Can Sunnyside Yard Finally Happen?

0:06Lilah Burke: Welcome to Deconstruct, a podcast from The Real Deal. I'm Lilah Burke. Hannah Kramer is in Miami this week, so reporter Jake Indursky will be filling in. Jake, welcome. Happy to be here. So this week we'll be talking about New York's Commie Corridor, what's next for Marty Berger, and a new chapter for real estate attorney Mitch Kosoff. And for our main segment, New York Building Congress President Carlo Chassera will join us to talk about a long-stalled megaproject, Sunnyside Yard. Let's get started.

0:37Lilah Burke: Last week, New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani held a joint press conference with President Trump. There, he said that the two had brought their conversation about Sunnyside Yard, a long-stalled Queens mega-development, to, quote, a new level. The idea here is to build housing on top of the Sunnyside Rail Yard in Queens, bringing 12 ,000 units. Here to talk with us about the plan is President and CEO of the New York Building Congress, Carlo Chisura. Carlo, welcome. Great to be here. Good to see you both. Thanks for being here. We have you on because you have experience evaluating this site, Sunnyside Yard.

1:13You're on a task force under the de Blasio administration looking at this project. Could you give us a little bit of the background of Sunnyside Yard? How long has this been an idea, you know, somewhere that people could develop? You know, the president said it, I guess, yesterday or the day before, when he said this thing's been kicking around for 35 years at least, probably more. I think Bill de Blasio, when he was mayor, created this task force in 2017, 2018, around that time, and really brought an interesting group of people from across the city and Queens, right, because that's where the site is, to talk about and figure out a plan of what we can do.

1:52And we spent, you know, some time working on it, and it was very exciting. You know, it's something that's been talked about, like many things in New York. New Yorkers talk about a lot of things. We've been talking about redeveloping the BQE for 50 years, probably 40 years. We've been talking about Hudson Yards way before it got built. We've been talking about so many things. But, you know, Now, at some point, you have to go from talk to let's start something like the Second Avenue Subway. We talked about it for decades and decades, and now we're in phase two. So it's really an opportunity to say let's continue talking but with some actionable items.

2:32Lilah Burke: And so it seems like the first step with Sunnyside Yard is this platform, right, that's estimated to cost something like$20 billion. How big of a lift is that construction-wise? So look, I think that's not even the first step. I think the first step is people who will have a say in this have to come together and say, we want to do it. So you've got a mayor who wants to do it, which is phenomenal. Thank you, Mayor Mandani. You've got a president who says we want to do it. If the president wants to do it, that means Amtrak will want to do it because it's part of the federal government. And now you've got a couple of other things.

3:11So you've got to get the state and the governor on board, and then you've got to get the MTA on board, right? So you've got a couple of folks that need to come together and say, let's do it. I would imagine you want to create the Sunnyside Yards Development Corporation to really manage the process and the project and everything. And then we can talk about, let's build a platform,$20 billion or whatever the number will be. We built platforms all around the world. We can build a platform in Sunnyside Yards. It sounds like you're saying that the hardest part is not the construction of this. It's getting consensus from all these different entities.

3:50That's probably the case with a lot of these mega projects, right? Where you need the MTA to agree with the state, to agree with the city. I think construction is easy. It's getting the people together. It's getting the consensus. is honestly, is it going to be the president of the United States inviting everybody into the Oval Office to say, hey, folks, here's a down payment. Come up with the rest of the money. We're really going to do this, right? Someone's got to pull this together. And it sounds like there's at least a vision or an agreement to start discussions on this, which is a big deal.

4:28I think Mayor Mumdani had mentioned that there's a, I'm going to make sure I quote this correctly, but there is an aspect of the technical and legal authorization of the construction of the platform. What is he referring to when he's talking about the technical and legal authorization of the platform? Well, I would imagine someone has to give the okay to build it, whether that's Amtrak or MTA or some other entity. Someone has to say, okay, you can build a platform here the way they had to do on Hudson Yards. Mm-hmm.

5:00Lilah Burke: And speaking of Hudson Yards and then also, you know, the Atlantic Yard development, they're calling it so many different things. Is it still Pacific Park? Pacific Park, yeah. I worked on that when I was chief of staff to the Brooklyn Borough President, so I know that project very well. And it seems like those have gotten, those are further along. What separates something like those projects from something like Sunnyside Yards? Well, I mean, think about this. We started talking about Hudson Yards probably 30 years ago. So these things have been baked much longer than now. Are there lessons that you think that we should take from the Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards Pacific Park projects?

