JV Plans 55-Story Mixed-Use Tower in Long Island City

Tavros Capital and Charney Companies have closed on the acquisition for $68.3M of a Jackson Avenue development site in Long Island City where the partners are planning to build a 55-story mixed-used tower with up to 600 apartments and 90K of retail and offices. 

The partners are combining the property, located at 24-19 Jackson Avenue, with a neighboring parcel that they own at 45-03 23rd Street to create a site large enough for the high-rise, which will become the one of the tallest residential towers in Queens.

The seller was Toyoko Inn, a Japanese hotel operator, which bought the property in 2007 and filed plans with the city to build a 50-story, 1,200-room hotel. CBRE represented the seller in the transaction.

The buyer and the seller reached an agreement on the deal in May, which enabled the joint venture of Tavros and Charney to complete foundation work for the new development in June—in time for the project to qualify for NYC’s 421a tax abatement, which expired at the end of June.

Toyoko Inn shelved its plans for a hotel and put the property up for sale in December, after the City Council passed a new requirement for developers to obtain special permits before constructing new hotels.

Despite the battering the NYC hotel industry was taking during the pandemic—leading to a “fire sale” of midtown hotels being sold at a loss—the City Council on December 9 adopted a text amendment to the New York City Zoning resolution that imposes a special permit requirement for virtually all new hotels in NYC.

The measure was imposed after lobbying from community groups expressing concern about the impact on neighborhoods of NYC’s growth in tourism in recent decades.

Between 1997 and 2017, the annual number of tourists visiting New York City nearly doubled, from 33M to 63M, and the number of hotel rooms in the city doubled to meet that growth. 

Labor groups also supported the new permit requirement, which they said would ensure that new hotels in the city are high-wage operations.

In January, the Tavros Capital and Charney Companies Partnership bought a full-block site at 318 Nevins Street along a newly rezoned stretch of the Gowanus Canal from Property Markets Group for $102M.

The joint venture will be building a 500K SF apartment building on the site, with an anticipated 660 units. In November, the City Council rezoned a manufacturing neighborhood adjacent to the Canal across an 82-block area to permit mixed-use developments including 8,500 new apartments, of which 3,000 will be designated as income-restricted.

The Gowanus Canal recently emerged from a cleanup under the federal Superfund program.