Mamdani and Trump Raise Sunnyside Yards Housing Plan From the Grave

A project to build housing above the Sunnyside rail yards in Queens may be back from the dead after a surprise meeting between New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump.

The strange bedfellows met Thursday at the White House where they discussed building 12,000 new affordable homes above the Sunnyside Yards nestled between Long Island City, Sunnyside and other surrounding neighborhoods.

The mayor’s office announced the housing plan, which dates back to former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. Surrounding residents widely opposed the plan at the time.

Much like the de Blasio-era proposal, Mamdani’s plan could include new parks, schools and health care clinics as well as 6,000 affordable homes under the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, while creating 30,000 union jobs, the mayor’s office said.

Mamdani said he had secured $21 billion in federal grants from President Trump to build a deck over the 180 acres of rail yard and construct the development on top of it.

“New York City is facing a generational affordability challenge,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Working families are being priced out of the neighborhoods they built. To meet this moment, we need a true federal partner prepared to invest boldly and act urgently. I appreciated the opportunity to speak directly with President Trump about building more housing in any single project than our city has seen since 1973.”

The president has been vocal in his willingness to work across party lines with Mamdani, who he summed up in his State of the Union address as having “bad policy, but [a] nice guy.”

De Blasio-era feasibility studies placed the price tag for the Sunnyside Yards project between $16 billion and $19 billion with a more recent assessment in 2019 estimating the project to cost $22 billion.

“As a member of Mayor de Blasio’s Sunnyside Yards task force, it has always stuck in my craw that all that work ultimately went nowhere,” New York Buildings Congress President and CEO Carlo Scissura said in a statement. “We must finally bring this dream project to life … the largest housing development project in the city in 50 years, right in the crossroads of Queens and minutes from Manhattan, knitting communities together. The kind of mass production we need to truly put our housing crisis in the past.” 

The financial fallout and other distractions from the pandemic sidelined the original plan, followed by Mayor Eric Adams entering Gracie Mansion and seemingly shelving the ambitious project altogether.

While Adams did not overlook the need for more housing by any measure — instituting sweeping rezonings of basically the entire city and transforming the approval process for new housing to be built — Sunnyside Yards just wasn’t on his radar for much of his four years in office.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.