5:36I think involving the community early on would be my number one recommendation. as someone who worked on the project, get the local elected officials together and really create a vision of why we need this and sell it to the community, because that will be your biggest hurdle in any construction of this magnitude. Yeah. I mean, I think Councilmember Julie Wan actually had some criticism about the fact that so far it's been meetings between Trump and Mom Donnie around this, and she has not been included. She feels like the community piece is lacking. What do you think needs to be done there to build that consensus?

6:17I think I am certain that the mayor will include the community. I think right now it's still such a high level. You need the federal government to do this. It's that simple. If the federal government does not get involved, this never happens. So the fact that the president, who is the federal government, right, and if he says we want to do it, it gets done. The fact that he has now met twice with the mayor to talk about this really sets us on a course where then you can take the next steps, right, which is get the local elected officials, the council, assembly, senate, borough president, et cetera.

6:54Get the community board. Start really working on a community process. But, you know, I think we've learned this many times. You do all these projects. You create tasks for us, et cetera, and then nothing happens. Because at the end, if you don't have the buy-in from the people who really have to buy in, it's not going to happen. Here we have the buy-in from the president, seemingly, and that's a good start.

7:17Lilah Burke: And you've been part of or seen many, you know, really large-scale projects. What's sort of the timeline here? What can we expect? Can I expect to live in Sunnyside Yard? Well, I'll have to ask you how old you are. Pass. Well, I will tell you this. I am 55 years old. I will be 56 in November, even though I look much younger. You're supposed to say you look much younger. 56, what? Yeah, exactly. I have accepted the fact that I will never ride a fully built out Second Avenue subway. And I hope to live to be 100. But the probability that I can start from beginning to end of Second Avenue subway is a non-starter, right?

8:03I would imagine you will live in an apartment in Sunnyside Yards. It may be a 55 and over apartment, but you will live in an apartment. I will retire in Sunnyside Yards. You will live in a great community called Sunnyside Yards.

8:21Lilah Burke: Okay. With new transit and healthcare and schools for your grandkids and parks that you can enjoy, etc., etc. And why does it take a long time for all of these projects? Not just Sunnyside Yard, but the subway. You know, I think people sometimes get tired of waiting. You know, why do you think it's taking so long? Look, there's so many processes that have to happen, so many bureaucratic hurdles. When Robert Moses was around, you may have heard of him, of course. He said, this is what we're doing, and he just went forward and did it. That doesn't exist anymore. And thankfully, it doesn't exist anymore.

8:58Now there are steps. There's environmental reviews. These things cost a lot of money. They have to go out to bid. Lawsuits. People will sue, right? There's so many obstacles. This will probably go through Ulerp. It's several community boards. So there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle. I don't know how long until we get to the point where there is a construction crew there starting to build a platform. But the key is we have to invest in long-term projects because otherwise 20, 30 years from now, we won't be cutting ribbons. I'm curious, what's like the thing that will happen where you're like, okay, I think Lila is going to be able to retire and set aside yard.

9:38Like what's the next step where we start feeling some confidence? I would love the president, the mayor, the governor, the head of Amtrak, the head of the MTA, the local council person to announce we are creating legislation, probably state, so you need the assembly and the Senate, that will create the Sunnyside Yards Development Corporation. and we will hire an executive director and there will be a board of directors for this. And this entity will be funded by city, state, federal. And there will be lawyers who will draft up agreements with Amtrak and MTA and whoever else owns pieces of this Con Ed National Grid.

10:23I mean, there's like so many pieces to this. And we will now go forward and start analyzing optimizing the construction and what can be built to you and what the plan is. And that will take a few years to get to that point. One thing I was curious about, because we're talking about getting the community on board, do you see that, you know, this being partially a President Trump-driven idea in a very liberal part of the city? It's obviously important on the federal funding side, but do you see that as an obstacle towards getting that community buy-in? That's a great question. By the time this really gears up, he will be out of office.

11:01There'll be a new president. The mayor represented, I don't know if he actually represented Sunnyside Yards, but he represented that area in the assembly. He knows the district. So I think, yes, people don't want to give the president a win, of course. Same thing with the new Penn Station, right? They don't want to give the president a win. And my position is you may like him, you may not like him. The fact is if he's giving you lots of money to build infrastructure and housing and things that New Yorkers will use long after he's not president, just continue your advocacy for what you believe in.

