The Rockaway Peninsula in Queens attracts millions of New Yorkers each increasingly sweltering summer, who arrive by car, subway, ferry, or bike in droves to luxuriate along a 7-mile-long stretch of public beaches. These perennial visitors may be less familiar with the dense residential neighborhoods on the peninsula’s eastern tip, such as the long-neglected Edgemere, where New York’s “first net-zero community,” Arverne East, is rising. Led by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the nearly $1 billion project will provide 1,650 units of housing when the final phase is completed in 2031. Eighty percent of the apartments will be affordable, designated for formerly homeless and low-to-middle- income households.

A multi-purpose nature and welcome center with all-important public bathroom facilities, designed by WXY architecture + urban design, was completed late last year as part of the development’s first phase, which also includes a 35-acre nature preserve by landscape architecture studio Starr Whitehouse. Descending from the subway on a brisk winter day, I spotted the new building immediately from across Rockaway Freeway—though diminutive and low-slung, it is striking against the coastal backdrop. It sits in the middle of the development site’s length, which stretches just over a mile from Beach 56th Place to Beach 32nd Street, with the lush planting and meandering paths of the preserve to the project’s west, and a still-barren construction site, pending future housing, to its east.