You can’t fault Mayor Mamdani for swinging for the fences and attempting to squeeze $21 billion out of President Trump to build 12,000 affordable apartments in Sunnyside, Queens. Slipping down to Washington, D.C., on an unannounced visit, the mayor flattered the president by presenting a mock newspaper front page portraying Trump as a visionary city-shaper (“TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD”) and pushed an audacious plan to construct a vast deck over the 182-acre Sunnyside Yards and build a new mini-neighborhood on top of it.

“To meet this moment, we need a true federal partner prepared to invest boldly and act urgently,” Mamdani said after the meeting. “I appreciated the opportunity to speak directly with President Trump about building more housing in any single project than our city has seen since 1973.” (For good measure, Mamdani used the occasion to enlist the president’s help in securing the release of a Columbia University undergraduate, Elmina Aghayeva, who’d been yanked out of her dormitory and detained by ICE agents.)

Mamdani is trying to exploit a bromance that has surprised and baffled pundits and the political class. The president’s warm treatment of the socialist mayor arguably becomes less mysterious if you follow the money: Trump, whose family and companies clocked an estimated $1.4 billion in profits over the last year — mostly from deals in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — probably recognizes that making nice with New York’s first Muslim mayor can only smooth relations with his business partners and help his personal bottom line.

Trump might even be intrigued by the parallels between the Sunnyside Yards idea and his own famous, failed attempt in the 1980s to deck over the Penn Yards on the west side of Manhattan and build Television City (later called Trump City), which would have featured a 150-story tower, 8,000 condominiums, and 2 million square feet of commercial space. A determined coalition of activists and politicians killed the deal in favor of what today is a vastly scaled-down Riverside South.

Mamdani should be careful what he wishes for: Even if City Hall gets all the support from Trump and the federal government that he’s seeking, the Sunnyside project will be, at best, a long shot. The idea was first floated 95 years ago, when the Regional Plan Association noted that there was “urgent need of improvement of the Sunnyside Terminal district at Queens Plaza in Long Island City.” A generation later, the LeFrak Organization sketched out its own plan to build housing and commercial space on top of the rail yards in 1971.

Another four decades passed before Mayor Bill de Blasio shocked the dormant idea back to life, dropping a Sunnyside Yards proposal in his 2015 State of the City speech and ordering the city’s Economic Development Corporation to initiate an elaborate planning process. Years of community meetings, sketches, engineering studies, and cost estimates yielded an elaborate master plan that was published in March 2020 only to be sent back into hibernation weeks later with the COVID pandemic overwhelming the city.

But as Justin Davidson noted in New York at the time: “Even if you accepted the proposition that the project would yield 12,000 rent-regulated apartments, possibly toward the end of the Barron Trump administration, the benefit to low-income Queensites would be negligible, since the development would push up the real-estate market all around. Meanwhile, the budget will multiply and suck up public billions that should have been spent on more urgent needs, like boilers for public housing.”

Six years later, the math is still daunting. Assuming no additional expenses, spending $21 billion to create 13,000 apartments averages $1.75 million apiece, which is more than double the $800,000 per unit the Real Estate Board of New York estimates to be the cost of building middle-class housing with union labor and more than triple the $500,000 per unit Mamdani estimated in his housing plan during the campaign. By comparison, an experiment in upstate New York features factory-made 1,500-square-foot modular houses that can be assembled and installed for $250,000 per home.

More than one developer has learned the hard way that what looks like a simple matter of building a deck over rail yards is hellishly expensive. Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project, which includes the Barclays Center, originally included plans to construct more than 2,000 units of affordable housing on top of the Vanderbilt Yards. The developer, Greenland USA, part of a Shanghai-based company, lost control of the project after defaulting on a $286 million loan; a new company is trying to revive the project, now called Pacific Park.

The best-known built-atop-rail-yards project, Hudson Yards on the West Side, sucked up $6 billion in subsidies at its inception and is currently seeking another $2 billion in public financing to build a deck over the last portion of rail yards and construct more buildings. Even with billions in support, the New York Times notes, “The apartments that Related built at its first Hudson Yards project have been leased this year at an average rent of $19,475 per month,” which is in a different galaxy than the affordability Mamdani has promised.

Mamdani is already getting pushback from a political ally, City Councilwoman Julie Won of Queens. “Any proposal that reshapes Sunnyside Yards must begin with the neighbors who live here. Our community deserves a seat at the table long before anyone, including the mayor, makes headlines in the Oval Office, especially for a project they have previously rejected,” she said.

That’s a small example of the community opposition that would surely materialize against the proposal. Mamdani is about to discover, like so many before him, why building on top of the Sunnyside Yards is a political Rubik’s Cube that has eluded solution for nearly a century.

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