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.
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