5 Key Questions About Mamdani's $21B Sunnyside Yard Pitch To Trump

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made an impromptu visit to the White House last week, the topic of discussion — reviving a 12,000-unit residential development over sprawling rail yards in Queens — surprised residents and local officials.

The day after Mamdani’s surprise meeting with President Donald Trump, news emerged that the New York City mayor asked for $21B in federal funds to develop housing, parks, schools and medical buildings at Sunnyside Yard. 

The project would entail decking over most of a 180-acre rail yard that around 780 trains pass through every day, between Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, Acela, the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit.

Sunnyside Yard has always held tantalizing possibilities for development — including for Trump, who eyed the area for a potential sports complex in the 1980s. 

“This is the busiest piece of rail infrastructure in North America,” said Skylar Bisom-Rapp, who helped author the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan when he was a senior associate at the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism.

“Hudson Yards is a much quieter piece of rail infrastructure,” he said. “This is the beating heart for most of the commuter rail in New York.”

But much is yet unknown about what Mamdani and Trump might actually do to revive plans, in the making for more than a decade, for an affordable housing complex at Sunnyside Yard that would be one of the largest developments in city history.

“You have to first figure out what you might build, in what phase, and what the role of the public sector is, what the role of the private sector is,” said Annemarie Gray, executive director of advocacy group Open New York. “This is an extremely technically complicated site to build on.” 

Here are five key questions the revival of Sunnyside Yard raises. The mayor's office didn't respond to Bisnow's request for comment.

What Was The Sunnyside Yard Plan?

Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio pitched affordable housing on the site during his 2015 State of the City address. Two years later, the New York City Economic Development Corp. published a feasibility study that concluded the project would be “technically feasible, but complicated.” 

In 2018, the city kicked off drafting of the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan, a more than 400-page document that took two years to assemble. The plans call for 12,000 units of 100% affordable housing — 6,000 affordable rental units for very low-income New Yorkers and 6,000 for-sale units through the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program.

The city envisioned up to 1.7M SF of offices, 1.4M SF of commercial or industrial space, and roughly 1M SF of retail, plus 60 acres of open space, 10 to 12 new schools, new libraries, childcare and health centers, and regional rail and subway stations. It estimated the cost of decking over the yard at $5B.

But as the city was gathering feedback to formulate the plan, fierce local opposition was brewing.

Protesters stormed an EDC meeting in 2019 over fears that Sunnyside Yard would contribute to gentrification. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stepped down from the project’s steering committee the following year, citing similar concerns.

But it was ultimately bad timing that shelved Sunnyside Yard from the list of priorities for the NYC government. The master plan was published in March 2020, just days before the coronavirus swept across the globe. It was never revived under de Blasio's successor, Eric Adams.

“I'm not sure that it was a priority of the Adams administration, to be honest,” said Carlo Scissura, president and CEO of the New York Building Congress. “By 2023, it should have been back moving.”

How Feasible Is It Today?

Sunnyside Yard was always a complex undertaking, Bisom-Rapp said. 

Alongside the EDC, Bisom-Rapp had to coordinate 14 subconsultants, from structural and rail engineers to financial analysts and landscape architects. They tried multiple different models to meet stakeholder needs but found that compromise was going to be required on all fronts.

“When we did the first pass at designing the deck, just following all of Amtrak standards to the letter, we basically ended up with a plateau that was 30 feet above all surrounding [ground level],” Bisom-Rapp said. “You can imagine — you're in Long Island City, you get to what's currently a dead-end street, and you just see a 30-foot wall.”

And while the master plan ultimately outlined a vision that the various stakeholders, including Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, believed was possible, questions of who will fund the development — and how — remain unanswered.

A spokesperson for the EDC referred Bisnow to City Hall, which didn't respond to a request for comment.

Mamdani's request for $21B in federal aid would only fund the construction of the deck — a threefold increase from the pre-pandemic cost. The master plan placed the housing development costs at $14.4B. It isn’t clear how much local funding the Mamdani administration would provide.

