Benenson's 390-Unit Forest Hills Tower Clears City Planning

The City Planning Commission approved the rezoning behind The Frances, Benenson Capital Partners’ 21-story, 390-unit building at 100-12 Queens Boulevard, directly above the 67th Avenue subway station in Forest Hills. Fogarty Finger is the architect. The application now goes to the City Council, which has 50 days to vote.

Why it matters

The number that travels here is the alternative. Without the rezoning, the site supports 96 apartments, none of them income-restricted, over a 109-space parking garage. With it, the building carries 390 apartments and roughly 100 income-restricted units. That is a delta of 294 homes and about 100 affordable units on a single transit-adjacent parcel, and it is the cleanest public arithmetic any sponsor can put in front of a community board or a council member on a City of Yes-era rezoning.

It is also a live test of what an affordability ask is worth. The community board’s land use committee recommended raising the income-restricted share to between 30% and 37%, or 120 to 146 units, against the roughly 25% in the approved plan. The Council now decides whether to hold the line, push the number, or take the 96-unit outcome.

The numbers

City parcel records show what is being replaced. The lot is 20,000 square feet with about 260 feet of Queens Boulevard frontage, carrying a single-story, 17,583 square foot retail building put up in 1951 and holding zero residential units today. It is built to 0.88 FAR in an R7-1 district that already permits 3.44 residential FAR, so the site is developed to roughly a quarter of what its existing zoning allows before any rezoning is considered. That underuse is the argument for the application and the reason the as-of-right fallback still pencils at 96 units.

The retail tenants on the block, among them Andre’s Hungarian Bakery, Fruit Ranch and The Bund, would be displaced.

What’s next

The Council vote inside 50 days is the decision point, and Queens land-use items of this size are typically negotiated on the affordability percentage rather than the height. For developers holding underbuilt transit-adjacent parcels in the outer boroughs, the outcome sets the going rate. See our New York coverage for the rest of the borough pipeline.