New hotels are checking in: Able Management Group’s new hotel development project on Sutphin Boulevard will have 240 rooms, a full-service restaurant and 10,000 SF of retail space. There’s a 155-room hotel with a theme restaurant being planned. All of these will be just steps away from the sleek glass tower of our existing JFK AirTrain, and LIRR Jamaica Station.

We have a broad trade area with over 670,000 residents in a 3-mile radius. They have an average household income of $75,000, and spend more than $6.5 billion each year on retail goods and services. However, most of that spending leaks out of Downtown Jamaica: we have $3.7 billion in unsatisfied annual retail demand. Of course, that doesn’t even count the spending of our office worker population, our international visitors coming to and from JFK Airport, and the students at CUNY-York College, or nearby St. John’s University.

New housing has been popping up all over Downtown from The Dermot Group’s sleek MODA apartment complex with 346 units and more than 50,000 SF of retail space (including an Associated Supermarket, and CityRib Restaurant). Yorkside Towers added another 180 apartments and recently completed Park Haven Apartments has 102 units. The Bluestone Organization is opening Norman Towers, a nine-story, twin tower mixed-use building with 101 residential units, office and retail space. Housing is just part of the story; Blumenfeld Development Group is building a new 180,000 SF retail complex, and we still have 4,320,000 SF available for development in the Station Area.