A $21 billion ask better come with a good headline.
The one presented to the president and posted to social media: “Trump to City: Let’s Build,” followed by “Backs New Era of Housing,” and then “Trump delivers 12,000+ Homes,” seemed to land, at least for now.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday pitched President Donald Trump on providing more than $21 billion in federal grants to deck over Sunnyside Yard to pave the way for 12,000 housing units.
The administration announced that Mamdani’s meeting with the president this week focused, in part, on the funds needed to build a platform over the more than 100 acres of active rail yard. The platform would allow the city to build 12,000 affordable housing projects over the tracks, of which 6,000 would be Mitchell-Lama-style homes.
After the meeting, Mamdani posted a picture on social media of himself standing next to the president, who is seen grinning and clutching two newspaper printouts: One, depicting the famous New York Daily News frontpage headline from 1975, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” and the other stating, “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”
Representatives for City Hall and the White House did not respond to questions about the specific grants or terms of receiving the funding. In a press release, City Hall indicated that the mayor and president “agreed to continue discussions in the weeks ahead.”
New York officials have long envisioned building on the 200-acre site, which runs between Long Island City and Sunnyside in Queens. These visions have languished due to lack of political will, high cost and the complicated nature of building atop active train tracks, a feat that is possible but has proven difficult, as seen with the thousands of affordable housing units that have gone unbuilt at Brooklyn’s Pacific Park.
Related Companies successfully built a rail yard platform for the first phase of Hudson Yards, but the developer cut a deal with the Adams administration to pay for a platform needed for the second phase.
The administration hasn’t released details on the affordability levels of the housing that would rise at Sunnyside Yard. The proposal, at least in broad strokes, appears to follow the masterplan released by the city’s Economic Development Corporation under Bill de Blasio in 2020, just before the pandemic.
That plan called for 6,000 units affordable to those earning less than 50 percent of the area median income, with half of those homes reserved for those earning below 30 percent of the AMI. The other 6,000 units would have been homeownership units (billed as modern versions of Mitchell-Lama units), for those earning on average 100 percent of the AMI.
The city hasn’t released an update on how the housing, to be built by union labor, would be financed. The federal grants appear to only apply to the platform, which, along with the streetscape and other necessary infrastructure
The revival of a Sunnyside Yard plan arrives in a different political landscape than the one that pushed back against the 2020 proposal, when progressive elected officials — who also played prominent roles in killing Amazon’s headquarters plans in Long Island City — stood against the project. Mamdani-ally Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quit a steering committee planning the development in January 2020 because she felt that the community’s calls for prioritizing community land trusts, deeper affordability and green infrastructure were not being adequately incorporated into the plan.
Sen. Michael Gianaris, who announced this month that he doesn’t plan to run for reelection, similarly emphasized the need for securing community support before developing the site.
Representatives for Gianaris and Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Increasingly, progressive electeds’ votes have been guided by the notion that increasing housing supply is a critical step in bringing costs down for New Yorkers. In the past two years, the city has approved significant zoning changes and reshaped how certain affordable housing projects are approved.
That doesn’t mean everyone’s onboard with developing Sunnyside Yard. Council member Julie Won, whose district includes Long Island City and Sunnyside, sent a statement out on Friday recounting past opposition to the project from Gianaris, Ocasio-Cortez and former Council member Jimmy Van Bramer. She echoed their previous criticism of the project.
“Our community deserves a seat at the table long before anyone, including the mayor, makes headlines in the Oval Office especially for a project they have previously rejected,” she said in a statement. “I welcome the opportunity to build more deeply affordable housing and other federal investments for public transit and other infrastructure, but it cannot be done behind closed doors unilaterally.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said he learned of the mayor’s meeting with the president after it happened. He said he wasn’t surprised that the mayor pitched a “legacy-building” project to the president, but thought he would also raise the need for funding for the New York City Housing Authority.
Richards, who has previously supported the project, indicated that he is pleased that the meeting has sparked national attention for the development, but also is wary of banking on federal funding too early.
“When the check cashes then I will truly believe it,” he said. “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.”
That said, he would like the city to consider including an arena for the New York Liberty basketball team as part of the project.
He also noted the shift in how communities respond to the city’s housing crisis, pointing to the local community board’s support of the Long Island City rezoning last year. He believes the project will need to go through the city’s land use review process. Thanks to a ballot measure approved in November creating an appeals board that can reverse City Council’s rejection of a project, Won’s potential opposition does not present as much of a hurdle for the development.
The idea of building on the Queens rail yard dates back to at least the 1960s, when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller suggested the possibility of decking over the rails. The site was later considered as a potential home for athlete housing as part of the city’s failed bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
Trump’s involvement is also somewhat of a throwback, another chance to build a massive project atop a rail yard. Back in the 1980s, the developer pitched “Television City” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to rise above the old Penn Central rail yards. The idea, which later morphed into “Trump City,” never came to fruition.
The president has a fondness for attaching his name to his buildings. More recently, as federal funding for new rail tunnels under the Hudson River remained in limbo, Politico reported that the president would agree to release the funding if Penn Station was named after him. (Trump refuted that this idea came from him.) It’s unclear if the Sunnyside Yard project, if it moves forward, would bear Trump’s name.
When asked at a press conference on Friday, Mamdani said naming the project hadn’t come up with the president.
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