Mamdani’s Sunnyside Yard Push Illustrates Shift On Housing

NEW YORK — Six years ago, left-leaning New York City Democrats blasted a plan to build a gleaming megaproject atop a Queens rail yard. Now, their new standard-bearer, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, wants to advance the proposal — with the help of none other than President Donald Trump.

The shift is one of the most striking illustrations yet of how much the political tides have turned in favor of development, particularly on the left, as New York City struggles with a worsening housing crisis.

Mamdani, who represented western Queens in the state Assembly since 2021 before entering City Hall, is seeking to revive a plan introduced under former Mayor Bill de Blasio to redevelop a site known as Sunnyside Yard. It would make way for some 12,000 homes on the massive swath of land — a rare, prized commodity in a city where large, developable sites are scarce.

In late 2019, as de Blasio’s team prepared a housing proposal for the rail yard — a plan contingent on federal investment — the reception from local officials on the left ranged from skeptical to hostile.

Their star was rising: politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America and fresh off victories against the party establishment, had growing influence in New York and were eager to make their mark on a city they saw being transformed in the image of Big Real Estate.

Ocasio-Cortez cited a “resounding rejection of further over-development in Western Queens” in a letter at the time. Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris — who represents the area and, with Ocasio-Cortez, helped kill an Amazon headquarters proposed for nearby Long Island City earlier that year — echoed concerns that a megaproject in Sunnyside would “further gentrification and displacement.”

Six years later, the tenor of the response from western Queens officials of a similar political stripe is palpably different.

Their responses came after Mamdani’s second meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, where the two first discussed plans to revive the project. Mamdani gifted Trump a mock New York Daily News front page — “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD” — to illustrate how warmly federal support might be received. The mayor is specifically seeking $21 billion in federal grants to pay for a platform over the rail yard and said Trump expressed interest in the project. (The White House has not commented on the meeting.)

Ocasio-Cortez called the potential federal investment “transformational” in a statement and said she “looks forward to working with the mayor to expand the supply of affordable housing in New York and lower rents across the city.” Rep. Nydia Velázquez called it an “enormous opportunity for Queens.” Gianaris, meanwhile, said he “applaud[s] the mayor’s ambition” while noting the process is in early stages.

“The consensus has emerged in the last several years that a dramatic increase in housing stock is necessary, whereas that was much more up for debate a decade ago,” Gianaris said in an interview. “That new consensus would seem to inure to the benefit of a proposal like this.”

In other words, the political winds have shifted in favor of housing. As the city emerged from Covid, rents skyrocketed as demand came roaring back and new data emerged laying bare just how bad the housing crunch had become. A 2023 city survey recorded the rental vacancy rate at just 1.4 percent, the lowest in more than 50 years.

Meanwhile, the YIMBY, or Yes-In-My-Backyard, movement has grown in New York, offering a new counterweight to local opposition in fights over development. And there’s a growing recognition nationally — detailed in the so-called Abundance agenda -– that high-cost, Democratic-led states and cities have gotten in their own way, enacting endless red tape and regulatory hurdles that have made it far too difficult to build.

While there were once perceived electoral costs to supporting contentious developments or being seen as too close to the city’s powerful real estate industry, there are now political costs, at least in some corners, to being seen as a so-called NIMBY.

That doesn’t mean moving forward on a project like Sunnyside Yard, which is uniquely massive and complex, will be easy. The site has been eyed by planners and city officials for decades. Developing it will be extraordinarily expensive, require the cooperation of multiple state and federal agencies, and rely on the whims of the famously mercurial president. And Mamdani’s surprise announcement last week that he had brought the proposal to Trump received a decidedly cool reception from one prominent local politician, City Council Member Julie Won.

“One day after President Trump’s State of the Union, where he attacked and degraded our immigrants and trans communities, the mayor opted to meet with the President re-proposing a failed housing project in my district,” Won, who represents western Queens neighborhoods including Sunnyside, said in a statement.

Won’s broader record on development, though, illustrates the overarching shift toward housing growth.

Last year, she approved a major rezoning of Long Island City, which came after two failed attempts to redevelop prime waterfront property there under her predecessor, including the site identified for Amazon. Three years before that, she approved another highly-contentious rezoning known as Innovation Queens. (The Council has typically deferred to members on land use proposals in their districts.)

