During a meeting at Gracie Mansion on Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump said they spoke about plans to build 12,000 homes atop a city-owned rail yard in Queens but announced no new details on the proposed project. In a joint press conference following the meeting, their third since November, Mamdani said he and the president “agreed to set up a new level of that conversation” between City Hall and the White House on Sunnyside Yard, a proposal to build a deck over the 180-acre rail yard in Queens to create a new community with affordable apartments, schools, and public space. The proposal is years in the making. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio shelved an earlier version because of the pandemic, but Mamdani revived the project and pitched it to Trump during a White House visit in February.
“What we’re speaking about is 12,000 homes, 30,000 jobs, and the prospect of an entire new neighborhood in a city where housing is the number one cost,” Mamdani said on Monday.
“I appreciate the president, his interest in this,” the mayor continued. “We also know the president not just as a leader of the country, but also as someone who has built quite a bit of housing here in our city.”
Trump said he has been watching Sunnyside for 35 years and called the project “a big job” that will need “a lot of federal approvals and probably some federal money to do it.”
He added, “They’ve been talking about developing that for 50 years, so maybe they have a shot at doing it.”
Spanning roughly 180 acres across western Queens, Amtrak owns and operates Sunnyside Yards, meaning any changes to the yard require federal approval. As of 2020, roughly 780 trains passed through the yard each day, serving Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor and the Long Island Rail Road’s Main Line, while NJ Transit also uses the yard for train storage, as 6sqft previously reported.
The master plan released by the city’s Economic Development Corporation in 2020 under de Blasio called for a $14.4 billion deck covering roughly 80 percent of the train yard to create new land for development.
The proposal included 12,000 affordable homes, half of which would be rentals for very low- and extremely low-income families, while the other half would offer affordable homeownership opportunities modeled after Mitchell-Lama.
If built, the project would be the largest affordable housing development in the five boroughs since Co-op City in the Bronx was completed in 1973.
While plans to build over the yards have only picked up steam in recent years, a vision for developing the site first surfaced in 1931, when the Regional Plan Association called for a new transportation terminal and office building “of a size that would dominate all this part of the Borough of Queens,” according to their website.
The plan Mamdani pitched to Trump in February shares some similarities with that earlier vision but replaces the proposed office space with thousands of affordable homes.
At the White House meeting, he outlined a proposal to build a deck over the rail yard and create a new mixed-use community with 12,000 affordable apartments, new schools, and public space above a new regional rail hub. During that meeting, the mayor said he asked the president for $21 billion in federal funding for the decking over the yards.
On Monday, while in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Trump met with Mamdani at Gracie Mansion, marking the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to the mayor’s residence since Ronald Reagan in 1981. Following the meeting, Mamdani said he and Trump “elevated” discussions on the project “to a place where it’s going to be technical” between the two offices.
The meeting was the third between the two men since Mamdani won election as mayor. Their first encounter came at the White House in November, when Mamdani was mayor-elect, drawing attention for their cordiality. Trump congratulated Mamdani and said he was confident he could “do a very good job,” according to The Guardian.
In Monday’s meeting, the New York Times reported that the private discussions that preceded the public announcement were “warm, respectful,” and even “productive.”
Specific details of Sunnyside Yard remain unclear; neither the mayor nor the president provided any new information about the proposal.
Beginning the announcement, Mamdani acknowledged their political differences but emphasized that he would work with anyone who could help improve quality of life across the five boroughs.
“Each time the president and I speak, it is about the same topics: how to improve the lives of New Yorkers and how to use the power of government to take on the cost of living crisis, to grow our economy, and to build a better, stronger New York,” Mamdani said.
“I have said time and again that I will work with anyone no matter what party they belong to, no matter how much we may disagree on other topics,” he added. “I appreciate the conversation that the president and I have had on the subject of how we can make it easier to afford life in this great city that we call home.”
Responding to reporters, Trump highlighted the project’s dependence on federal support while pointing to his familiarity with the area and decades of proposals to develop the railyard.
The president also said he expects any new housing at the site to include a substantial affordable component, touting his past experience developing low-income housing.
“I know a lot about affordability because I did many, many low-income and moderate-income buildings over the years and had great success with it,” he added. “I would think that Sunnyside would have to at least a pretty substantial [affordable] component of exactly that.”
While the city and federal administrations appear to be on the same page for once, the proposal does not have the backing of all city officials.
According to Gothamist, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards questioned whether Trump would remain committed to the massive project, which could take decades to complete. He said the city could instead focus on housing projects with shorter timelines, including a proposal to build 3,000 apartments on the site of the former Flushing Airport in College Point.
Similarly, Council Member Julie Won noted that the project would require funding approved by Congress and coordination among several federal, state, and city agencies, none of which has yet been secured.
“It could be an amazing project but I’ll believe it when I see the actual funding for it,” Won told Gothamist. “I’m a realist. I am not about chasing clouds. This isn’t ‘I want to talk to my boy Donny on a side chat about $20 billion.’”
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- Master planning for huge Sunnyside Yard project to begin this summer
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