NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for reviving a plan to build housing over Sunnyside Yard in Queens, the mostly Amtrak-owned facility that handles equipment for the national passenger carrier, NJ Transit, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Mamdani met last week with President Donald Trump and said Trump indicated support for the idea. It would involve building more than 12,000 apartments — half of them affordable housing — using air rights above 180-acre yard and maintenance facility. The project would involve some $21 billion in federal grants; it is unclear how much of the yard would be involved.
The project would involve building a platform above the yard as the base for the other construction. A similar concept, but on a much smaller scale, led to the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, a 28-acre development over an MTA storage facility adjacent to the Hudson River between 30th and 33rd streets. That mixed-used development, which remains unfinished, includes offices, residences, shopping, and entertainment facilities.
Another such project, Atlantic Yards, covers a 22-acre Long Island Rail Road facility in Brooklyn. That development, also known as Pacific Park, includes the Barclays Center arena that is home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and more than 3,200 residential units, but like Hudson Yards, is far from reaching the scope originally envisioned.
The New York Times reports that a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul indicated tentative support for the project last week, and Amtrak indicated in 2015 that it was open to a similar proposal floated by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. An Amtrak spokesman declined comment on the recent development, the Times said.
The earlier projects have proved to be extremely expensive to build — one reason they have not been fully developed — and the Sunnyside project would be far more complicated. Unlike the Hudson and Atlantic developments, Sunnyside Yard includes Harold Interlocking, where Amtrak and LIRR trains come together to reach New York Penn Station. NJ Transit trains also move through the interlocking to lay over at the yard between trips west from Penn. A 2012 New York Times article said the interlocking, the busiest in the county, saw more than 650 trains a day — and that was before LIRR expansion that sending trains through the interlocking to Grand Central Madison, the station that opened in 2023.
WNBC-TV reports that construction experts told the station that under the best-case scenario, it would take four years to begin construction, but completion would likely not come until 2040.
— To report news or errors, contact trainsnewswire@firecrown.com.
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This is the socialist version of swamp land realestate. How much will each unit rent for? Can anyone point to a successful accomplishment of a similar project? And NO way I want tax dollars in Georgia to pay for this boondoggle.
Could someone please explain to me why my tax dollars from South Carolina are going to a project in New York City?
Hmmm. I wonder what the earnings level is for this “affordable” housing?
Not quite as crazy as the plan for an East Coast Florida city to build a rail tunnel UNDER a boating access channel.
As the article correctly notes, other projects failed to be completed. This also?
I understand the concept. But what I don’t understand is that there are already two similar but much smaller projects like this that have yet to be built out. Wouldn’t it make more sense to finish those before starting something much larger and many times more complex. A housing version of California HSR?
What is with this insistence that people who do what I used to do should work in a cave?
This fails on so many levels it can’t be counted.
Let’s start with this: under the best of circumstances, housing is unaffordable. If a condo is built on solid ground with the easiest cases of site prep, street construction, and utility extension, it’s still expensive and for many beyond reach.
Now add in the cost of the deck, the cost of rebuilding the rail yard (and staging rail traffic), the premium costs of streets and utilities for building condos where they don’t belong, that’s maybe in multiples of millions of dollars per unit above and beyond what the unit should cost.
That’s not all. The deck, the floodlights under the deck, all need maintenance and eventually repair. Figure minor repairs at age 20, major repairs at age 40, and so on ad infinitum into the future. Who pays for that? Not the railroads, but the HOA.
If I’m Amtrak and LIRR, I want the HOA to build up to with a billion dollar sinking fund for eventual repairs, plus an insurance bond for whatever could go wrong – concrete chunks falling, a storm or sanitary drain failing, you name it. How much does that sinking fund and insurance policy cost per unit?
I get that New York has a shortage of space for new homes. Well, then don’t live in New York. Living prices there are through the roof and this proposal will make that cost far higher.