Echoing some commenters,
the point isn't that (all of) Queens is some hideous place, it's just that to outsiders New York is basically "Manhattan." People don't want to pay the big bucks to travel to New York and not be near Manhattan. People also don't want to pay the big bucks to travel to New York and then have to be rental car dependent. There's a functioning monorail ride after all, just not one that functions very well in (much of) Queens. The Chicago convention center where Netroots Nation was a few years ago was in kind of a crap isolated location, but it was at least a relatively short cab ride to not crap locations.
