Mayor Zohran Mamdani seemed to have made political magic happen on Thursday when he said he had persuaded President Trump to consider resurrecting an affordable housing project over a rail yard in western Queens — a development so enormous in scale that many consider it impracticable.
Now the mayor faces a grinding, bureaucratic slog if he wants to get it done.
Nobody knows exactly how the development will unfold, or if it will even be built. The project, which involves building 12,000 homes over a new deck atop Sunnyside Yard, a massive working rail yard, is likely to involve a private developer, or several. It is also unclear whether it would be completed in pieces, or if it would involve any market-rate apartments.
Then there are the challenges. The project is exceedingly complicated. Mr. Mamdani will have to find the money, with the city appearing to suggest the deck alone would require at least $21 billion in federal grants. He will have to convince local politicians and residents to support the development. And he will need to win the approval of Amtrak, the passenger rail service controlled by the federal government, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that oversees the city’s public transit.
On Friday, Jen Goodman, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul, signaled her tentative support.
“New York needs more housing,” Ms. Goodman said. “Any initiative that could deliver 12,000-plus new homes would be good news for New Yorkers and a positive step toward lowering the cost of living. We look forward to seeing the details and partnering with the city to get more homes built.”
Mr. Mamdani will also have to hope that Mr. Trump does not lose interest. So far, the president has declined to speak publicly about the project, and the White House on Friday declined another request for comment.
The only evidence for his support is Mr. Mamdani’s representations of Mr. Trump’s interest — which the mayor repeated during an unrelated news conference on Friday — and Mr. Trump’s willingness to pose for a photo holding a mock-up of a fake Daily News front page whose headline says the president backs a “New Era of Housing.” Mr. Mamdani provided Mr. Trump with the front page mock-up.
“It’s hard to be just like, ‘We won,’” said Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration who helped craft a master plan for Sunnyside Yard. “It’s directionally positive. Let’s see where we go.”
Already on Friday, the idea was meeting with skepticism from influential corners.
“Any proposal that reshapes Sunnyside Yards must begin with the neighbors who live here,” said Julie Won, the councilwoman whose district includes the site. “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.”
Sunnyside Yard, a 180-acre train yard and maintenance hub in Long Island City, is much larger than other rail depots that have been converted to residential and commercial uses, including the 28-acre Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the 22-acre Atlantic Yards development, now called Pacific Park, in Brooklyn. Both projects remain unfinished, decades after work on them began.
It is unclear if Mr. Mamdani intends to build over a portion of Sunnyside Yard, or over the entire 180 acres — roughly the size of 19 Bryant Parks.
Amtrak, the national passenger railroad service that is controlled by the federal government, owns most of Sunnyside Yard, and would have to approve construction plans for the site. In 2015, the rail company signaled openness to a similar housing proposal.
Jason Abrams, a spokesman for Amtrak, declined to comment about Mr. Trump’s apparent interest in the project.
The sprawling space, sandwiched between rapidly growing residential neighborhoods — all of which voted decisively for Mr. Mamdani — serves as a critical way station for trains operated by NJ Transit and several Amtrak carriers traveling along the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger rail route in the United States.
Many trains that pass through Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, for instance, continue toward the yard for storage, before returning to service later in the day. The M.T.A., which is controlled by the governor, also stores Long Island Rail Road trains at a separate yard nearby.
The site has long been an elusive target for development. As early as the 1920s, an airport and a mixed-use complex were proposed for the area.
In 2015, Mr. de Blasio proposed building 11,000 apartments over the yard, but Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, opposed it, arguing that the space was too important for transit operations.
Since at least 2018, city officials have considered the creation of a new passenger train station at the yard, but the M.T.A. in recent years has opposed the proposal for cost reasons. A master plan for the site published in March 2020 was abruptly rendered moot, its release coming days before the city became an epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The construction of high-rise buildings and complicated infrastructure over a rail yard can be immensely costly to taxpayers, and stretch far longer than expected.
Atlantic Yards was proposed in 2003, but more than two decades later, hundreds of affordable apartments that were promised have not yet been built.
Tax breaks and other government assistance for Hudson Yards, the luxury mixed-use project, reached nearly $6 billion in 2019, and its private developers have sought $2 billion more in public subsidies for an unbuilt portion of the rail yard because they claimed the cost of construction was too high.
Carlo Scissura, the president and chief executive of the New York Building Congress, a construction trade group, said in a statement that he was “over the moon” to hear that Mr. Trump might be receptive to moving the Sunnyside Yard project forward.
Mr. Scissura, who was a member of a Sunnyside Yard task force under Mr. de Blasio, added that “it has always stuck in my craw that all that work ultimately went nowhere.”
Mr. Mamdani has said that all of the 12,000 units would be affordable, and the project would create 30,000 union jobs. Any affordability or union construction requirements would render the project even more expensive. There would also be parks, schools and clinics. Much of that would have to be built on top of the deck.
“In a city where we know that land is so precious and so finite, here lies an opportunity to create more of it, by creating the largest rail deck the world has ever seen,” Mr. Mamdani said at a news conference on Friday.
City Hall has said it is seeking $21 billion in federal grants for the project. But they have not provided more detail on where specifically that money would come from, or how much additional city funding may be necessary.
“You have to make a public sector, upfront investment,” Ms. Glen said. “There’s no other way to do this.”
She also said that Mr. Mamdani’s call to build 100 percent affordable housing and use union work would make the project impossible to work financially.
“It’s just going to make the project untenable unless they throw the entire budget at it, which would just be nuts, because they have other important projects,” she said.
Still, with New York City grappling with a continuing housing shortage, residents have grown more receptive to development since the Sunnyside Yard project was put on hold. But if local leaders do not back it, Mr. Mamdani will have a hard time getting it through the City Council.
Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens, said he was “excited about the proposition” of rebooting the development. But he also said that he had told City Hall officials on Thursday night, after news of the meeting with Mr. Trump broke, that there should be a “robust community engagement process” before the project moved forward.
Mr. Richards said Queens residents were likely to want the project to include schools, investments in transit and lots of affordable housing. He said he personally would like to see a stadium for women’s professional basketball on the site.
“We’re going to ask the hard questions, like we would ask about any project,” he said.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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