What Happened to the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan?
Rendering of the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan
In March 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and Amtrak released the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan, an ambitious $14 billion infrastructure project that would deck the 180-acre rail yard in Queens and effectively create a new community with thousands of affordable homes and dozens of acres of green and public space situated atop a new regional rail hub.
But the plan was released at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, just before the city and state went into lockdown, economic activity slowed to a crawl, and every city infrastructure project was put on pause. The Sunnyside Yard Master Plan, a product of an announcement that de Blasio first made in 2015 during his State of the City address, was shelved.
More than two years later, there have been few signs of life for the plan, though some related transit projects are progressing. Elected officials and experts, including those involved with creating the master plan, say that the time is ripe to pursue such a monumental proposal, especially considering the long-term need for housing in the city, the immediate impact of job-creation on the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic, and as federal funding for infrastructure has begun to flow.
“It's a project of a scale that really only the public sector could realize,” said Skylar Bisom-Rapp, senior associate at Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), the firm that led the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan process at the behest of the de Blasio administration. “There’s a very kind of unique scale to this project in terms of the amount of housing, the amount of public services it could provide just given the amount of contiguous land that's available there without having to directly displace anybody.”
The Sunnyside Yard Master Plan envisions building a deck over the existing rail yard – a project in the vein of what the city has done or plans to do, to varying degrees, in recent decades at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Hudson Yards in Manhattan – so it can continue to operate while constructing 12,000 units of affordable housing (half for very low-income families) over the new space that would be available, along with 60 acres of new public space, schools, libraries, and more.
The transit hub, which currently serves Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road, could be connected with the city’s subway system and the new space could also accommodate additional transit infrastructure such as a Bus Rapid Transit corridor.
The MTA recently included a new “Sunnyside Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Station” in its 20-year needs assessment of transit infrastructure, beginning the process of studying the proposal before deciding whether it can be funded down the line. But the entities involved in the overall Sunnyside Master Plan don’t seem to be making any progress.
“There’s a logic to doing the project as MTA and Amtrak consider their next round of investments and improvements in the yard,” said Bisom-Rapp.
“It definitely requires a lot of political will…It’s a large-scale project with a lot of opportunity that comes at a cost and ultimately elected officials and the people they’re accountable to need to be the ones deciding if now is the time to do it,” he added.
“Amtrak is committed to continuing working with NYC and [the city’s economic development corporation] EDC on a plan to knit the many sides of Sunnyside Yard together with a potential overbuild,” said Jason Abrams, an Amtrak spokesperson, in a statement. “We’re open to concepts and working with our partners to develop those concepts but recognize there are many issues to work through. We appreciate the potential to leverage an important railroad asset and create value and opportunity for transit-oriented development in an important part of New York City.”
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a mayor-controlled public benefit corporation, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.
Alicia Glen, founder and managing principal of MSquared, was de Blasio’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development when the Sunnyside Yard plan was announced to much fanfare. The pandemic, she said in a phone interview, may have stalled the project but also made it all the more necessary.
“All of the reasons why we wanted to develop Sunnyside Yard have gotten even more compelling,” Glen told Gotham Gazette. “It would seem to me that now would be a really, really smart time for not just City Hall, but all the other partners to really put the pedal to the metal because there's [federal] infrastructure money available, there’s demonstrated market demand. And it’s just really the perfect time to start making these kinds of investments so that New York City can continue to grow.”
“There could not be a better time than now when you have all of the political stars aligned,” she added.
New York City is set to benefit from tens of billions in infrastructure funding under the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law passed in November 2021 by Congress and President Joe Biden. New York State expects as much as $27 billion in direct funding, much of which will flow to the city. The bill also included about $66 billion for Amtrak, funding crucial infrastructure needs.
With several major transit projects underway or in the planning process, Glen said that the groundwork for Sunnyside Yard is essential. “All of this is interconnected,” she said.
But a major undertaking like the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan requires elected officials to champion it. Mayor Eric Adams has not taken up the plan as of yet. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said in a podcast interview with Gotham Gazette in July 2021, just after he won a tough primary election for his office, that the plan was “of the highest priority,” but his office has since declined to comment on the proposal despite multiple inquiries for this article.
“It’s all about leadership and political will because there's no other reason why it couldn't get done,” Glen said. “It’s not too complicated. We have the technology, we have the skills, we have the wherewithal to figure out how to build above and next to a complex rail system. It's just about money. There happens to be more money right now than there's ever been.”
