FEATURE ARTICLE, SEPTEMBER 2005

NYC’S 50TH BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT
Long Island City, the gateway to both Queens and Manhattan, is the home of NYC’s 50th business improvement district.
Nicole Thompson

Long Island City’s Business Improvement District (BID), almost 4 years in the making and the 50th BID in New York City, launched on July 19 with a kickoff event at MetLife’s headquarters in Long Island City. Signed into law by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in December 2004, the intervening months until kickoff were filled with organizing the nitty-gritty details of implementing a BID.

“Once you have your BID signed into law, then you have to determine administratively just how that BID is going to be operated,” says Gayle Baron, the executive director of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation (LICBDC), which worked closely with the New York City Department of Small Business Services and the Department of City Planning. “In our case, you are looking at security and sanitation. You then have to decide what you expect from those vendors, send out requests for proposals, determine who the finalists are, interview them, negotiate the contract, and then actually select the vendors to provide those services for you. It's the same as establishing any other type of company — all of the infrastructure, that you have to put in place. And then, of course, having the kick off event itself, which fortunately went very well.”

Services that the BID will offer to business tenants, employees and residents include street maintenance, security and marketing. There are 84 properties in the L-shaped BID footprint, which stretches on Queens Plaza North and South from 21st Street to Queens Plaza East, and along both sides of Jackson Avenue between 45th Avenue/Thomson Avenue (Court Square) and Queens Plaza. The district also includes properties on Queens Street and the 4200 block of Crescent Street.

One of the challenges of establishing the BID stemmed from the character of Long Island City itself — it is very much a true mixed-use community with strong industrial and manufacturing roots, yet the area has branched out considerably to embrace both other commercial uses and residential.

“It was a matter of looking at all of the diverse interests and trying to pick a footprint that would work well in covering the major businesses as well as a lot of the small ones,” says Baron, who will also serve as the executive director of the BID. “The footprint where the BID is located, we have industrial and manufacturing concerns, commercial concerns, small mom and pops, smaller retailers, and then we have the corporate headquarters, so it was a matter of trying to determine, number one, what the best area would be initially. Secondly, we had to create a BID that would be large, but not so large as to make it untenable, but that would also reflect the diversity, because the diversity is really what Long Island City is all about.”

In developing the footprint of the BID, the LICBDC talked to many property owners and residents through one-on-one conversations, letters and surveys.

“We asked the property owners and the existing tenants about their wish list, what things were the most important to them — what areas did they want us to really address initially and they came back and said these are the things that are most important to us, and that's the way in which we really constructed BID goals and priorities,” says Baron.

One of the goals of the BID is to continue work to establish Long Island City as New York City’s fourth business district, along with Midtown Manhattan, Lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. In July 2001, a 37-block area, in which the BID sits, was upzoned by the city to diversify uses and eventually become a spillover centralized location for the city.

With the largest amount of developable land in the area — possibly up to 20 million square feet — and heated development and transaction activity, especially along the waterfront, Long Island City is one of the strongest markets in New York City.

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