35-18 Steinway Street

Innovation QNS was going to be a $2 billion, 2,800-unit district stretching across Astoria. It died in 2025. What survives is the rezoning, and the first serious building to come out of it has now been filed: 35-18 Steinway Street, a 560-unit, 498,000-square-foot mixed-use project from BedRock Real Estate Partners and a subsidiary of L+M Development Partners. Beyer Blinder Belle is the architect.

Project Scope

The program is residential over ground-floor commercial on one of the two Astoria sites BedRock controls. Silverstein Properties, which led the original Innovation QNS venture alongside BedRock and Kaufman Astoria Studios, is out. L+M brings a long track record on mixed-income deals and the tax-credit and HPD machinery that comes with them.

At 560 units on a single site, this is meaningfully denser than what the pre-rezoning zoning allowed. It is also a fraction of what the master plan promised, which is the whole point of the story.

Why It Matters

Megaproject rezonings in New York keep producing the same outcome: the community fight is over the master plan, the master plan collapses, and the entitlement quietly gets harvested by smaller developers building smaller buildings a few years later. Hudson Yards is the exception. Astoria is the rule.

That is not necessarily a bad result for housing supply. It is a terrible result for the affordability commitments negotiated in the rezoning, which were tied to the master plan. Of the 2,800 original units, more than 700 were meant to be permanently affordable. Whether the successor projects deliver a proportional share is the question the City Council will be asked about the next time a developer brings a district-scale rezoning to Queens.

Project Team & Details