Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s effort to revive a giant Queens housing plan that died in 2020 may have appealed to President Donald Trump, but responses from local elected leaders are much more mixed.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said he’s excited by a long-stalled proposal to deck over an Amtrak trainyard in Sunnyside and build 12,000 apartments on top. State Sen. Michael Gianaris said many have tried, and failed, to do the same thing. And local Councilmember Julie Won has expressed concern that the local community is already getting cut out of the planning process.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Mamdani ally, is taking a slightly more favorable view than she did of the previous plan.
“The level of federal investment now under consideration for Sunnyside Yards is transformational,” Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesperson Karla Santillan told Gothamist. “The congresswoman looks forward to working with the mayor to expand the supply of affordable housing in New York and lower rents across the city.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens, was critical of an earlier plan to deck over the train yard in 2019, and even quit a committee tasked with helping shape the plan. In a letter with then-Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer, she warned against a “luxury development that is Hudson Yards duplicated in Sunnyside.” The lawmakers also cited concerns that the project would further displace communities of color and transfer public land into the hands of private developers.
The lawmakers said the new version of the project should enhance public benefits like transit and public housing.
At the time, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s Economic Development Corporation estimated that proposal would cost over $14 billion. But the plan withered as the COVID pandemic took hold, and eventually went nowhere.
Six years later, the project price tag has changed — the Mamdani administration says it will likely cost $21 billion — but so have attitudes toward new housing development, including among left-leaning lawmakers like the new mayor.
“The tide has turned on housing,” Richards told Gothamist. “We’re in the ‘Let’s build’ phase, and there are a lot of politicians who have definitely come around on the housing piece.”
He’s also pitching what he called an “insane” idea to build an arena for the New York Liberty, the reigning WNBA champions, alongside the housing.
“The champions would be the first women’s team in the country to have their own stadium,” he said.
Richards said he expects elected officials to support the proposal given the city’s deep affordable housing shortage, but said he wants Mamdani to share more details about the affordability levels, funding sources, and planning and public review processes.
“This is a nonpartisan issue,” he said. “But as always, the devil is in the details.”
Other leaders have criticized how Mamdani kept the plan under wraps before unveiling it to Trump at a surprise Oval Office meeting Thursday. They also question the financial feasibility of a large-scale project that requires approval from an unreliable federal government and billions of dollars to construct.
“One day after President Trump’s State of the Union, where he attacked and degraded our immigrants and trans communities, the mayor opted to meet with the president, re-proposing a failed housing project in my district,” Won said in a written statement. “Any proposal that reshapes Sunnyside Yards must begin with the neighbors who live here.”
Won said she wants to build affordable housing on the site, but only through “community-centered planning.”
It’s still unclear exactly how the planning process will proceed. Typically, housing projects that require zoning changes to build go through the city’s lengthy land use review process.
But in the case of large-scale housing, the state can step in, establish what’s known as a General Project Plan and bypass city review. The state and city have partnered on one such plan along the waterfront in Red Hook, where they aim to build thousands of new homes.
Prameet Kumar chairs the land use committee for the community board representing the Sunnyside Yards site. He declined to speak on behalf of the board, but said in his personal view the project could be a boon for the region.
“I was hoping it would come back, so it’s nice to see,” Kumar said in a phone interview. “Sunnyside Yards is one of those super-rare large-scale sites in the city where you can do a lot of big, transformative development.”
He said he hopes any development plan is shaped by local residents and goes through the city’s land use review process, just like another proposal to rezone a 54-block swath of Long Island City to add 14,000 new homes last year.
“That was a nice model for how this part of the city could grow responsibly and ethically,” Kumar said.
But there’s one thing most leaders agree on: Don’t count on the plan to actually happen just yet. A similar proposal to deck over the train tracks at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn has stalled for over two decades. And the Trump administration has stopped and started funding for other large infrastructure projects, like the Second Avenue subway and the Gateway Tunnel between New York and New Jersey multiple times in just the past year.
State Sen. Michael Gianaris, a powerful Democrat who has declined to seek reelection, said he’s taking a cautious view.
“Ambitious plans for Sunnyside Yards have come and gone many times over several decades, Gianaris told Gothamist. “If Mayor Mamdani can make something happen there that brings thousands of sorely needed affordable housing units, it will be a legacy-defining accomplishment.”
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