The city has declined to clarify whether the development would contain market-rate units.

But Sunnyside Yard wouldn’t be able to pay for itself if it were built as an all-affordable development using union labor, MSquared founder and Managing Principal Alicia Glen, who was deputy mayor under de Blasio and helped craft the master plan, told The New York Times.

What Are The Next Steps?

What happens next is unclear, but Scissura said the first thing that should happen is examining if the master plan needs to be updated. 

“This is an opportunity to not just build there but then to connect all the communities around there,” he said. “I think that should be something that is really looked at.”

The next step would be obtaining the federal dollars to build the deck over the train tracks. The NYCEDC would then need to issue a request for proposals for contracts to build the deck before selecting construction groups and engineers to carry it out.

The deck itself would be built in 240-by-240-foot blocks in the city’s grid format, with space for several parks and a greenway running through its center, according to the master plan.

The city also needs to solicit bids from developers for the housing portion via a separate RFP. Because of the size of the development, the city would likely bring in multiple developers, Gray said.

“This is many, many phases,” she said. “This is not necessarily one RFP that goes to one massive developer — it's kind of the anti-Hudson Yards model in a lot of ways.”

Local residents also highlighted schools, health clinics, libraries and other community facilities as priorities during the period that the master plan was being written — developments that would likely also require their own funding.

Are Locals On Board?

The potential to revive Sunnyside Yard comes from a fundamental shift in public attitudes toward housing development since the master plan was published, Scissura said. 

“If you think about five, six years ago, if you said we want to build housing, there was opposition to it,” he said. “Now everyone is saying we have to build housing.”

The de Blasio-era Gowanus and SoHo/NoHo rezonings showed New Yorkers what more housing in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods looked like, Gray said.

But Council Member Julie Won, whose district includes Sunnyside Yard, voiced her opposition immediately after Mamdani’s announcement, saying in a statement that Sunnyside residents should have been consulted.

Won, a Democrat, still hadn’t received a briefing from Mamdani by Wednesday, almost a full week after the mayor met with Trump, she told Bisnow.

“The community should decide what we want in our neighborhood, not Donald Trump,” she said. “All this is very off-putting.”

She was also skeptical that the $21B in federal funding would come through, adding that it would need to be approved by the House Committee on Appropriations.

“It's not just going to be done unilaterally by the president,” she said. “I won't believe it until I see it.”

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said in a statement that “it would be a dereliction of duty” not to pursue the project, and he lobbied for it to include a new arena for the New York Liberty of the WNBA. 

“Mayor Mamdani campaigned on making housing more affordable for New Yorkers, and I commend him for continuing to advance that conversation on a national scale by advocating directly to President Trump about the need to build more homes in their shared native borough,” he said.

Residents on the ground in Sunnyside have serious doubts that the proposal will ever actually come to life, said Memo Salazar, board co-chair of the Western Queens Community Land Trust.

“People are confused,” he said of the project's revival. “They don't really know what it means.”

Who Would Build It?

The largest private development in New York City history — building Hudson Yards over train tracks on Manhattan's West Side — was led by Related Cos. and Oxford Properties.

Manhattan-based Related, which was recently interested in taking over another deck-based project, Brooklyn's Pacific Park, is seen as an obvious contender for Sunnyside Yard. It is already building an entirely affordable project 

Brookfield Properties, which owns Brookfield Place and developed Manhattan West next to Hudson Yards, might be a candidate, Scissura said, but no further information about the project has emerged since Mamdani and Trump’s meeting last week. 

“There's nothing to be in the running for, because literally, all it is is a comment from the mayor and the president,” he said.

Bart Mitchell, president and CEO at nonprofit developer The Community Builders, said he believes nonprofit developers could also play a role.

“You can find quite a number of super talented developers who care deeply about affordability,” he said. “Let's say each does 2,000 units, and you've got 12,000 units getting built simultaneously, with the affordability that goes with public funding for the infrastructure, rather than private funding.”