“Sunnyside Yard is an unbelievable opportunity to build a truly, truly sustainable, inclusive mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhood at scale in the middle of the most amazing borough,” she said.
What sets Sunnyside Yard apart from other recent major city projects – like Hudson Yards or the proposed Empire Station Complex plan to redevelop Penn Station and its surrounding neighborhoods in Manhattan – is that it is primarily focused on affordable housing, said Liam Blank, policy and communications manager at Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“In the post-covid world, it's now more questionable whether more office space is actually needed. There's more of a permanent shift towards remote work and flexible work,” he pointed out in a phone interview, referencing the Penn Station area plan, which is heavily focused on office space versus the Sunnyside Yard vision centered on housing and transit.
The project will require the mayor’s outspoken support, he said. “The mayor definitely would have to be probably the number one spokesperson on the project. If it's not a priority for the mayor, it's gonna be a lot harder to push it, to make any progress on it.”
The governor could potentially create a General Project Plan for Sunnyside, as is the case with the planned Penn Station area redevelopment and was done for Atlantic Yard and Hudson Yards. A GPP would supersede local land use rules and ease approvals. But it does not seem to be on the state’s radar. A spokesperson for Hochul did not return a request for comment. (Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, for his part, repeatedly criticized de Blasio’s proposal for Sunnyside Yard when he first announced it, and instead expressed some support for an alternate proposal to build a massive convention center at the site — but he was known to make decisions based on undermining de Blasio.)
For Mayor Adams, the Sunnyside plan could be a legacy-defining project particularly as he deals with a continuing affordable housing crisis. Adams has pledged to spur housing production, released a "City of Yes" plan that will seek zoning changes to increase development, as well as a larger housing plan that includes the zoning proposals, which are in development.
“We are going to turn New York into a ‘City of Yes’ — yes in my backyard, yes on my block, yes in my neighborhood,” he said when announcing the generalities of the proposed zoning changes. But he has not yet committed to any annual housing production targets and hasn’t identified or offered any big housing creation projects as part of the plan.
An Adams spokesperson did not provide comment for this article after saying he would.
The Sunnyside plan was designed to receive broad support. The planning process was led by a steering committee, co-chaired by Sharon Greenberger, President and CEO of the YMCA of Greater New York, and Elizabeth Lusskin, then-President of the Long Island City Partnership. It included 35 community leaders, advocates, and policy experts who, according to EDC’s announcement of the plan, sought feedback through more than 100 public interviews, four community workshops, three large public meetings, a digital town hall, walking tours, and discussions with more than 145 organizations.
“After over a year of extensive community engagements and scores of conversations with a wide range of stakeholders, we developed a thoughtful framework to guide development at Sunnyside Yard for the generations to come,” said then-Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Vicki Been, in a statement accompanying the release of the plan.
“Civic engagement is alive and well in Western Queens,” Greenberger said at the time. “The planning process enabled direct community participation and the prioritization of community needs. It’s particularly gratifying to see the input and recommendations of the community reflected in the final Master Plan.”
There were, of course, detractors to the plan. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then-City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, both Democrats representing the area, sent a joint letter to EDC in November 2019 expressing their concerns about the potential plan, though it was still in the drafting process. “The proposed high-rise and mid-rise residential buildings would further exacerbate a housing crisis that displaces communities of color and parcels off public land to private real estate developers,” they said in their letter. Ocasio-Cortez stepped down from the steering committee in January 2020, insisting that her constituents’ feedback, particularly about potential gentrification, was not being heeded. After this year’s redistricting process, Sunnyside Yard will no longer be in Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional district come January; it is now in the district likely to be represented by Rep. Nydia Velazquez.
City Council Member Julie Won, Van Bramer’s successor, now represents Sunnyside Yard. Her office did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Van Bramer also did not return a request for comment.
There are still those who are holding out hope about the project and the monumental impact it can have on the city.
“I think now is the time to think strategically for the future and this is a great opportunity,” said Carlo Scissura, president and CEO of the New York Building Congress, who was one of the members of the steering committee for the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan. “When you look at where the world is right now…we need to be building affordable housing, we need to be truly thinking about the future of job creation and creating opportunities not just in Midtown or lower Manhattan.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
'Everything's On The Table' as Redistricting Commission Draws Next Version of City Council Map
Commissioners hold a public hearing of the NYC Districting Commission (photo: @DistrictingNYC)
This month, the commission tasked with redrawing the 51 New York City Council districts is set to unveil a second and potentially final map following a process that has unfolded behind closed doors to a significant degree.
