President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Monday that they focused on housing development for the city during their meeting at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.
For decades, New York officials have floated developing 140 acres at Sunnyside Yard, which serves as an active rail yard for Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road in western Queens.
“We’ve spoken about Sunnyside Yard,” Mamdani announced at a news conference, “and it’s a real pleasure that just today we’ve agreed to set up a new level of that conversation between our housing and operations team at City Hall and the White House team, because what we’re speaking about is 12,000 homes, 30,000 jobs, the prospect of an entire new neighborhood in a city where housing is the number one cost.”.
Trump called the Sunnyside Yard development a “big job” he has been watching for 35 years.
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“I would say that was a very federal-oriented job,” Trump said at the news conference. “You’re going to need a lot of federal approvals and probably some federal money to do it, but it’s always been a great location.”
The meeting marked the first time Trump visited Gracie Mansion as a sitting president. Trump said he encouraged Mamdani to live in the mansion even though the mayor had doubts about moving in because “it is a little bit on the luxurious side.”
When asked about affordability, a term Trump has deemed a “hoax” in the past, the president said he knew “a lot about affordability” because he developed “many low-income and moderate-income buildings over the years, and had great success with it.” A development at Sunnyside Yards would have to have “a pretty substantial component of exactly that,” Trump added.
When Trump and Mamdani met at the White House in February, Mamdani proposed “securing more than $21 billion in federal grants to construct the world’s largest deck over the site” in order to allow the housing development project to begin.
Mamdani and Trump’s remarks come as the president’s ban on several news outlets from entering the White House grounds remains in effect.
The mayor said that he stressed that it is important to engage with all members of the press “no matter the opinion or the critique,” while Trump lambasted the banned news services as being “very bad for national security” and publishing “biased news.”
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