Other left-leaning western Queens politicians have also supported large private real estate proposals, even when they include market-rate housing. Council Member Tiffany Cabán, a democratic socialist representing what is sometimes referred to as “The People’s Republic of Astoria,” surprised some observers when she voted in favor of a 1,340-unit project known as Halletts North in 2022.

More recently, progressives were largely on board with a major rezoning blueprint known as City of Yes, which aimed to make it easier to build housing across the city. A decade ago, when the de Blasio administration pushed its own citywide zoning initiatives, they were much more controversial on the left.

Mamdani “is the type of elected official who ten years ago would have been very hesitant to embrace housing production and clearly is fully embracing housing production,” said Jon Paul Lupo, a Democratic political consultant.

Mamdani’s embrace of the Sunnyside Yard proposal — which under de Blasio was led by the Economic Development Corporation, an agency Mamdani is purportedly refocusing on “economic justice” — suggests he may hew closer to his predecessors on housing than some critics have suggested.

“You have a mayor who represented a district not far from there, who you maybe would not have thought of, on paper, as the most pro-economic development, pro-growth person, who is now a leader in wanting to build housing and create jobs and spur economic development,” said Carlo Scissura, head of the New York Building Congress, a consortium of construction, real estate and labor groups.

When de Blasio came into office in 2014, he was seen on the left as a progressive antidote to the widening inequality of the Bloomberg years — an inequality that seemed to manifest in a sea of high-end developments lining formerly derelict neighborhoods. But as he pursued an aggressive housing agenda over his tenure, de Blasio was often criticized for being too amenable to powerful real estate developers.

His successor, Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat, was largely elected on the issue of public safety, but his top housing aides sought to capitalize on the changing political tides making major growth more feasible.

Leila Bozorg, Mamdani’s deputy mayor for housing who was previously a top housing aide to Adams, credits the rise of the YIMBY movement in New York.

The “outside game has shifted a lot over the last decade and has been a really critical part of creating the conditions for us on the government side to be able to imagine government doing bigger or more innovative things,” she said at a recent panel.

One of those bigger moves was a raft of charter revisions that overhauled the city’s zoning approval process. The changes, initiated by a commission convened by Adams and approved by voters in November, curbed the influence of council members, who previously had much greater latitude to kill contentious proposals in their districts. Now, there’s a new appeals board that has the power to override council decisions.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who expressed enthusiasm for the Sunnyside Yard project, suggested the existence of this appeals board could give the proposal an easier path forward.

“Even if there was, let’s say, a Council member who wanted to complicate things, we have a process for that,” Richards said.

Mamdani talks frequently about making it easier to build. Last year while campaigning, he said one issue he’s changed his mind on is the role of the private market in addressing the city’s massive housing crisis.

But his fellow democratic socialists are still trying to take private profit out of the equation, like north Brooklyn Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who’s pushing state legislation to expand “social housing.” The concept aims to insulate housing from market forces.

Speaking of the YIMBYs, Gallagher said, “There’s this very pure-hearted, capitalist belief with them that the market is actually going to cure this affordability problem, and I don’t agree with that.” Still, she agrees that there’s room for reforms to address practices like exclusionary zoning — restrictions allowing only single-family homes in some areas, for example, that have the effect of keeping them racially homogenous.

Mamdani, for his part, seems to view his brand of socialism as one that far predates the so-called Commie Corridor, a term for a swath of Queens and Brooklyn that contains many younger, left-leaning voters who are enthusiastic Mamdani supporters.

He frequently references former Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — who advanced major public works in the 1930s and 40s with the federal government — and cited an earlier era of major construction in New York City that included massive projects like Stuyvesant Town and Co-op City.

“So many of us, we aspire to help to build a city that can build in the same manner that it used to,” Mamdani said Friday.

It’s a subject of great interest to Trump, a former New York builder who once conceived of his own sparkling megaproject on the west side of Manhattan — atop rail yards, no less — before settling for a curtailed version in the face of community opposition.

Making deals with Trump poses its own risks though, and there’s a chance the president, in exchange for $21 billion, could want to make an imprint on Sunnyside Yard that proves too large.

How might New Yorkers respond to a real-life tabloid cover of Trump declaring “Let’s Build!” — particularly if said megaproject bore his name?

Richards, the borough president, said he would “certainly be against naming anything Trump-ville, Trump-Sunnyside Yards.”

“I think the community would be up in arms.”