A 99-Year Lease and a Parking Lot: A Queens Church Opens a 39-Apartment Building Without Selling Its Land

• A 39-apartment building has opened on a Queens church’s former parking lot
• The church leased the land to Azimuth Development Corp. for 99 years rather than selling it
• About 20% of the units are affordable and let through New York City’s housing lottery
• The church gains new meeting space for its ministry and community groups

A church in Queens, New York, has turned an empty parking lot into an apartment building while keeping ownership of its land. Trinity Family of Astoria/Long Island City announced in December 2019 that a new 39-apartment building had been dedicated on the lot, the result of a 99-year land lease with Azimuth Development Corp.

The building offers studios up to three-bedroom apartments, with a laundry room, a community room and a gymnasium. Around 20 per cent of the units are let at affordable rents to households who qualify through New York City’s housing lottery, with the rest at market rate. CW Realty’s Matt Katz coordinated construction, and the brokerage Nooklyn handled market-rate lettings.

Pastor Paul Milholland watched the project rise with obvious delight. “I was like a little kid, enjoying seeing the large machines digging and building,” he said. “Despite the quick construction, this is a solid steel and concrete building and is quite sturdy.”

For the church, the building is also about space for ministry. “Our desire is to increase our outreach to the Astoria community, as well as having more meeting space for our own growing ministry,” the pastor said. “In the 9 years I have served as pastor here, we have had to turn down several 12-step groups seeking space as we simply had no room for them. We look forward to providing safe space for people to engage in conversation and healing.”

The ground-lease model is increasingly popular with congregations that own more land than they need. Rather than selling, the church lets a developer build and operate homes for decades, keeps the freehold for future generations, and gains facilities or income in return.

Queens is home to a large Jamaican and wider Caribbean community, and many of its churches sit on car parks and side lots that are empty most of the week. The Astoria model is worth studying for congregations there and in Jamaica alike: a long lease, carefully drafted with legal advice, can add homes and ministry space without the church giving up land that members spent generations paying for.

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