{"id":128801,"date":"2026-02-10T14:55:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T14:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/128801\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T14:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T14:55:12","slug":"sunnyside-yard-and-the-quest-for-affordable-housing-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/128801\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunnyside Yard and the Quest for Affordable Housing in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books & the Arts<\/a><\/p>\n

\/
\n February 10, 2026<\/p>\n

Sunnyside Yard and the quest for affordable housing in New York<\/p>\n

Constructing new residential buildings, let alone those with rental units that New Yorkers can afford, is never an easy task.<\/p>\n

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This article appears in the
\n March 2026 issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the most memorable promises that new York City\u2019s newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani made during his campaign was to freeze the rent for tenants of the city\u2019s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. The idea sounds simple, suggesting that there\u2019s a quick and easy way for a mayor to tackle one of the city\u2019s most insoluble problems.<\/p>\n

But nothing in New York is ever quick and easy. One of the complicating factors is that the mayor can\u2019t freeze the rents himself. He needs the approval of the city\u2019s nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, which votes annually on whether landlords can increase the rents on regulated apartments and, if so, by how much. The board is appointed by the mayor, but it\u2019s largely regarded as independent and data-driven. This is not to say that a rent freeze can\u2019t be done. \ufeffUnder Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Rent Guidelines Board froze the rent three times during his two terms: in 2015, in 2016, and in 2020, during the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n

The proposal also faces a backlash from those in the real estate industry, who argue that a rent freeze will undermine the solvency of the landlords who typically own what are known as \u201cnaturally occurring\u201d rent-stabilized buildings: smaller, older buildings that are in perennial need of expensive maintenance.<\/p>\n

However, the real issue when it comes to Mamdani\u2019s signature housing proposal is straightforward: It\u2019s not enough. On its own, it\u2019s not big enough or radical enough to tackle the real problem, which is one of supply and demand. New York City, after all, has a population of 8.5 million and a rental vacancy rate of 1.4 percent.<\/p>\n

Mamdani clearly knows this. In a position paper issued back in February 2025, when he was still a blip on the political radar, he vowed to \u201ctriple the City\u2019s production of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.\u201d He also promised to \u201ctriple the amount of housing built with City capital funds,\u201d creating \u201c200,000 new affordable homes over 10 years for low-income households, seniors and working families.\u201d Four hundred thousand new units may not be enough either, but it\u2019s a start\u2014and building this housing would surely be one measure of his success as mayor.<\/p>\n

As most of his predecessors learned, building affordable housing is challeng\u2028ing, and past mayors tended to pad their achievements. Over the fiscal year 2025, for example, the previous mayor, Eric Adams, \u201cbuilt\u201d or \u201cpreserved\u201d 33,715 affordable units and claimed that by the end of his single term, 425,000 units \u201cwill have been built, preserved or planned for.\u201d Similarly, de Blasio announced at the end of his two terms that he\u2019d reached his goal of creating and preserving 200,000 units: \u201cOver the administration, more than 66,000 affordable units have been created and another 134,000 have been preserved.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If only \u201cpreserved\u201d and \u201cplanned for\u201d units were enough to erase the shortage of housing for working families. Indeed, if units \u201cplanned for\u201d dependably led to housing built, de Blasio could take credit for one of the most impressive initiatives imagined in New York: a master plan for developing Sunnyside Yard in Queens. This mile-and-a-half-long expanse of busy rail yard, jointly owned by Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and General Motors, represents the scarcest commodity in New York City: 180 acres of open land. Drafted by the Manhattan-based Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), the Sunnyside Yard master plan was a thing of beauty\u2014a deft mixture of different building types and generous open space, complete with illustrations of children playing in car-free streets. It looked more like Denmark or the Netherlands than Queens. And the written description was, if anything, even more upbeat: \u201c12,000 new 100 percent affordable residential units, 60 acres of open public space, a new Sunnyside Station that connects Western Queens to the Greater New York region, 10 schools, 2 libraries, over 30 childcare centers, 5 health care facilities, and 5 million square feet of new commercial and manufacturing space that will enable middle-class job creation.\u201d It was (and remains) the most utopian thing I\u2019d ever seen proposed for New York City. However, it was released in early March of 2020, on the eve of the pandemic shutdown of pretty much everything.<\/p>\n

