NYCFC soccer stadium approved by BP
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The site planned to one day be home to New York City Football Club’s soccer stadium, a project Queens Borough President Donovan Richards approved on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
The plan to bring the city’s first-ever soccer stadium to Queens came even closer to reality on Wednesday after getting the thumbs up from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards.
Issuing his formal recommendation Wednesday morning, Richards urged the City Council to vote in favor of the project from New York City Football Club, the New York City Economic Development Corporation and developers with Sterling Equities and Related Companies to bring the stadium and over 1,000 units of affordable housing to Willets Point.
Richards’ approval of what they city has dubbed phase two of the development project in the notorious corner of Northwest Queens came with a number of conditions, including commitments from the development group to hire locally, create opportunities for local street vendors to sell their wares, offer discounted tickets to nearby residents, make improvements to nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park and more.
Speaking with the Eagle on Wednesday morning, Richards said he felt the project was a “huge win.”
“It’s a goal for the borough,” the borough president said. “This site is being turned from the ‘Valley of Ashes’ to the ‘Valley of Opportunity.’”
Richards’ approval of the project, which has essentially been in development for the past two decades, was largely expected. Though the overall plan to develop Willets Point has seen countless starts and stops, and has, at times, been controversial, the latest iteration of the plan to bring an entirely new neighborhood to what was once known as the Iron Triangle hasn’t faced much pushback. In fact, the project has largely been celebrated and embraced by all local elected officials, various city agencies and locals.
Now moving on to a review from the City Planning Commission before heading to the City Council and mayor for final approval, the project isn’t expected to face much opposition. Perhaps the project’s biggest booster is local City Councilmember Francisco Moya, a major soccer fan who showed up to the local community board’s first review of the project wearing a custom jacket with NYCFC’s logo printed on the front and back. The City Council has a long history of voting in favor or against development projects depending on the vote of the local lawmaker, a practice known as councilmember deference.
“New York City FC is grateful for Borough President Donovan Richards’ support on our proposed stadium project and his guidance to help us build a stadium that benefits the entire Queens community,” NYCFC Vice Chairperson Marty Edelman said in a statement to the Eagle. “We have a history of being a committed community partner through our many initiatives and City in the Community foundation, and we are grateful for his shared vision of using our platform for the betterment of Queens and all New Yorkers.”
“We continue to receive overwhelming support from the local Queens community throughout this process and are grateful the borough president held a thorough hearing to allow our fans to voice that support,” Edelman added.
Phase two of the project, which was approved by the borough president on Wednesday, includes 1,400 units of affordable housing, an 18-story hotel, several parking garages, over 75,000 square feet of retail space, a number of pedestrian plazas, open space and the 25,000-seat stadium, which is expected to open for its first match in 2027.
Phase two of the development builds off of phase one, which officials broke ground on toward the end of December.
The first phase of the project was approved by the city around a year ago and includes 880 units of income restricted housing, 220 units of senior housing, a 25-space parking garage, over 22,000 square feet of retail space, around 5,000 square feet of community facilities and over 30,000 square feet of open space. Construction on the first phase is expected to be completed by 2026.
Every unit of housing built in the first two phases of the project will be income restricted.
Together, the 2,500 units of affordable housing stand to make the redevelopment of Willets Point the largest production of affordable housing in the five boroughs in 50 years.
A spokesperson for the city’s Economic Development Corporation said the quasi-government agency was “thankful for Queens Borough President Donovan Richard’s support and recommendation for the Willets Point phase two development and looks forward to working with the City Planning Commission next.”
Queens’ Community Board 7 gave its near-unanimous approval of the project in December. The board’s approval came after it first got the city to agree to explore the potential for brining a new police precinct to Northeast Queens, given the expected increase in population in the area, in part because of the Willets Point project.
While a potential new precinct wasn’t at the top of Richards’ wish list for the project, he got the city, NYCFC and the developers to agree to a handful of conditions to the BP’s support.
Among them was a promise to make the affordable housing rates similar to those in phase one of the development, meaning over 50 percent of the units will be rented at or below 80 percent of the area median income.
He also got the development group to agree to a number of local hiring promises, including a commitment to consider “widening any sidewalks surrounding the stadium to accommodate both local street vendors and safe pedestrian passage, as well as adding a ‘vending lane’ along a ‘No Parking’ zone if possible.”
At one point during the negotiation process, Richards threatened to withhold his support of the project if unlicensed vendors who had, at the time, recently been booted from Corona Plaza by the city weren’t given the right to return to the cultural destination in Queens. Late last year, the city came to an agreement with some of the vendors and a local nonprofit to create a first-of-its-kind vendor market in the plaza.
But Richards said the new stadium could also be part of the solution.
“One of the reasons we have these issues with the underground economy that has really continued to emerge [in Corona] is because we don't have jobs, so, how do you scale the economy?” the borough president said. “A piece of that was ensuring that we had concessionaire opportunities for street vendors.”
“It's one thing to say we don't want the street vendors in Queens, we don't want them in the plaza, we don't want them operating illegally, but there's another thing that makes sure that they have a pathway for upward mobility,” he added.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards recommended the City Council approve plans to develop the second phase of Willets Point. File photo via Queens Borough President's Office
As part of the agreement reached with the BP, NYCFC also said that they would conduct outreach to Queens colleges in an effort to provide employment opportunities to students and graduates.
The soccer club also agreed to help make improvements to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and to local public transportation, and to also explore the possibility of building small playgrounds within the second phase of Willets Point.
The team has also agreed not to hold games on the same days the Mets are playing at home.
Not included in the recommendation was any mention of the plans NYCFC has to lease the parking lot at Citi Field to be used by their fans during game days.
An agreement between the club and the baseball team has yet to be reached, however, a memorandum of understanding has been reached between the two that stipulates the club would be able to use 4,000 spaces in the Mets’ lot.
“I am 100 percent positive that the parking issue is resolved,” Richards said on Wednesday.
Richards’ approval of the project marks the furthest a proposal to develop Willets Point has made it through the city’s review process.
Though the area across the street from Citi Field was ignored by the city for much of the 20th Century, it has been eyed by the city, which owns a portion of the land in the neighborhood, for development for the past several decades.
A century ago, Willets Point was the inspiration for a particularly desolate setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby.” He called it the “Valley of Ashes,” named for the conditions created by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, which dumped heaps of ash onto the site until 1930, when the company was booted from the neighborhood to make way for the World’s Fair.
For a time, the neighborhood served as a city dump and later became home to scores of auto mechanic shops. Those shops populated the area when in 2008, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council officially marked Willets Point for redevelopment.
Several plans for the area were pitched and scrapped, including one that involved bringing a shopping mall to Willets Point that was shot down in court.
It wasn’t until the final years of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s second term in office that the current plan began to take shape.
De Blasio announced the details of phase one of the site in June 2021, and remediation began on the land shortly after – around that time, the city also agreed to lease the land to Related Companies and Sterling Equities, the two development companies that make up Queens Development Group, for 99 years. The clean-up, which included excavating 100,000 tons of contaminated earth and replacing it with 80,000 tons of clean dirt, was completed toward the beginning of 2023.
In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city had struck a deal with NYCFC to bring a stadium to the new neighborhood – the stadium will be privately financed by the soccer team, which will receive a tax break that is expected to cost the city $516 million in lost revenue over the 49-year term of the club's lease on the land.
