St. George is the neighborhood most visitors encounter first when they arrive on Staten Island — and for good reason. It sits at the northeastern tip of the borough, right where the Staten Island Ferry deposits its passengers, and it is the civic, administrative, and increasingly cultural heart of the island. But in 2026, St. George is on the verge of something much larger than what most New Yorkers associate with it. A proposed waterfront development of historic scale is moving through the city’s approval process, and if it goes forward, it will transform the neighborhood’s waterfront from an underused stretch into one of the most ambitious mixed-use communities the borough has ever seen.

The Plan: 2,500 Homes on the Waterfront

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has put forward a plan to transform two adjacent waterfront sites in St. George into a dense mixed-use neighborhood. The two sites are the Empire Outlets retail complex — which has struggled commercially since opening — and the former site of the New York Wheel, the giant Ferris wheel project that was cancelled after years of delays and became an embarrassing vacant lot on prime waterfront land.

Combined, the plan would deliver up to 2,500 new homes serving a range of income levels, more than 20 acres of new public space, and what the city describes as over 7,500 family-sustaining jobs. The investment commitment is roughly $400 million. The rezoning required for the project entered the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) in the first half of 2026, with city approval potentially coming in 2027 if the process moves on schedule.

For St. George residents, the implications are significant. The neighborhood already absorbs a high volume of ferry commuters passing through each day. Adding thousands of new residents, while promising in terms of vitality and tax base, will place real demands on transit, parking, and infrastructure that community members are already raising concerns about.

What’s Already There: A Waterfront Comeback Already in Progress

It would be a mistake to frame the St. George waterfront as entirely undeveloped — a genuine revival has already been underway for several years. The 115-unit Lighthouse Point development, after nearly a decade of delays and false starts, launched in 2025 and brought new residential units to the waterfront for the first time in a generation. Empire Outlets, despite its commercial challenges, brought a physical transformation to the seafront and remains operational.

SIUH Community Park — home of the Staten Island FerryHawks, the borough’s independent baseball team — sits steps from the ferry terminal and has become a genuine gathering spot for families on summer evenings. The National Lighthouse Museum, a small but genuinely excellent institution documenting the history of American lighthouses, operates on the waterfront and is worth an afternoon for anyone who has never been. The Postcards 9/11 memorial, designed by architect Masayuki Sono and dedicated in 2004, stands at the water’s edge and remains one of the most affecting public memorials in all of New York City.

The St. George Theatre: A Cultural Anchor

A block from the ferry terminal, the St. George Theatre is one of the great hidden gems of New York’s performing arts landscape. Built in 1929 as a vaudeville and movie palace, the 2,800-seat venue was saved from demolition through a years-long community campaign and has been operating as a performing arts center since 2004. It hosts concerts, comedy shows, Broadway touring productions, and community events on a scale that would be unimaginable in a neighborhood of comparable size anywhere else in the city. If you haven’t been — and most New Yorkers haven’t — the programming calendar is worth checking at stgeorgetheatre.com.

Getting Around From St. George

St. George’s primary connection to the rest of New York City is the Staten Island Ferry, which runs 24 hours a day and is completely free. The crossing to Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan takes 25 minutes and offers one of the best views of New York Harbor available to anyone without a boat. From St. George, the Staten Island Railway — the only above-ground rapid transit line in the borough — connects to neighborhoods throughout Staten Island’s east shore.

For drivers, the Staten Island Expressway is accessible nearby, and the Bayonne Bridge (connecting to New Jersey) and Goethals Bridge are both reachable within minutes. St. George is, by Staten Island standards, extremely well-connected — which is part of why the new waterfront development is being proposed there rather than elsewhere on the island.

Infrastructure Concerns and Community Voice

Not everyone in St. George is enthusiastic about the scale of proposed development. A cluster of marquee projects planned for the area around Hamilton Avenue and Stuyvesant Place would together add close to 1,000 residential units while providing only around 500 off-street parking spaces. Residents and local officials have warned that without significant infrastructure investment, the density could overwhelm the neighborhood’s roads, utilities, and transit capacity.

The civic community in St. George — represented in part by the St. George Civic Association — has been engaged on these issues for years. If you’re a resident who wants to weigh in on the ULURP process for the waterfront development, community board meetings are the place to do it, and the clock is running.

What You Need to Know

• A plan to build up to 2,500 homes on the Empire Outlets and former New York Wheel sites entered the ULURP process in early 2026. City approval could come in 2027.
• The $400 million project would also create 20+ acres of public space and thousands of new jobs on the St. George waterfront.
• Lighthouse Point’s 115-unit residential development launched in 2025, marking the return of waterfront housing to St. George.
• The Staten Island Ferry (free, 24/7) connects St. George to Lower Manhattan in 25 minutes — the borough’s primary transit link.
• The St. George Theatre hosts major concerts and performances at stgeorgetheatre.com — an underappreciated venue for all of NYC.
• Infrastructure concerns around parking and transit are central to the community conversation about what kind of development St. George can absorb.

St. George has always been the place where Staten Island meets the rest of New York. For most of the past several decades, that meeting has been a quick walk through the ferry terminal and a bus ride to somewhere else. The plan now on the table would make St. George itself a destination — a place people come to, not just through. Whether the neighborhood can absorb that transformation gracefully is the defining question of the next several years. The conversation is open, and residents have a real role to play in shaping what comes next.