PAU\u2019s vision for Sunnyside Yard was, in fact, the feel-good antithesis of Manhattan\u2019s Hudson Yards. The two developments used the same strategy, decking over working rail yards to create a building site; the key difference was how the deck would be funded. At Hudson Yards, the developers paid for the deck, and everything they built on top of it was intended to help them recoup a billion-dollar investment. The beauty of the Sunnyside plan was that the city would build the deck. According to Adam Grossman Meagher, who was running the project for New York\u2019s Economic Development Corporation, the $5 billion that the city would have to spend on the portion of the deck that would support buildings was comparable to the amount the city would have to spend to acquire plain old land\u2014except that nowhere in New York City does a comparable amount of land exist. Utopia, as it happens, doesn\u2019t come cheap.<\/p>\n

At the time, the whole thing struck me as lovely but improbable, something that desperately needed to happen but, because of Covid and the fact that de Blasio was approaching the end of his second term, probably never would. Even during those awful months of early 2020, PAU\u2019s founder and creative director Vishaan Chakrabarti was surprisingly optimistic\ufeff, seemingly able to see beyond the fog of Covid: \u201cThis is part of why you do master planning,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou don\u2019t know something like this is going to happen. But it tees things up for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

That future, however, came and went. The project, released too early in the pandemic and too late in de Blasio\u2019s tenure, has since gone \u201ccompletely dormant,\u201d Chakrabarti told me in a recent conversation. Before anything could be built there, the yard would have to \u201cbe rezoned in accordance to the plan,\u201d and the MTA would have to kick-start the project by building a commuter rail station. The rezoning, which would\u2019ve demanded an enormous amount of political will and acumen, and the existence of a rail station might have positioned the project for a \u201cbig federal grant to build a platform,\u201d Chakrabarti says, adding: \u201cThere\u2019s no way to build a platform without a federal grant. And this is what\u2019s so frustrating. Mayor Adams, when this plan was still fresh in people\u2019s minds\u2026could have applied for Biden infrastructure money to build the platform.\u201d But he didn\u2019t. And the likelihood of a federal grant ended when Trump returned to office (the startling bromance between the president and the new mayor notwithstanding).<\/p>\n

The Sunnyside Yard saga, however, reminds us that accomplishing anything major in New York City requires decades. A mayor (with the exception of Mike Bloomberg, who stuck around for three terms) is in office for a maximum of eight years. So Mamdani will have to get moving.<\/p>\n

This is why smart mayors take advantage of\u2014and need to build upon\u2014the work done by their predecessors. As Marc Norman, the Silverstein Chair and associate dean of New York University\u2019s Schack Institute of Real Estate, recently told me, success for Mamdani\u2014or any other mayor\u2014requires using what\u2019s already in the pipeline: \u201cA lot of it depends on who the mayor was before them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Adams has helped Mamdani: The former mayor \u201chad a very ambitious housing plan,\u201d Norman points out, one that Mamdani should find useful. Adams\u2019s incremental rezoning of the whole city, a plan known as the \u201cCity of Yes,\u201d offers the incoming mayor a toolkit and a set of strategies to allow more housing to be built in every type of New York City neighborhood.<\/p>\n

The City of Yes plan is also projected to help generate 82,000 homes over the next 15 years by encouraging infill development: buildings with a couple of floors of apartments over retail in commercial areas; accessory dwelling units in single-family neighborhoods; and smaller units than had previously been allowed under New York\u2019s building codes. \u201cMamdani\u2019s going to be able to take credit for the things that happen under [the plan], even though it passed under Adams,\u201d Norman points out.<\/p>\n

Even so, whatever City of Yes might facilitate, it\u2019s still not enough. For one thing, as a nation, we no longer build housing. The Faircloth Limit, drafted by North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth and signed in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, capped the number of public housing units in the United States at close to 1.28 million, the number that existed on October 1, 1999.<\/p>\n

Today, housing is only indirectly funded by the Feds. Depending on whom you ask, this is either a blessing or a tragedy. The mid-20th-century practice of urban renewal, in which massive complexes were constructed that wound up serving as warehouses for the poorest of the poor, has been supplanted by a system that hinges on the private sector. Funding for affordable housing still comes from the federal government, but indirectly, in the form of low-income tax credits. The credits are given to developers of affordable housing, who sell those credits to investors. Public money is still an essential part of the package, but it\u2019s laundered through the private sector. As a result, the process of funding affordable housing is byzantine and slow-moving.<\/p>\n

A number of private developers are experts at working the cumbersome system. For example, Jonathan F.P. Rose, the founder and CEO of Jonathan Rose Companies, has been building affordable housing since 1989. He\u2019s known for large-scale affordable and mixed-income projects and is currently developing Gowanus Green, a 100 percent affordable-housing development that includes 995 units in six buildings, on the site of a former gasworks in Brooklyn. The list of funding sources for the project is a mile long.<\/p>\n