11:39You could obviously say I don't like him, but take the money and let's build things for the future of New Yorkers.

11:45Lilah Burke: And beyond these big projects like Sunnyside Yard, what's going on, you know, with your members right now? What are what's important to them? Listen, my members are busy. We're going to put out a report in a few weeks. You should come to our event where we announce it. I'll give you a sneak peek. Folks are busy. Housing is being built. New office construction is still needed. Young people, when they go to work, because not everybody wants to work five days a week anymore in the office. But when they go to an office, they want a nice building. They want a gym, they want coffee, they want food, they want amenity space.

12:19So you've got, you know, five or six new massive office buildings that are either announced or will be announced from American Express and the World Trade Center to the new office building across from Penn Station on 7th Avenue to two or three more office buildings in East Midtown. So there's a lot of work there, a lot of work in housing, a lot of work in office to residential conversions, really picked up the pace on housing construction, which is phenomenal. And then infrastructure, right? So we're going to kick off a brand new Penn Station, which will be incredible and phenomenal. And we deserve that.

12:59The mayor announced the BQE. That's going to move forward. So that's another big project. There's a lot of momentum, a lot of things happening. Where I would say there are some warning signs. So cost of doing business skyrocketed with the Iran war and inflation. Interest rates are really high. Diesel is really expensive. Now, this whole trade war and tariffs doesn't help folks that want to build. There are some obstacles, but we're resilient and we continue working.

13:31Lilah Burke: Carlo, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Always a pleasure seeing you both. Okay, so Jake, I am very excited to have you here as a guest co-host. Can you tell me about a story that you're obsessed with this week? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about a story I wrote about the commie corridor with our politics reporter, Ben. Okay, what's the commie corridor? It's this chunk of Brooklyn and Queens. It was dubbed by this, well, what I thought was a political analyst, but turned out to be a 27-year-old boy, Michael Lang. but he dubbed this area the commie corridor because of how much it went for Mayor Momdani and DSA candidates.

14:10It stretches from like Long Island City down to different sources have it differently but like I think we really focused on North Brooklyn down to Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights.

14:23Lilah Burke: Mm-hmm. So like some North Central Brooklyn. We didn't include Red Hook although that some sources have it like that. I like that there's different sources. drilling down. We followed the Michael Lang pedagogy. Okay, so I actually live in the commie corridor. I live in Bushwick. Tell me what's going on there. Okay, so what we looked at was we wanted to get a sense of what's the development happening there. It was actually really interesting for me. One, just to, I think, step back. We took like a 10-year window and looked at all the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens and also looked at what's coming up.

14:56And I mean, by far, the Kami Corridor has accounted for the most development in these boroughs. I think Long Island City is the neighborhood with the most housing built of any neighborhood in the city for the last 10, 15 years. And so it also kind of creates this weird tension where there's a perception that, you know, the constituents in the Kami Corridor, a lot of whom voted for DSA candidates, are wary of developers. I think that also has been attributed to Mayor Mamdani. And seeing all this development, I mean, the first takeaway we had was like, this is where you guys are living. Like you're living in private developments.

15:32Lilah Burke: I mean, maybe that's what's happening. Maybe they're seeing so much private development that they're like, ah. Yeah, but I don't think they'd be able to live there. I mean, it's funny too, because, you know, I think we talked to the council member in Greenpoint and Williamsburg about, you know, there's a lot of market rate housing that's built there. Like that housing has gotten more expensive. And so I think the people living there, they're like living in these glass boxes and they're paying$5 ,000 a month. They're like, this is too expensive. But I don't think I thought about how expensive it would be to like rent a loft that would have been the only place available in these neighborhoods if that development wasn't there.

16:08You know, it's like the housing supply in these neighborhoods has increased so much. I think what's interesting is that, you know, it's allowed this sort of constituency that has some anti-development sentiment to actually proliferate in the city. So sort of this weird circle of development, building this commie corridor that doesn't like development. Mm-hmm.

16:29Lilah Burke: So, I mean, just to put a finer point on it, these neighborhoods have changed a lot, right, in the past 20 years, both demographically as you have like these sort of young, you know, upwardly mobile folks coming in and also politically, right? And there's like a real estate angle to that cycle. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what we've seen so far, at least for Mayor Mamdani on the building side, is that I think he's been pushing for development. I think he's been a lot more antagonistic to landlords. But on the developer side, you know, it's something that I think he's been a proponent of.

