Mamdani Courts Trump for $21 Billion Sunnyside Housing Play, Mitchell-Lama Model Eyed

New York’s latest bid for colossal public housing over Sunnyside Yard sets up a rare alliance—and an even rarer test—for a city in desperate need of affordable homes.

It is not often that a borough-dividing railyard promises to unite both sides of New York’s political spectrum. Yet on a blustery February Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani—a democratic socialist swept into office by discontent over unaffordable rents—found himself pitching President Donald Trump on a $21 billion plan to deck over Sunnyside Yard, that yawning chasm in Western Queens, and build some 12,000 homes atop it. The gambit was discussed, rather improbably, in the Oval Office, with the president’s Queens pedigree and the mayor’s taste for unorthodox alliances both on display.

The proposal glistens with superlatives: the “world’s largest deck,” as Mamdani’s office described it, a plank spanning the city’s tangled tracks and connecting fragmented, vibrant neighborhoods. Half of the homes—6,000—would mimic the Mitchell-Lama model that once gave thousands of middle-class New Yorkers a stable footing. The package includes parks, schools, clinics, and, if the city’s estimates are to be believed, 30,000 union jobs.

These are grand numbers for a metropolis that, as even seasoned optimists admit, remains decades behind on meeting its housing needs. Rents have soared to punishing heights, with the city’s vacancy rate scraping a 50-year low. Queens, once a refuge for new arrivals and strivers priced out of Manhattan, now routinely posts median asking rents above $3,200 a month. The city’s own housing planners reckon New York needs several hundred thousand new homes just to ease the backlog.

Yet scale is both a promise and a challenge. Mamdani’s team is blunt: such a project is “extraordinarily expensive” and demands robust federal backing—hence the mayor’s pilgrimage to Washington. City officials, led by Cea Weaver of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, argue that decking over the railyard could bridge not just physical but social divides, stitching together some of the most ethnically diverse zipcode clusters in the country. But the city’s budget, strained by pandemic aftershocks and migrant inflows, cannot shoulder the load unaided.

The sums bandied about are instructive. In 2020, officials put the cost of a Sunnyside platform plus affordable housing at around $14 billion. Today Mamdani seeks over $21 billion—an inflationary leap that city hall did not fully explain. There is a whiff of political theatre about the new estimate, with the White House and City Hall both eager to be seen “thinking big” at a time of drifting ambition in other corners of American government.

For all the bonhomie between two ideological opposites, brokered by the president’s nostalgic view of his native Queens, the obstacles remain prodigious. Even with a presidential imprimatur, federal purse strings tend to loosen only in close proportion to electoral incentives and legislative headcounts. Republican congressional leaders may blanch at backing a socialist mayor’s grand public-works scheme in deep-blue New York. And local infighting—over union bids, displacement, rents, and the east-west divides of Western Queens—can scuttle the best-laid plans.

Mitchell-Lama nostalgia has strong roots in New York: its complexes, built in the mid-20th century, kept rents in check for three generations of city dwellers. But those subsidies proved transient. Many once-affordable co-ops and rentals have since exited the programme; nearly half the original units are no longer protected. Whether new models evoke the scaffolding of social mobility or the pitfalls of bureaucratic sclerosis remains an open question.

A city’s housing fix: bridge or mirage?

Should Mamdani succeed where predecessors failed, the implications would ripple far beyond Queens. If 12,000 new homes hit the market by the early 2030s, New York would at last make a dent—if a modest one—in its chronic shortfall. Construction of this magnitude would generate thousands of jobs, buoy state and local tax coffers, and perhaps put the city back on the map for middle-income households squeezed out by zealous gentrification. But if costs balloon or local antagonism persists, Sunnyside may join the city’s ever-growing catalogue of visionary but unbuilt megaprojects.

Nationally, New York’s housing appetite is not unique; San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles face similarly dire deficits. Yet few American cities have attempted anything on Sunnyside’s scale since the postwar years. The project evokes Hudson Yards—notorious for its luxury towers, tax breaks, and “gated citadel” air—but with a more populist bent. If Washington signs on, it may set a template for big-city housing development—provided cities can muster political consensus and federal largesse in equal measure.

Globally, mass housing over decked rail yards has precedent—from Tokyo’s Shibuya to London’s King’s Cross. Those projects, however, have more often yielded luxury flats than broad-based affordability. New York’s bid to do differently comes at a time of mounting pressure on urban policymakers to curb speculation and deliver tangible results for voters battered by inflation and soaring property prices.

Will it work? The city’s history bodes ambivalently. New York has too often promised affordable housing and then delivered something more meagre, after lawsuits, cost overruns, NIMBY revolts, and election cycles have run their course. The practical hurdles—engineering, funding, permitting—are gargantuan. Yet the scale of New York’s need, and the unprecedented pairing of Trump and Mamdani, could portend something more momentous than another consultant’s rendering.

We reckon this peculiar partnership—a socialist mayor, a real-estate-touting president, and a borough divided by both rails and class—represents the city at its most inventive and confounding. It is neither a sure bet nor a quixotic fantasy, but a gamble aligned with the best traditions of urban renewal: brash, expensive, and perhaps, in the end, transformative. If Sunnyside fails to materialise, New York will soldier on—resilient, if not exactly affordable. Should it succeed, however, the world’s cities may be tempted to follow New York’s audacious lead. ■