The designation
New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced on July 29, 2026 that it had selected a development team for Parcel E at 54-42 2nd Street in Hunter's Point South, Long Island City — a 70,000-square-foot site that has sat vacant since it was assembled for the city's failed 2012 Olympics bid.
The project, called The Orion, is planned at 983 homes across three buildings. Of those, 658 — two-thirds — would be permanently affordable, with rents spanning households earning between 20% and 120% of area median income. A further 149 units are set aside for formerly homeless individuals.
Total project cost has been reported at $650 million to $700 million. The team comprises Slate Property Group, The Hudson Companies and Volunteers of America–Greater New York, with Marvel Architects designing and the nonprofit Commonpoint operating a daycare, workforce centre and pool on site.
How it is paid for
The financing stack combines HPD capital subsidies, low-income housing tax credits, a property tax exemption and private equity. It is the first deployment of HPD's Mixed Income Market Initiative framework.
The AMI band is the detail that determines who actually lives there. A range running from 20% to 120% is unusually wide for a single New York project, covering households on very low incomes through to those earning above the regional median — a deliberate cross-subsidy structure in which higher-band rents help carry the deepest affordability.
Where it sits in a larger plan
Parcel E is part of the 30-acre Hunter's Point South plan, expected to total roughly 5,000 homes with about 3,000 affordable. That in turn sits inside the broader Long Island City neighbourhood rezoning approved by the City Council in November under the Adams administration, which projected 14,700 new homes across 54 blocks, including 4,300 affordable.
Analysis: the sequencing here is the point. A rezoning establishes what may be built; a developer designation with a financing framework establishes what will be. The gap between those two steps is where most large New York housing projections are lost, and this designation moves roughly a thousand homes across it.
What has not happened yet
This is a developer designation, not a groundbreaking. The land sale remains subject to regulatory approval, and an HPD spokesperson has said construction is expected to begin in the next few years rather than on a fixed date.
Readers should treat the unit count as a planned figure that can change as the project moves through approvals and financing, since the land sale itself remains subject to regulatory approval.
For the Long Island City market, the near-term effect is on expectations rather than supply: nothing is added to the rental stock until the buildings open, which on a project of this scale is years away.
How the site was chosen
HPD released the request for proposals for Parcel E on June 13, 2025, following a community visioning process, and set a submission deadline of September 5, 2025. The winning team was chosen from that competitive process and announced on July 29, 2026, roughly ten months after bids were due.
HPD Commissioner Dina Levy announced the designation, and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards joined the announcement, saying the city could not leave any options unexplored in expanding its housing supply. Volunteers of America–Greater New York, the nonprofit co-developer, said in its own statement that the project would include 150 apartments for formerly homeless individuals, a figure the city's release put at 149; both descriptions point to the same set-aside within the 658 affordable units.
Not the only Orion in Queens
The name is not unique to this site: a separate, already-built affordable building known as Orion Sunnyside exists roughly two miles away at 43-46 39th Place in Sunnyside, Queens, with units listed through the city's Housing Connect lottery system. The two projects are unrelated beyond sharing a name.