It’s really been cool to see the emergence of 3 distinct clusters form over the last couple decades and really accelerate in recent years. These 3 clusters are downtown Jersey City, LIC Queens, and downtown Brooklyn. 30 years ago these were not high-rise areas, save for a small handful of one off buildings. I’m curious how does everyone see these evolving in the next 10 to 20 years? And what would you consider to be the most exciting under construction/proposed project in each of the clusters?
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Downtown Brooklyn is the cluster to watch. It has the most potential for tall developments because the FAA seems to have set their sights on LIC for its proximity to LGA. LIC will of course become much more dense - hopefully with more office and mixed use towers. The East river waterfront will sprawl from LIC to past the Williamsburg Bridge, and tall towers will be built on the Lower East Side waterfront in Manhattan. Journal Square in JC will be a cluster of its own worth. JC will look extra beefy with the addition of the Hudson Exchange West buildings
However, I must point out the potential for new clusters to pop up in the next 20 years. Jamaica is building up highrises around its airtrain station. New Rochelle, though not apart of the city proper, is also set to explode with highrise developments. We might even see developers pushing to building taller in the South Bronx, leading to a new cluster of tall highrises somewhere up there.
tl;dr - there’s a lot to look forward to.
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Let’s also not forget the downtown area of Newark. It might not be close enough to Manhattan but there’s a lot of potential there as well. They’ve recently showed a rendering of the redevelopment of Bears Stadium, there’s the proposal for higher density and taller buildings in the Ironbound near Newark Penn, and there’s SoMa which has huge prospects. So there’s plenty to watch there too, maybe a few years from now, in that 20 year timeline.
I do agree that Downtown Brooklyn is the cluster to watch, even though I’m a JC resident 
. There’s a lot of FAA restrictions in downtown JC as well as Journal Square that have already hampered 99 Hudson and One Journal Square. So probably no supertalls in JC in the foreseeable future.
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Newark is about as close to downtown/midtown Manhattan as Jamaica is. If it ever sprouts 40-50-story buildings, they’ll be visible from some vantage points in the city–my favorite is the top of Sunset Park, where you can see Downtown Brooklyn, Downtown Manhattan, Midtown Manhattan, and JC (both downtown and JSQ) all in a single view. I’m sure on a clear day you’d be able to see a cluster of tall buildings in Newark from up there too, if it ever develops.
I have to say I find it amusing that two places named for the archetypal ‘burbs’–Long Island City and Jersey City–are in many ways the future of dense vertical urbanism in the NYC region. These places have a lot in common, including similar origins in the early 19th century as steamboat suburbs of NYC, similar history of growth as railyard hubs, similar architecture, similar geography and proximity to Manhattan, and today, they are the two main places alleviating the city’s housing shortage through the construction of tens of thousands of apartments.
Brooklyn will undoubtedly take the grown for the tallest and baddest towers, but Long Island City and Jersey City are where it’s at in terms of sheer number of future highrises and density.
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LIC, the blue man group of the three outer skylines
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Cool angle. Very balanced from that pov, just needs one right down the middle. The FAA needs to let LIC build just one 1k footer to break the plateau.
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Long Island City reminds me of the less posh and fancy version of Canary Wharf in London. It also had a very similar pattern of development to it. Canary Wharf had One Canada Square as the only skyscraper throughout the whole 1990s before other buildings have risen… Long Island City had One Court Square before the 2000/2010s construction boom as a standalone skyscraper…But while Canary Wharf is one of two main skyscraper clusters in London, LIC is only a secondary skyline in NYC. 
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Nice viewpoint! That’s a gigantic patch of land on the lower left… anything slated for there?
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That is the site of Gowanus Green, which is currently stuck in legal purgatory
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This thread is now 7.5 years old, so it’s fun to look back and see that these 3 clusters still have new construction.
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What new clusters will sprout out this decade?
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Bayonne and Newark
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Bayonne (at the Military Ocean Terminal), maybe?
The zoning is there but the question is whether it will be financially feasible and able to attract investors. Is it close enough to Manhattan? Is the transit good enough? Is it desirable enough to live in to support the expense of high-density high-rise construction?
Another place that has some potential in terms of zoning is Yonkers (maybe? not sure exactly how much has high-rise zoning). I think if Fort Lee decided to zone for high-rises more extensively, it would quickly become a cluster, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Same with St George on Staten Island.
Bayonne Military Ocean Terminal renderings:
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St George in Staten Island should have BEEN had a skyscraper cluster by now. Every borough should have multiple clusters in my opinion…Brooklyn, Queens, and ofc Manhattan already have multiple.
NYC in the future should resemble Tokyo where there’s highrises all over the place.
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Journal Square Jersey City is distinct from the waterfront and that’s emerged as a new cluster and should only get more high rises… Hallets Point in Astoria, Mott Haven, and the Greenpoint waterfront are all mini clusters.
I don’t know how much is left to build on, but if that little slice of Mott Haven has more room for expansion and the current units are selling well (are they?) I can see it growing.
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Coney Island should be another cluster that should be coming soon. Blows my mind on prime beachfront real estate we just have a little theme park, housing projects, and parking lots right on the beach. Any other city would have been developed the area appropriately. That area should be a little Miami with lots of high rises, shit bring in the fake palm trees too and clean the boardwalk/beach up. Too much potential in Coney not being realized. And it has lots of subway connections
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Where I think all the skyscraper clusters will be over the next couple decades. The typical ones, plus Newark, Red Hook, Fort Lee, northern Staten Island and Flushing. That big tower is being built there, so why not?
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Coney Island casino?