Like many others in the real estate world, Rose questions the value of Mamdani\u2019s proposed rent freeze and cites the potential for unintended consequences. He points out that half of the affordable-housing developments built with tax credits and owned by nonprofit organizations are already losing money and warns that \u201cif they continue to lose money, they\u2019ll go bankrupt.\u201d As a private developer, the advice he has for Mamdani\u2014and for the government in general\u2014is unsurprising: \u201cGet out of the way. We have a whole series of ridiculous regulations that just waste a whole lot of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other private developers of affordable housing operate at a smaller scale. Andrea Kretchmer, a founding principal at Xenolith Partners, is about to close on a loan that will allow her firm to start the construction of a 95-unit building on the site of a former police station in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was vacated by the city in the mid-1980s and, Kretchmer tells me, \u201ca nonprofit in the neighborhood bought it and has been holding on to it since 2002, trying to figure out what to do with it. And we\u2019ve been working for 11 years to get it financed and approved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note that it\u2019s taken over a decade for Kretchmer to assemble funding for a relatively small project. And even as developers like her angle for funding to create new affordable housing, existing units, for a variety of reasons, disappear. \u201cWe are losing units faster than we can replace them with new construction,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like we are running on a treadmill that\u2019s going faster than you can run, and we\u2019re falling backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Chakrabarti, meanwhile, has moved on from Sunnyside Yard. In 2023, he and his team at PAU did a research project for The New York Times called \u201cHow to Make Room for a Million More New Yorkers.\u201d It was a study of the city in which they \u201cidentified more than 1,700 acres of underutilized, developable land: vacant lots, single-story retail buildings, parking lots.\u201d They also included office buildings that could be converted into apartments. It was like a scavenger hunt in which they looked for places where more housing could be added without rezoning or changing the character of neighborhoods. Unlike Sunnyside Yard, though, this project is not at all utopian. Instead, it\u2019s a hyper-pragmatic approach to solving a problem, one that could serve as a template for Mamdani\u2019s housing goals.<\/p>\n

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Chakrabarti points out that \u201ceveryday working-class people in New York City can sometimes make up to six figures if they\u2019re union employees,\u201d but even those people \u201ccan\u2019t afford market-rate housing\u2026and that\u2019s because the market\u2019s broken. Our big developers,\u201d he continues, \u201chave zero interest in building 50-unit, transit-oriented developments in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. They are geared towards building 300-, 400-, 500-unit buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, much of the \u201caffordable\u201d housing that\u2019s been constructed in New York City over the past couple of decades has been generated by those same big developers. With a strategy called inclusionary zoning, developers can build taller or fatter towers if 20 or 30 percent of the apartments are set aside as \u201caffordable.\u201d It\u2019s a clever end run around the funding issue, but\u2014surprise!\u2014it\u2019s not enough. In part, this is because the strategy\u2014labeled \u201ccreating affordable housing out of thin air\u201d by NYU\u2019s Furman Center\u2014can succeed only in those parts of the city that are affluent enough to support the building\u2019s market-rate units, meaning that it won\u2019t work for many of the sites identified by Chakrabarti\u2019s mapping project. \u201cWe need a new family of small-scale developers who can, in a really unimpeded way, build working-class housing on those available sites,\u201d he contends.<\/p>\n

When I mention Chakrabarti\u2019s theory to Kretchmer\u2014that what we need is developers interested in turning parking lots into 50-unit buildings\u2014she is enthusiastic: \u201cYou know, we like parking lots. That\u2019s our jam.\u201d And when I asked her about some other small firms doing work like Xenolith, she lists a number of them, including Type A Projects (another firm owned by women) and Kalel Companies. Clearly these developers exist.<\/p>\n

The new mayor, meanwhile, has appointed Leila Borzog as the deputy mayor for housing and planning. She was the Adams administration\u2019s executive director for housing, so she knows what\u2019s in the pipeline, and as the deputy commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development under de Blasio, she helped organize a competition: Big Ideas for Small Lots NYC.<\/p>\n

So parking lots could well be Mayor Mamdani\u2019s jam, too. His administration might be smart enough to effectively deploy what\u2019s already there, taking the City of Yes and running with it, shoehorning in non-luxury housing wherever it might fit. There are, for example, 20,714 surface parking lots in New York City, according to one survey. Not all of them need to be used for new housing, but redeveloping the city one parking lot, vacant lot, or disused commercial building at a time would move the dial in 50-unit increments until someday, eventually, there is enough.<\/p>\n

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Karrie Jacobs<\/a><\/p>\n

Karrie Jacobs is a veteran critic and observer of New York City\u2019s architecture and development and a strong advocate of conducting research by walking around.<\/p>\n

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