The New York City Districting Commission has been working since March on the new map, which must be redrawn each decade after the U.S. Census to account for population shifts. Those lines must be finalized by the end of this year and will be in place for the 2023 elections, where all 51 City Council seats will be on the ballot. They will have implications for how communities are divided and represented in the Council and, by extension, decisions around government funding, land use, and legislation.
Officials told Gotham Gazette the Districting Commission is expected to submit its next map to the City Council on September 22. The Council can accept the submission and finalize the map, or reject it and trigger another round of public hearings, after which the commission must unilaterally draw final lines.
"The ideal is to have something that the City Council will be happy with when we submit it,” said Dennis Walcott, who chairs the Districting Commission, in a recent podcast interview with Gotham Gazette. “But the reality is, we are prepared to make adjustments based on the feedback we get.”
The commission is composed of 15 members, seven of whom were appointed by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, including the chair, five by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Democrat, and three by Council Member Joe Borelli, the Republican minority leader.
The city gained 630,000 residents between the 2010 and 2020 census counts and no district went unchanged in the preliminary map published by the commission in July. Those initial lines, which include several major shifts from the current Council map, have received a fair amount of criticism from residents, advocacy groups, and City Council members — some of whom would be pitted against each other or saw their bases shift.
The commission, its staff and consultants must now consider the public input it has gathered while adhering to strict guidelines established in the U.S. Constitution, the federal Voting Rights Act, state law, and the City Charter.
While the commission has received testimony from over 8,000 residents, the decisions about where to place district boundaries have been made out of public view, and with no public explanation of the decisions that went into the preliminary map. Leading up to the creation of those lines, commissioners and staff often met in subcommittees small enough to avoid the state's open-meetings requirements.
Good-government groups have called on the commission to hold some deliberations in public or explain the reasoning behind its decisions, ideally before making final ones.
"A record number of New Yorkers have made their voices heard during this year’s Council redistricting process and they deserve to see how their comments are being synthesized and debated by the Commission," said Dan Kaminsky, a policy analyst with the good-government group Citizens Union, which put out a report with recommendations for the commission in February. "Holding mapping deliberations in public clarifies mapmakers’ intentions, prompts healthy dialogue between commissioners, and reduces the potential power of outside influence on the process."
The commissioners’ initial choices have seen public pushback on several fronts. New Yorkers and organizations that represent them have raised alarms about the way the preliminary map grouped or split their communities in more than a dozen parts of the city.
Some of the biggest points of contention are the contours of a so-called "Asian opportunity district" in southern Brooklyn; the inclusion of part of the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island in a largely-Queens district; the breaking up of Hell's Kitchen and Harlem and parts of Southeast Queens; the specifics of the South Bronx-East Harlem crossover district; and how Canarsie, Woodside, Long Island City, and Astoria are dealt with, to name a few.
Part of the consternation stems from a major anchoring decision by the commission to keep Staten Island's three Council districts entirely on the island. The result was that the smallest borough, by population, also has the three smallest Council districts in the preliminary map. In the zero-sum game of New York City redistricting, with its fixed number of districts and requirements around population deviation, that means districts in other parts of the city had to take on more residents, sometimes stretching across borough lines in the process.
The preliminary maps appear to favor the Council's five-member Republican minority, whose stronghold on Staten Island would likely be weakened if the districts incorporated part of blue-leaning Brooklyn or Manhattan. There is speculation that the Districting Commission's seven mayoral appointees and three from Council Minority Leader Borelli aligned, according to Politico reporting, to ensure the districts were not expanded off-island. The preliminary maps passed 11 to 2, with one abstention and one absence; the two in opposition were appointees of Speaker Adams.
"We're taking a look at the lines as far as, say, specific neighborhoods that people say we cut off, or we didn't include properly," Walcott said.
"Nothing's off the table. Everything is on the table. It's a preliminary draft," he said about whether Staten Island districts would remain on-island in the next map. Walcott would not discuss deliberations around particular lines.
When asked if the commissioners would hold open meetings to give the public insight into their debate, Walcott said that was under consideration but made no promises.
"I mean, yeah, I hear what folks are saying, but same time, I’ve got to make sure we do it the right way," he said.
"While we wouldn't say anything privately that we wouldn't say publicly, I think the process is so dynamic…the implications are so tremendous that we have to be very conscious," Walcott said of the "comfort level" of commissioners and staff to deliberate freely in public.