17:02Maybe it's because he realizes that's where all his constituents are going to be living. I don't know. Conspiracy theory on here. But no, I mean, I think, you know, it's part of his affordability agenda. But it's also just interesting that, again, the neighborhoods where we've seen by far the most development compared to like, you know, Park Slope, Ryliffe, I think of like Brad Lander territory. Not as much development there. So I think pulling on that tension was interesting. And, you know, at the same time, it's also realizing that in the last 10 or 15 years, development sentiment has changed.

17:33Ben talked to Emily Gallagher, one of the council members, who told him, she was like, I didn't want the Domino Sugar Factory to be redeveloped. She was worried about the jobs there, the sort of manufacturing history. But, you know, all these years later, when she looks at it, she's like, there's a lot of units of housing there. People are happy in the units they're living in. There's a really nice park. I think it's a sign that maybe one day the commie corridor turns into the capitalist corridor. Okay.

17:59Lilah Burke: I mean, is there a sense that, you know, with all of this anti-development sentiment from these folks, that there will be really less development in this area that's seen so much? I mean, a lot of development, ultimately, I think we see this and what's transpired in this area so far comes down to zoning. I mean, the rezonings that already took place in Long Island City and Williamsburg and Greenpoint allowed for all of this waterfront development. I think what's interesting is that, you know, even in the last few years, we've seen a shift from politicians who are representing these communities.

18:32Like Julie Wan in, you know, covers parts of Queens, came out as very against Innovation Queens, which is going to be a huge development from Silverstein Properties, said there was no political support for it. That was like maybe two years ago. Currently on her website, it says that she's proud to have shepherded through the latest Long Island City rezoning. And so I just think this is a shift that we've continued to see. And, you know, I think that even DSA members understand the need in a lot of ways for more housing in the city. That has to come from somewhere.

19:06Lilah Burke: Well, as I said, I live in the Kami Corridor and I will continue keeping tabs on this. I'll let you know what I see.

19:15Now for some headlines. Lila, what's going on?

19:17Lilah Burke: So Marty Berger, who was ousted as the CEO of Silverstein Properties three years ago, is once again making transactions. He and his joint venture, L &L Infinite, purchased the 42-story office tower at 600 Third Avenue for$245 million. He formed L &L Infinite with the similarly named L &L Holdings CEO, David Levinson, in January. It's, you know, one purchase, but we're sort of interested to see where Marty Berger goes after Silverstein. Obviously, that didn't work out, but seems like he's getting some points on the board. Good for him. What else is going on? Right. So elsewhere, former real estate attorney and convicted fraudster Mitch Kosoff has been released from prison.

20:06Who is Mitch Kosoff?

20:08Lilah Burke: So he was a big time real estate attorney representing some of the biggest multifamily landlords in New York. But he got in trouble because on the side from doing the real estate attorney business, he also owned a struggling family packaging firm, which I guess wasn't doing so well because he was using money that clients had given him to hold an escrow to keep the packaging company afloat. This all came crashing down in 2021. In 2022, he was disbarred. Then he was convicted of stealing$14.6 million and sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison. Now, we know that he was granted parole and we know that he was released, but that's sort of all we know about why he's gotten out just a few years into his sentence.

20:56Interesting. I guess if anyone does know what's going on there, let us know.

20:59Lilah Burke: Yes. If you have any tips about Mitch Kosoff, please let us know.

21:06Lilah Burke: And Jake, before we go, if you could give us an update on the Alexander brothers and what's going on with their sentencing. Yeah. So the Alexander brothers, Tal, Oren, and Alon. Tal and Oren were big time real estate brokers in New York City and Miami. The three brothers were accused by dozens of women of rape and earlier this year convicted of federal sex trafficking. The brothers are supposed to be sentenced on October 6th, but that was pushed back to October 27th. Their attorneys raised some concerns about some of the victims who were planning to testify during the sentencing hearing. The brothers are facing a minimum of 15 years in prison and up to life.

21:44Lilah Burke: Well, you can read more of our coverage about the Alexander brothers' sentencing at therealdeal.com. That's our show for you. Have a great week. Thanks for listening. Our script today was written by Lila Burke and Hannah Kramer, edited by Kara Eisenpress, and our in-room producers were Mary Deduk and Usha Sukai. Our sound engineer and post-producer is Mila Miller.