The mayor’s administration suffered a setback in 2006, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company announced plans to move two-thirds of its employees back to Manhattan from the Brewster Building on Queens Plaza North. Only five years earlier, the insurance giant had made a heavily subsidized deal to relocate to Queens, but company officials said employees were unhappy about the absence of restaurants and the distance from Manhattan.

Image Queens Plaza in 2004, top, had a commuter parking lot. Credit... N.Y.C. Department of City Planning

Just as Dutch Kills Green was completed in 2012, however, JetBlue opened a 200,000-square-foot headquarters in the Brewster Building, a former airplane assembly plant. JetBlue is subleasing space from MetLife, which still has a presence in the building. Last year, MetLife acquired another subtenant, the advertising and public relations firm Publicis.

Kenneth A. Siegel, the Jones Lang LaSalle broker who represented MetLife in the sublease deals, said the city’s decision to spruce up Queens Plaza and the area around it, including nearby Jackson Avenue, was an important factor in JetBlue’s move. “As we would go around the neighborhood, we would see some commitment to improving it; it was not like this was a forgotten zone,” Mr. Siegel said. “The park and these other things made a difference in how they looked at the area.”

Mr. Reinertsen said Tishman Speyer, the New York-based developer, had to work hard to find a tenant for its new glassy 22-story tower on Queens Plaza South, known as 2 Gotham Center.

Now fully leased to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the building was sold in 2011 for $415.5 million to H&R REIT, a Canadian real estate investment trust. The tower was intended as the first phase of a 1.5-million-square-feet commercial complex to replace the decrepit Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage, but Tishman Speyer, which controls the rest of the site, has not disclosed any plans for it and declined to be interviewed. Mr. Reinertsen said rents would have to reach at least $45 a square foot for an office project to be economically viable. (Tenants pay around $35 a foot at the Brewster Building, brokers said.)

Mr. Reinertsen said the neighborhood lost one of its best incentives when the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) program expired last summer. Under this program, a tenant could get 12 years of tax credits worth up to $3,000 per employee.