Trump Backs Mamdani’s Plan for 12,000 New Sunnyside Yards Homes, Queens Saints Unlikely

An unlikely alliance between New York City’s mayor and the president signals that old political animosities may yield to pragmatic efforts to tackle the city’s housing woes.

In politics, gestures often outshine policy. Yet the image of President Donald Trump, smiling beside Mayor Zohran Mamdani, clutching a front page declaring “Trump to City: Let’s Build,” portends not just stagecraft but a rare outbreak of cross-party cooperation in New York’s chronically gridlocked housing debate. Before Thursday’s Oval Office meeting, few would have bet on the city’s progressive mayor finding common cause with the president, a polarising figure and ostensible ideological adversary. That both men come from Queens only adds to the political symmetry.

At stake, ostensibly, is the future home of as many as 12,000 New Yorkers. The two leaders discussed a plan for constructing 12,000 new housing units—the largest such federal support for the city since 1973. The homes are destined, if plans hold, for a long-mooted development over the railway tracks at Sunnyside Yards, a site whose scale would rival Battery Park City in ambition.

Details were sparse—no precise construction timelines or funding breakdowns were offered—but symbolism was abundant. Mamdani’s aides created mock front pages for the president, one lauding his role in housing and the other conjuring the infamous “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline of 1975, when a White House rebuff nearly led the city to bankruptcy. Rarely has Trump looked so pleased to be compared favourably to his predecessors.

For New York, where the median rent bobs above $3,600 and vacancy rates have sunk below 2%, the promise of new housing offers more than political theatre. Previous mayors, from de Blasio to Adams, pledged hundreds of thousands of “affordable units,” only to be hamstrung by recalcitrant zoning boards, gummed-up planning processes, and inter-governmental squabbles. Federal cash—if it comes—could prove a lodestar for both construction and policy vision.

Housing insiders will wonder about actual delivery: 12,000 homes is a bold figure, but not gargantuan in a city of 8.7m. It nonetheless exceeds any single project since the Nixon era. If even a chunk of the planned Sunnyside Yards development materialises, it could relieve pressure on rents and signal federal willingness to get its hands dirty in the inadequately housed metropolises of America.

Cascading effects could transform more than just city skylines. Construction—if shovels ever hit earth—will buoy jobs in the building trades and may ease the city’s construction slump. Local politicians, perennially wary of large-scale projects that attract both NIMBY ire and tenant activists’ demands, face a conundrum: how to capitalise on outside beneficence without ceding narrative control. The city’s fractious politics, with neighborhood interests often at odds with citywide needs, may produce delays or, more likely, vigorous debate.

On the economic front, the proposed development, pitched as the largest since 1973, bodes well for the construction sector and allied industries. Federal support at this scale would echo the Great Society-era investments—the sort that shaped Queensbridge Houses and Co-op City. Crucially, Mamdani’s conversation with Trump included, perhaps as quid pro quo, the fate of Elmina Aghayeva—Columbia student detained by immigration officials and, following presidential intervention, released. Kimchi diplomacy, New York style.

The episode hints at a changing political calculus. Trump—once known for disparaging the city of his birth—now lauds its mayor as a “rational man,” even as he gently skewers Mamdani’s “bad policy” for the cable cameras. For Mamdani, the photo-op is a two-edged sword: federal largesse is welcome, but intimacy with an arch-nemesis may upset his more progressive supporters. And for Trump, who famously cherishes outsized headlines, the image neatly reverses the sting of “Drop Dead” delivered to his New York four decades ago.

Nationally, moves to address housing shortages—especially in “superstar” cities—remain spotty. San Francisco and Boston have dithered over major housing projects, watching both rents and discontent climb. By contrast, New York’s latest gambit may offer a blueprint for federal-local handshake deals, even amid shrill rhetoric. Whether other cities will emulate such pragmatism—or simply trade theatrical press clippings—remains to be seen.

Globally, large cities have experimented with various forms of federal or national intervention. In Singapore or Vienna, forceful public investment sustains social housing, blunting price spikes. American cities, long left to their own devices, may struggle to match their counterparts. For New York, federal money in Sunnyside Yards would be a rare, and possibly fleeting, confluence of need, will, and purse.

If the many hurdles ahead—zoning, community pushback, environmental impact reviews—can be surmounted, the city’s housing gloom might lift, at least modestly.

We are, predictably, inclined to caution. Past masterplans for Sunnyside have wilted under political heat or logistical tangle. Nor is there any guarantee Congress will underwrite so bold a cheque. Yet, there is dry encouragement to be found in the spectacle of two ambitions—Mamdani’s social-housing progressivism and Trump’s taste for grand gestures—skewered together on the city’s housing crisis.

Still, other uncertainties gnaw. Which New Yorkers exactly will benefit? Will rents truly subside in other boroughs? And how will resentment be managed if new building, as it often does, brings gentrification in its wake? No one should expect 12,000 flats to cure all, or even most, of the city’s development headaches.

Nonetheless, as New York’s housing supply continues to fall woefully short, even a modest step forward is welcome. Should the project fizzle, few will be shocked. But if bipartisan ego and showmanship spur even incremental progress on the city’s most urgent problem, local politics may yet prove more pragmatic than it appears—if only by accident.

One suspects the city’s tenants, chained to paltry vacancies and punishing rents, care little who hands over the keys, so long as someone, finally, does. ■