ON March 3, 2020, two weeks before Covid would shut down the world, the Sunnyside Yards Master Plan was published. At the time, I noted “the release yesterday discusses that the timeline for fully building it out is decades,” and acknowledges that “the plan is a nonbinding document,” followed by “it’s not worthy of your time or mine, to dig into the details as the plan delivered yesterday is really just a very loose blueprint for the future. It’ll be up to successive administrations and generations to give the green light.” And finally “For the time being though the ‘affordable’ declaration assuages the noisemakers, and the non-committal timeline assuages critics like me who are willing to let sleeping dogs lie…”
As it turned out, I wasn’t really quite ready to let it lie after digging into the report two days later and being completely exasperated by it. So I drafted a post with some random thoughts and figures, headlined as is and topped by the flippant cartoon above, with the intent of pulling it all together shortly thereafter. I don’t know if it was the approaching Covid storm or the feeling that I was beating a dead horse, but I never did pull it together.
Fast forward almost exactly six years when I came across the NYT story below titled “Can Mamdani (and Trump) Build a Neighborhood Over a Queens Rail Yard?” and I knew it was time for ‘pulling it all together.’ Sunnyside Yards is a really, really bad idea, and it’s time to stick the knives in. Here’s a slightly cleaned up and slightly updated version of my thoughts at that time.
[Continue reading] about Sunnyside Yards, A Financial Evaluation
