Developer joins Jamaica development wave with 300K sf resi plans

Another project is joining the development party in Jamaica, Queens. 

Heartfelt Townhouse Build’s Joel Weiss filed plans for a 303,000-square-foot building at 94-15 Sutphin Boulevard, Crain’s reported. The 13-story project will stand 138 feet tall and has 238 residential units in its design.

There will be retail space on the first floor of the project, which is being developed on a vacant site. There will also be a 338-space parking garage stretching from the cellar to the third floor.

JFA Architects and Engineers is the designer on the project. Weiss did not respond to Crain’s request for comment, leaving other specifics like a construction timeline up in the air.

The site sold in late 2021 for $59.7 million to limited liability company Sutphin Boulevard Equities.

The Queens neighborhood is becoming a hotbed of development activity, landing near the top of The Real Deal’s analysis of the city’s Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) database. Jamaica ranked second in the city with a net gain of 1,047 homes last year, 6.73 percent of its housing stock — only Brooklyn’s Fort Greene fared better.

FBE Limited, operated by the Fruchthandlers, recently acquired a development site along 165th Street and Merrick Boulevard for $51.5 million. The firm is planning to redevelop the 2.6-acre site into a large mixed-use project; the site has about 557,000 square feet of buildable space.

Meredith Marshall’s BRP Companies in July landed $378 million in construction financing from Tammy Jones’ Basis Investment Group for a 614-unit residential building on 168th Street. About one-third of the building’s units will be designed as affordable housing.

BRP also has two other big projects in the neighborhood, a 604-unit development on Archer Avenue and a recently completed 539-unit development on the same avenue.

— Holden Walter-Warner