A decade ago, Long Island City was a cautionary tale. Glass towers shot up along the East River, promising a glittering new skyline, but the streets below were eerily empty. Walking through Court Square felt less like exploring a neighborhood and more like navigating a sterile construction site. There were no bookstores, no bagel shops, no places where neighbors might casually bump into each other. It was a place you passed through, not a place you belonged to.
Today, those same streets hum with life. On a recent Thursday morning, I watched a line of forty people snake down Jackson Avenue outside Utopia Bagels, a beloved Queens institution that opened its LIC location this spring. Next door, a small independent bookstore hosted a children's story hour. Across the street, young professionals took swings at Five Iron Golf's simulators while museum-goers spilled out of MoMA PS1, animatedly discussing the art they'd just seen. These weren't just busy shops and crowded sidewalks—they were signs of civic vitality, evidence that a once-sterile development had matured into a real neighborhood.
For years, Long Island City embodied the worst fears of modern urban development: density without soul, rapid growth measured in raw numbers rather than lived experience. Planners focused on building vertically - towers, unit counts, floor-area ratios - without giving much thought to what life at street level would feel like. By 2017, LIC had more new housing than any other neighborhood in New York City. The population surged from roughly 35,000 to 63,000 between 2010 and 2023, an astonishing 78 percent increase in just over a decade. Yet for all those new residents, there was little sense of community. The 7 train platforms at Court Square became dangerously overcrowded. Streets designed for trucks were unsafe and unpleasant for pedestrians. At night, you could see lights glowing in hundreds of windows, proof that people lived there. By day, the sidewalks were eerily empty. The towers housed thousands of people, but they lived side by side without truly sharing a neighborhood. It was proximity without connection; a physical closeness that lacked the civic fabric to turn residents into a community. Local institutions and everyday relationships give density its meaning. Without them, a place is just buildings and bodies, not a functioning neighborhood.
That began to change slowly, and then all at once. Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist, has written argued many times in books like the Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the magic of cities. But that magic doesn't appear automatically. It has to be cultivated, nurtured through planning, infrastructure, and cultural choices. In recent years, three shifts in particular transformed LIC's civic ecosystem and made street-level life not only possible but vibrant.
First, transit reliability improved. By mid-2025, weekday subway on-time performance reached 83.7 percent, a marked improvement over pre-pandemic levels. Buses now exceed 95 percent reliability, and ridership citywide is up 10 percent from last year. These may seem like dry statistics, but they translate directly into lived experience. Without dependable public transit, density simply means congestion and frustration. With it, streets are freed from parking battles and cars, allowing them to function as public spaces rather than storage facilities.
Second, public parks became the civic living rooms of the neighborhood. The completion of Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park in 2018 turned eleven acres of industrial wasteland into a vibrant communal space where families picnic, kids play, and strangers become neighbors. Next year, The Baseline will add another acre beneath the bridge ramps, featuring art installations, play areas, and dog runs. Parks are not decorative extras. They are essential institutions, as vital to the health of a city as sewers or power lines. The fact of the matter is that shared public spaces build trust and social capital by creating opportunities for repeated, informal interactions- the often unseen but very strong glue of community life.
Finally, the ground floors of buildings came alive. Consider Sven, a 67-story tower at Queens Plaza. Its nearly 1,000 units might have been just another anonymous vertical stack of apartments, but its design prioritized the street level. Restaurants, retail shops, and the restored Clock Tower now line the sidewalk. Jane Jacobs famously wrote about the importance of "eyes on the street," and she was right: every open storefront adds safety, interest, and reasons to linger rather than rush home behind locked doors.
These changes didn't just alter the feel of the neighborhood; they altered its trajectory. Nowhere was this clearer than in the saga of Amazon's abandoned HQ2 plan. When Amazon announced in February 2019 that it was canceling its massive LIC campus after fierce local opposition, Governor Andrew Cuomo called it "the greatest tragedy" of his tenure. Many feared the neighborhood would stall without the tech giant's investment. But the opposite happened. Freed from the gravitational pull of one dominant employer, growth diversified. Small businesses, mid-sized firms, and local entrepreneurs filled the void. By the end of 2019, Modern Spaces reported selling 160 more units in six months than in all of 2018. Commercial interest didn't vanish; t multiplied.
This was an important lesson. Cities do not need a single corporate savior. They thrive when thousands of smaller actors make investments and take risks. Community strength comes from pluralism and diversity of contributors, not top-down dominance. The Amazon chapter taught LIC that resilience is built from the bottom up.
The arrival of Utopia Bagels this May captured this spirit perfectly. On opening day, the line for free bagels stretched down the block. People weren't just there for food - they were there for belonging. MoMA PS1 continues to draw over 200,000 visitors annually, and its Warm Up summer series fills the streets with music and conversation. Even Five Iron Golf, with its seven simulators, has become an unlikely gathering spot where neighbors meet for drinks and casual play. These institutions - whether cultural, culinary, or recreational - are more than amenities. They are the "third places" sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified as vital for civic life. They create the sidewalk ballet Jacobs celebrated, the choreography of daily routines that builds trust and connection.
But this success brings new challenges. Market-rate rents at Sven now range from $3,700 to $7,800 a month OneLIC rezoning could add 14,700 new units, with 4,300 designated as "affordable,"but in practice "affordable" often means out of reach for teachers, artists, and service workers. If working- and middle-class families are priced out, LIC risks becoming a monoculture of affluence; a vibrant stage set with no diversity behind the scenes. Infrastructure is also straining under the weight of rapid growth. Schools are overcrowded. The local police precinct was never designed to serve so many residents. Even the sewer system struggles to keep up. And some longtime residents feel displaced, not just physically but culturally, as the pace of change accelerates. These are not side issues. They are existential questions about what kind of community LIC will ultimately become.
For other cities grappling with similar pressures, LIC's evolution offers practical lessons. Link housing to reliable transit so density doesn't just create gridlock. Treat public space as essential infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Support local businesses and cultural anchors that give neighborhoods authenticity and character. Require active, human-scale design at street level and build housing that genuinely includes people across the economic spectrum. None of these ideas are radical. They were once the common sense of American city building. Somewhere along the way, we forgot them.
Last week, I sat in one of LIC's new pocket parks, watching children chase each other while parents chatted on benches. A street musician strummed his guitar as cyclists coasted past on a protected bike lane. Just a few years ago, this exact spot was a fenced-off construction site filled with rusting equipment. For a long time, I walked these streets with frustration, seeing only what was missing. Today, I walk them with hope and excitement, continually discovering new spaces and places that remind me how vibrant urban life can be when density is shaped by vision and care.
The Manhattan skyline still looms to the west, but LIC no longer feels like just another bedroom for Manhattan workers. It has its own rhythms, its own character, its own civic life. We've proven that density isn't destiny. With patience, planning, and the kind of institutional strength that comes from diverse stakeholders working together - local businesses, cultural organizations, and resident groups; even the most barren landscape can become home. Done right, density and community are not enemies, they are partners. LIC shows what is possible when a city remembers that it is building not just towers but places where life can flourish.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Graph: Joe Mabel Flickr, under CC 3.0 License.
Email this Story
