Mamdani Seeks $21 Billion for 12,000-Home Sunnyside Deck, Trump Gets the Hard Sell

An audacious proposal to transform a Queens rail yard tests political alliances and fiscal priorities in a city starved of affordable housing.

The dream of covering over Sunnyside Yard, a 180-acre scar slicing through western Queens, has a new lease on life—and a conspicuously odd pair of champions. Last Thursday, in an unscheduled Oval Office meeting, New York’s left-wing mayor Zohran Mamdani pitched President Donald Trump, late of Queens and now of the White House, on building what city officials claim would be “the world’s largest deck”—supporting 12,000 new homes, 6,000 of them geared to affordability. The price tag: a staggering $21bn in federal largesse.

That the mayor, a democratic socialist who won office last year, should make his plea to the arch-Republican president in person is a testament to both New York’s desperation and the peculiar dynamics of American politics. The Trump-Mamdani relationship, described by insiders as oddly collegial, has already yielded small Federal grants for lead-paint abatement. Mr Mamdani now seeks much more: cash enough to deck over a working rail yard and create what he calls a “city above a city.”

The project is vast in scale, and breathtaking in ambition. Sunnyside Yard—a tangle of tracks owned by Amtrak—has long been a divisive, and divisional, presence, physically cleaving off vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods such as Sunnyside, Long Island City, and Woodside. For decades, planners have floated schemes to connect, cap, or colonise the sunken site. The latest proposal resurrects a de Blasio-era vision mothballed by Eric Adams, Mamdani’s more pragmatic predecessor. This time, the city wants federal funding for not only housing, but parks, clinics, and new schools.

Yet the sums boggle the mind, and invite the scepticism which typically attends enormous capital projects in New York. A 2020 city estimate, produced before the latest bout of inflation and construction-cost escalation, tallied the platform-and-housing at a “mere” $14bn. Now, City Hall’s ask from Washington stands at $21bn—a 50% leap. Unsurprisingly, the mayor’s spokeswoman offers little by way of explanation, saying only that the city intends to take “a fresh look,” rather than revisit six-year-old plans.

If the sums seem eye-watering, so too do the stakes. For a city where the median rent now tops $3,700 per month and homelessness is at a postwar high, new housing—especially of the affordable sort—portends social and political benefits. Half the units would follow a Mitchell-Lama-style model, offering below-market rents to moderate-income families, recapturing a sense of New York’s postwar social contract. Backers say the plan could create 30,000 union jobs during construction, stir economic activity in under-developed Queens, and—by bridging the yard—help stitch together communities long sundered by rail.

But there are harder questions beneath the boosterish rhetoric. First is the risk of fiscal overreach. The city’s own capital budget is already groaning under the weight of other infrastructure needs (not least the MTA’s beleaguered Second Avenue Subway). Federal coffers, though not empty, are subject to shifting national priorities and, as ever, fits of Congressional pique. One suspects Mr Trump’s affection for his home borough may wane in the heat of election season, especially if nativist anti-urban sentiment festers among his base.

Second, there is the perennial challenge of execution. New York’s record with mega-projects is, charitably, patchy: delays, lawsuits, and cost overruns dog most big developments. If past is prologue, Sunnyside risks becoming another Hudson Yards, more benefit to developers than to desperate tenants. The proposed inclusion of parks and clinics, though admirable, will test the city’s resolve to create integrated, not isolated, communities—neither pleasure domes for the wealthy nor bleak islands of deprivation.

There is also the political optics of cooperation across the ideological spectrum. Both Mamdani and Trump have reasons to pursue this dalliance: the former as a fulfillment of his radical campaign promises, the latter as a chance to play benefactor to his natal city. Their joint venture is, perhaps, a refreshing rebuke to an era of national gridlock—though not without risks for both men should the scheme founder or devolve into a patronage vehicle.

The high price of transformation

Nationally, the proposal lands amid an intensifying debate about the federal government’s role in alleviating urban housing crises. Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco: nearly every big city rues skyrocketing rents and the flight of the middle class. Where cities like Vienna or Singapore have built expansive public housing for generations, America’s attempts have been scattershot, episodic, and hamstrung by shifting political winds. The scale of Mamdani’s ask—a single, $21bn gift—may play poorly among fiscal conservatives, but it is undeniably in keeping with the scale of the crisis.

Internationally, comparisons jar as well as inspire. The world’s largest deck and attendant high-rises would certainly rival projects seen in Asia or Europe, where over-rail construction is commonplace (albeit rarely on quite such gargantuan terms). Yet New York’s governance, with its morass of local, state, federal and private actors, is ill-suited to the tight coordination required—and delays and acrimony thus lurk around every curve.

Notwithstanding its fraught path, we reckon the Sunnyside plan is a worthwhile gamble. New York has grown by lurches, through grand—and, often, grandiose—schemes. The city’s postwar housing boom, the Robert Moses highways, and even the lamented Penn Station destruction all had their share of naysayers, some of whom were proved right, others badly wrong. It is easy, in a climate of caution and compounded fiscal constraint, to view boldness as a vice. But only boldness will keep a city of 8.7m from ossification.

We are not blind to the dangers: ballooning costs, mismanaged construction, or political backsliding could all lay this dream to waste. Yet the alternative—timidity—is no less costly, if measured in wasted opportunity, deepening inequality, and the slow erosion of the city’s spirit. That a mayor and president so ideologically divided can find common ground, at least notionally, over a rail yard portends that some divides are easier to bridge than others.

In an era otherwise defined by political paralysis, a massive affordable housing project straddling Sunnyside Yard may not only connect neighbourhoods, but also, just possibly, inaugurate a new habit of cooperation—however uneasy. Time, and perhaps another few billion, will tell. ■