In the weeks since Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he was reviving the sprawling Sunnyside Yard housing project in Queens, and had even pitched the venture to President Donald Trump, local residents and elected officials say the matter has dominated local conversations, though not necessarily in an encouraging way.
“We have no information, which I think makes it very frustrating,” said Memo Salazar, a longtime Sunnyside resident and co-chair of Western Queens Community Land Trust, a leading nonprofit active in land-use issues, “Everyone's talking about it and, you know, what are we really talking about?”
City Councilmember Julie Won is holding a public information session on the project on Monday, at 6:30 p.m. at Sunnyside Community Services, in hopes of addressing Queens neighbors’ concerns. Won will be joined by her land use and housing director, Ellie Lauderback.
Nobody anticipates all of the questions to be resolved in a single evening, for a project that dates back before pre-pandemic times, could easily overlap several mayoral terms, and carries an estimated price tag at over $21 billion. But the new mayor’s embrace has compelled the Queens community to take notice, even if deep skepticism is the prevailing sentiment among many community members.
The project, which is a holdover from the era of former Mayor Bill de Blasio, would create 12,000 new homes, of which 6,000 would be Mitchell-Lama style affordable housing units, according to city officials. It would require building a deck — the world’s largest, according to the mayor's office — over an existing and still-active railyard.
According to planning documents, it would also generate 60 acres of open space, for various neighborhood-enhancing amenities, 30,000 construction jobs and 7,000 permanent jobs. The 2020 master plan for the project, prepared by city officials and Amtrak, describes Sunnyside Yard “as the most important undeveloped public site in the heart of the most diverse region in the United States.”
But the contours of any potential deal between the city and the Trump administration, along with who would foot the bill for the work, have not yet been clarified. The idea was floated in February, an aide to Mamdani said, in response to the president’s suggestion months earlier that the mayor return with “big ideas” for how the two could work together.
Both men have strong ties to Queens. The president was born in the borough, and Mamdani represented Astoria in the Legislature before being elected mayor.
Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for Mamdani, said in a statement that City Hall had begun to meet with local elected officials as well as Amtrak and the MTA, and would eventually submit a formal proposal to the Trump administration in hopes of securing billions of dollars in federal funding.
“We must put forward solutions at the scale of ambition this moment demands, and the mayor has put forward a proposal that would deliver more affordable homes in a single development than New York has seen since the 1970s,” Rauschenbach said. “That’s the level of urgency we need — bold, unapologetic, and rooted in the belief that our city must work for the many, not the few.”
The starting point for all discussions was a 2020 plan, Rauschenbach said, but he added that all aspects of the project are being reconsidered, including the number of homes and the layout of the site.
The White House did not respond to questions about the project.
The project would remake a vast, low-lying area in the heart of Queens. On a recent day trains slowly moved in and out of the railyard, which abuts the growing skyline of Long Island City.
The existing plans would place the railyard out of sight with the construction of the deck, upon which thousands of new homes would be built, along with parks, community centers and other infrastructure. It would also bring tens of thousands of residents to an otherwise desolate and industrial corner of the borough, and turn the site into a transit hub as part of a regional transportation network.
Won, the local councilmember, said she organized the information session in response to concerns from community residents.
She said the revival of the idea had been met with “a lot of confusion, a lot of shock” by her constituents. These included people who had opposed the project in 2020, Won said, out of fear of “ displacement, speculation [and] climate vulnerabilities,” as well as feelings that the stated cost, at the time $14 billion, was “untenable.”
“You know, it's triggering for a lot of folks,” Won said. “People felt that they had organized. And won something that they really fought hard for,” only to have it once again “dropped on their lap, without warning.”
Won was skeptical of the project.
She pointed to the railyards' enormous size: 180 acres, an area larger than Governor’s Island and several times the size of Hudson Yards or Atlantic Yards. This alone made the project daunting, she said. Then there’s the matter of the soil: glacial till and marsh soil. “It's soft, not hard,” Won said.
She also expressed concern for any deal that required partnering with the Trump administration.
“When I think of Donald Trump, I don't get warm and fuzzy feelings. I actually feel a lot of disdain and distrust for a president like that who has been harmful to our communities,” Won said.
Even supporters of the project concede the complexity of executing it, given the presence of an active railyard and the sheer sprawl of the site.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is one of the most technically complicated sites to build on in New York City,” said Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, an organization that pushes for more housing of all types, including government-subsidized and market-rate housing.
But Gray said the severity of the housing crisis necessitated ambitious approaches, including in Queens, which has a vacancy rate of 0.88%.
“There’s widespread recognition that the housing shortage requires building more housing everywhere,” Gray said. “With a shortage on the order of a million units, we need every possible solution and we need to explore every opportunity.”
Existing residents like Salazar remain pessimistic. He said it’s “incredibly naive, if not downright disingenuous” to promise thousands of affordable housing units without a clear source of funding firmly in place.
Salazar, 52, said much has changed since he moved to Sunnyside in 2002. As a filmmaker and activist originally from Mexico, he said he fell in love with the neighborhood, “full of working-class immigrant families from all over.”
“When I moved here, nobody my age wanted to live in Queens,” he said. “It was all Brooklyn and Williamsburg.”
He said the neighborhood had managed to resist gentrification more than Long Island City. But even here, he said, escalating real estate costs in Long Island City and Astoria were creating a spillover effect on Sunnyside, one that threatened what initially drew him to the neighborhood.
One new development was offering studio apartments at $2,650 a month, he said, adding that “many great folks” he knew were leaving the neighborhood.
“The rising prices ripple everywhere,” Salazar said. “People just don't have that kind of money — at least the kind of people that Queens has traditionally housed.”
