don’t really have any American restaurants except places like McDonald’s,” Chen says. “This will make the neighborhood more diverse.”
Woodside resident Ace Watanasuparp, a home-loan manager who works in Flushing, bought a one-bedroom penthouse at the complex when sales started this winter.
“The potential for this neighborhood is tremendous. I think that a lot of people see this and that’s why they’re buying,” he says.
There are relatively few developments in Flushing with the level of services and amenities offered at Sky View Parc, notes Sam Suzuki, a principal with the Vintage Group, a New York-based real estate investment firm.
Sky View Parc aside, however, Suzuki isn’t particularly bullish on Flushing. In fact, Suzuki says, his company has been selling off its land holdings in the area since 2004.
“We believe the market there right now has hit its high point,” he says.
But this isn’t exactly stopping developers.
Just north of the Muss site, the Lev Group plans to turn another riverside brownfield into a 459-unit, LEED-certified condo development (pricing to be announced), with attached retail and commercial space.
The development, Lev CEO Eddie Shapiro claims, will be even more high-end than Sky View Parc.
“We’re going with something a lot more upscale,” he says. “We’re going to have amenities like a nutrition center, a feng shui consultant. We’re bringing a Manhattan-style project.”
Somewhat more modest are the projects popping up to the north along the College Point waterfront. There, in developments like Soundview Pointe – a collection of 86 two-family townhomes – waterfront property can be had for as little as $300 a square foot (a price that makes the 20-minute bus ride from the Main Street 7 stop seem more tolerable).
“You’re not going to find any waterfront property in the city at this price that I know of,” says Rocky Meli, a principal with Soundview developer JTR College Point.
The first 37-unit phase of the project is 90 percent sold. Locals from nearby neighborhoods like Whitestone and Bayside have made up the bulk of the development’s customers, along with a number of empty-nesters looking to leave detached houses in Nassau and Suffolk counties for lower-maintenance properties closer to the city.
Next door to Soundview, AVR Homebuilders is looking to lure the same sort of buyers with Powell Cove Estates, a 201-unit condo development slated to go on sale this August at around $400 a square foot. When complete, the project will also include a 7-acre riverside park.
“It’s kind of a rural setting in an urban area,” says AVR executive vice president Mark Eickelbeck, describing both the development site and College Point – a placid, low-lying neighborhood dominated by detached single-family homes on leafy, generous (by New York standards, anyway) lots.
“It’s a very quaint, quiet neighborhood,” says Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Alexandra Tsiatis, who is representing the Waterview Marina condo – a development along College Point’s western waterfront where prices have hovered in the $500-per-square-foot range.
Not that “quaint” is exactly what the Waterview is going for. The building, which features private rooftop cabanas, strikes area broker Wayne Rose of Century 21 Weber & Rose as “a little bit of Long Island City coming to College Point.”
Whether College Point is quite ready for that is another issue. After over a year on the market, less than half the building’s units have sold and 22 of the 34 apartments are now available for rent.
Nonetheless, a seven-lot plot next to the Waterview is being marketed by the Massey Knakal firm as a potential residential site.
And, Rose suggests, there’s reason for optimism.
“There aren’t that many places in the city where you can be on the water,” he says. “We have something unique here.”