Lumen — Long Island City Rental Tower

Long Island City has produced a lot of tall residential buildings this cycle. Lumen is the biggest of them. The 66-storey, 731-foot tower at 23-15 44th Road holds 938 rental apartments in about 838,000 square feet, which puts it among the tallest buildings in Queens and one of the largest single-phase rental buildings delivered in New York City this decade.

Project Scope

The program stacks 938 rental units above a lower-level office component and 17,400 square feet of ground-floor retail. Piling and foundation work started in 2022; the structure topped out and the exterior was wrapped through 2025, with completion in the first half of 2026. Reported total project cost is around $564 million, with the site acquired for roughly $200 million.

Carmel Partners developed it with FSA Capital. Hill West Architects designed the tower, and Carmel Construction East, the developer’s in-house builder, ran construction. JLL holds the leasing and marketing assignment for the office component.

Why It Matters

Nine hundred and thirty-eight apartments in one structure is a scale of concrete residential construction that barely exists in New York outside Hudson Yards. Getting there means a single tower crane cycle running for years, a repetitive floor plate that has to be right the first time, and a curtain wall order large enough to occupy a fabricator’s line on its own.

The delivery model is the part worth studying. Carmel Partners self-performs through Carmel Construction East rather than hiring a third-party GC, which is uncommon at this height on the East Coast and rare at this unit count anywhere. It gives the developer direct control of buyout and schedule, and it puts all the construction risk on the same balance sheet as the development risk. Lumen also drops a large tranche of units into an LIC submarket already absorbing heavy 2026 supply, which is the lease-up question the market will actually judge it on.

Project Team & Details