Jackson Heights was mostly farmland before the turn of the twentieth century. Later, as the construction of the Queensborough Bridge began, Jackson Heights was bought and developed into a bustling, populated neighborhood. ¹ According to a New York Times article Jackson Height was considered as “the parallelogram of land bounded by Roosevelt Avenue on the south, Junction Boulevard on the east, Northern Boulevard on the north, and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway on the west.”²

Jackson Heights is known as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City with more than half of its residents being immigrants. Roosevelt Avenue is a magnet for Latino and South East Asian immigrants in particular. Queens County is one of the most diverse counties in the country; its residents speak more than 100 different languages. The residents of Jackson Heights alone speaks more than 30 different languages, including Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Urdu. According to a New York Time article, “A Migrants’ Enclave Attracts a New Breed” by John Freeman Gill, “Nearly two thirds of residents were board abroad.” ³ This demonstrates the multicultural aspect of New York City, a city consists of people from all over the world.

Approximately 49.95% of Jackson Heights’ population is white, and 17.14% is Asian, which includes Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, etc. Jackson Heights also have a large number of Hispanic populations; the total Hispanic or Latino population is approximately 40,211, which represents 15.11% of the total Hispanic population in New York City. ⁴

Over the last five or six years, most of the new arrivals are coming from shorter distances, such as young professionals from Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Housing prices in Jackson Heights are less expensive than the prices in Manhattan; therefore, people are fleeing from overcrowded and overpriced Manhattan to live in Jackson Heights. For most of the residents, Jackson Heights is a great place to live because it provides easy transportation to many different parts of the city. According to architect Robert A.M. Stern, Jackson Heights is “the mix of urbane apartment and row houses… a model urban suburbia that demonstrates, as none have since, what high-density housing in the city could be.” ⁵