"So I and we are really still thinking about how we go about that process," he added.
Walcott said the commission held an open meeting with a voting rights consultant to discuss how she carried out a racial bloc voting analysis, a survey of voting patterns to determine whether the voice of groups protected under the Voting Rights Act would be diminished by certain line choices. That analysis has not been released. According to Eddie Borges, the commission communications director, that study is still in progress and a final report from the consultant will be completed and made available when the body submits the next map to the Council later this month.
Borges couldn't say whether the commission would hold any open meetings ahead of the September 22 vote. "We’re working on that now. When we’re done with the maps we’re required to produce a report on what changes were made and why on each district. As you can imagine it’s a massive writing project which we’ll all be working on," he wrote in an email.
Council Speaker Adams and a number of new and returning members have criticized the preliminary map, indicating a likely rejection if the next map does not show substantial changes.
"There are important foundational principles that need to be prioritized in this process, yet the first set of preliminary maps appear to violate these and do not ensure the adequate representation of certain groups of New Yorkers," Adams said in a statement in August.
"Maintaining three districts that remain entirely in Staten Island is inconsistent with population changes, creates a malapportionment issue that undermines the ‘one person-one vote’ principle, and forces irrational changes to districts in other boroughs," she said, blaming the decision for the fracturing of communities of color in Brooklyn and Queens.
Adams called attention to lines dividing Latino residents in Sunset Park and Red Hook, Filipino and Tibetan residents in western Queens, and Black and South Asian communities in Southeast Queens.
The potential majority-Asian American district in southern Brooklyn has stirred a backlash from Council Members Justin Brannan and Alexis Aviles, who would likely have to compete against each other in the 2023 election under the preliminary lines, as well as from some Latino and Asian residents and advocates.
“It is perplexing that the creation of an AAPI-majority seat in southern Brooklyn would lead to the dissolution and division of Red Hook, Sunset Park – in addition to Dyker Heights – and it is certainly not necessary,” said Brannan, who currently represents District 43, and Aviles, who represents District 38, in a joint statement when the preliminary map was released.
"The proposed lines eliminate a district that currently has a large plurality of people of color, which has benefitted from strong representation by Latino elected officials, and instead make it a strong plurality white district by connecting it to Bay Ridge and removing Red Hook," said Asher Ross, a senior strategist at New York Immigration Coalition Action, in testimony before the commission this summer.
"The same is true of district 26 in Queens, where a plurality Asian district is changed to having a large white plurality," Ross told the commission.
In a statement to Gotham Gazette, Ross called on the commission to reexamine its decision to maintain the borders of Staten Island. "The Commission must be judicious in balancing the population sizes of each district to ensure fair representation across the city," he said.
Borelli, the Republican minority leader representing the 51st district, has been adamant about the Staten Island boundaries. “We have nothing in common with any other part of the city, and given our small population, we already have a hard enough time getting attention from City Hall,” he said in an interview with Politico New York earlier this year.
“I will use whatever influence I have to make sure Staten Island doesn’t lose an ounce of power at City Hall,” Borelli told Politico.
At the Districting Commission's first public meeting in March, Walcott told the public the commission would develop a code of ethics that would outline how to deal with conflicts of interest. The commissioners all serve voluntarily and many hold other jobs with business before the city.
Walcott is the CEO of Queens Public Library; other members include Lisa Sorin, president of the New Bronx Chamber of Commerce; Maf Misbah Uddin, the treasurer of District Council 37, the largest municipal workers union; Kevin Sullivan, leader of Catholic Charities, a major nonprofit with city and state contracts; Marc Wurzel, the general counsel of Grand Central Partnership, which manages a business improvement district in midtown; and Joshua Schneps, a local media magnate, among others.
According to Borges, the commission spokesperson, the code of ethics was never developed. Instead, the commissioners received a training from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board at a meeting in May, he said. According to the meeting minutes, 14 of the 15 commissioners were present.
[LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Commission Chair Dennis Walcott on New York City Council Redistricting]
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Max Politics Podcast: The Start of a New School Year in New York City
Mayor Adams says hello to students (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
September 9, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: The Start of a New School Year in New York City
Alex Zimmerman, reporter at Chalkbeat New York, joined the show to discuss the start of the new school year, the controversy around school budget cuts, and more education news.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.
Read more: Max Politics Podcast: The Start of a New School Year in New York City
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