Most visitors to New York City think of Queens as the place where they arrive and leave via the airports—but it turns out that the borough is increasingly where travelers rest their heads at night.
Queens is leading the outer boroughs in new hotel development, spurred by one of its hottest neighborhoods, Long Island City, which has become a magnet for nearly every prominent hotel brand. Queens added about 500 rooms this year through mid-April, or 9% more than the same period last year, according to STR, a research firm that tracks hotel data. By contrast, Brooklyn did not generate any new hotel rooms during the same period.
Queens may not enjoy Brooklyn's cachet, but it dwarfs its hipper neighbor in hotel rooms. There are 10,489 rooms in Queens compared with just 3,986 in Kings County (of course, they both lag far behind Manhattan's 86,044). The majority of hotels in Queens are clustered around LaGuardia and JFK, but the significant growth is occurring outside the airport markets.
Long Island City may be trying to be Queens' answer to Williamsburg, but it has a way to go before it can command Brooklyn's room rates and wide recognition. The average daily rate in Brooklyn during the first four months of this year was $153, compared with $128 in Queens, according to STR.
What's more, despite rapid residential development, Long Island City still lags in amenities that would lure visitors.
"There are not enough restaurants in Long Island City to handle all the residents," said Ravi Patel, who opened the Ravel Hotel in 2008, a boutique property at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge.
5 comments:
From what I hear from friends that are staying at these places, they are very cheaply built - you can hear what is going on next door.
Having worked in the hotel industry I can tell you that these buildings need plenty of attention - the constant flow of traffic makes them wear out very quickly.
Manhattan has the high end of the market, Brooklyn is not really convenient, and the airports are great places for sleepovers or the mid-westerners who are used to this set-up.
The desire for restaurants is a pipe dream: hipsters work and socialize in Manhattan and there are lingering doubts about eating in places that were bathed by the rivers during the last storms.
Most of the housing around Queens Plaza, as was revealed by the blog are filled with tech drones who will not be permanent nor are the stuff you build a community (but of course are perfect constituents for the politicians who run this place which is why they are pushing tech.)
The hotels will be useful for 10 or 20 years before they get run down and become no-tell hotels.
SROs and dumping grounds for Section 8 lie in their future. And due to the tender mercies of Dutch Kills Civic and UCCA there will be no civic organizations that can fight this.
I would never invest long term in LIC for this reason. It is being built with the same charm as cities in the former Communist Block and filled with the spillover from a Capetown slum or a Brazilian favela.
But those responsible, developers and their purchased politicians will be long gone.
My son will be going away to college this fall - so I want the world to know that the hotel built 5 feet from his bedroom is now open to a film crew who would like to make porno movies but don't have to worry about paying the actors and actresses.
There aren't enough restaurants by Ravel because he is in an industrial bridge-wasteland area right next to a ghetto. There are plenty of restaurants on Vernon Blvd. by the train stations however few are "Manhattan-caliber" or quality enough that the tower people would frequent them regularly.
very sad reasons to build up Queens with cheaply built and looking hotels.
27 hotels and most are all but empty.
Looks like Penny Lee of City Planning and George Stamatiades of the library board did some great planning.
or perhaps no planning.
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