Cord Meyer builds 145 rentals atop its own parking decks

Cord Meyer Development has broken ground on 145 rental residences at the Bay Terrace Shopping Center in Bayside, Queens: two five-story buildings that Connect CRE says will rise on underutilized upper-level parking areas off 26th Avenue and cost more than $100 million. The parking is the part that matters. Cord Meyer developed Bay Terrace more than 60 years ago, and building on decks the company already controls likely means the ground carries a decades-old basis rather than a 2026 acquisition price—in a borough rental, that is most of the margin: no land bid to win, no assemblage to finance. Danielle Molaison, Cord Meyer's vice president of development, frames the start around demand, pointing to one of the borough's most pressing needs and to a community where people want to stay. Whether the deck was designed with a future residential conversion in mind, and how the $100 million-plus is capitalized, do not appear in the coverage; those two blanks cover a meaningful share of the project's economics.

Callahan Construction Managers is the general contractor, the same firm building 70 Westchester Avenue, Cord Meyer's 203-unit residential development under construction in White Plains. Running two residential jobs at once under one builder is a pipeline commitment rather than a site decision; developers who expect to be finished after one building do not schedule that way.

This publication has argued that in multifamily the operator, not the asset, is the underwriting unit. Bay Terrace is that thesis at its cheapest, because the company that will lease and manage these units also owns the land and deck underneath them, so returns do not hinge on winning a bid or on rent growth arriving on schedule. The refinancing wall is a duration transfer from banks to private credit rather than a distress event, so an owner with no fresh land basis and no legacy maturity to outrun sits on the right side of the repricing. $100 million-plus against 145 units works out to more than $690,000 a door if that is the all-in cost, a Bayside figure that clears only because nobody had to bid for the ground.

The 203 units in White Plains will finish first. After that, a second residential building over the same Bay Terrace decks would say Cord Meyer has concluded its parking lots are the cheapest land it will ever own.