As Sunnyside Yards planning process continues, community remains divided

As the Sunnyside Yard Master Planning Process draws to an end, and potential groundbreaking gets closer every day, supporters and opponents of the project are still having trouble talking to each other. Despite some small successes, on the whole, the gap between supporters and opponents of the project has proven difficult or impossible to clear.

“There are no supporters,” said Patricia Dorfman, a Queens activist and vocal opponent of the project. “They all don’t want the yards.” Pressed for clarification, Dorfman was adamant that she was speaking literally. She had never encountered a single supporter of the project.

Kacy Knight, meanwhile, is a Woodside resident who supports the development. He said that discourse around Sunnyside Yard has become too much for him to handle.

“It’s horrible,” he said. “It’s at the point where I don’t support it much publicly anymore.”

Sunnyside Yard, a 180-acre rail yard in Western Queens, has been the subject of fierce debate since 2017, when the City of New York released a feasibility study showing that it was possible to build a deck over about 80% of the yard. New development could take place on top of the deck, resulting in the creation of a new, artificial neighborhood, where for now, there is nothing but a train yard. The Sunnyside Yard Master Planning Process, led by the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and Amtrak, began in the summer of 2018. According to its website, it is supposed to last about 18 months, which gives it an approximate end date early in 2020.

Supporters say that the development will lower housing prices by increasing supply, and will bring much-needed commerce to the area. Opponents, meanwhile, say the project will result in gentrification and displacement, as well as overcrowding and strained infrastructure. The project is coming closer to fruition: last month, the city released design mock-ups of the site for the first time. But even as the planning process continues, both sides have had trouble converting members.

At the meeting last month, for instance, what was supposed to be a happy occasion — the city’s first release of design plans for the site — turned angry as protesters disrupted the proceedings.

“Things got heated,” Arthur Tarley, a Queens resident, said in an email. “A person here and there tried to shout down the protest but it didn’t work. And the EDC tried to take back the meeting and it failed.”

Mitch Waxman, an Astoria resident, said that while it was obvious to him that the EDC would not change its position, the protesters were equally unlikely to change their minds.

“There are people who have taken intractable positions,” he said.

Knight agreed.

“Short of just having the rail yards exactly the way they are, or maybe building a park on them,” he said, opponents of the project “will not be happy.”

But Jenny Dubnau, a Queens resident who is active with the Justice for All Coalition and opposes the development, said that she had actually had some success persuading supporters that the project was not a good idea. Her most successful argument, she said, was a financial one.

“This is going to be an unbelievably, unbelievably costly effort. And it’s going to be our money,” she said. “That money is really needed desperately in other parts of the city.”

Knight, by contrast, said that he hadn’t encountered this sort of good-faith interaction in debates with supporters.

“I have yet to have a civil conversation or interaction online with someone who’s against the project,” he said.

However, he said, that incivility is sometimes effective.

“For someone that’s sort of on the fence, those arguments seem pretty fair,” he said.

Another Sunnyside resident, who only agreed to be interviewed on background, said that economic arguments didn’t persuade him. On the contrary, he said, a Sunnyside Yards development would have positive economic impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods. Businesses had come to the area with hopes that development would bring increased revenue, he said — and without development, those businesses would be in danger.

“The rents are going crazy,” he said, “so they need foot traffic.”

Both this resident and Knight, however, agreed that opponents of the argument had one persuasive argument: transportation.

“I agree with that. The subways and transport will be stretched,” the Sunnyside resident said. Knight said that “the transportation thing is 100% legit.” Dorfman, an opponent of the project, said that “the 7 train is falling on us.”

But both supporters said that on its own, transportation wasn’t a persuasive reason to oppose the project.

“The subways are overloaded anyway,” the Sunnyside resident said. “The infrastructure should have been taken care of years ago.”

Beyond transportation, Knight said that there wasn’t much room for persuasion. He said that the heart of the dispute was a lack of understanding: it is difficult to understand why a large-scale Sunnyside Yard development is necessary, he said, until you have owned property, and understood the difficulties of the business and its low profit margins.

“You can’t build a 4-story, eight unit development and make money,” he said.

Some opponents of the project, meanwhile, said that their most successful arguments weren’t against development itself, but rather against the specifics of Sunnyside Yards. Waxman, for instance, said he wasn’t categorically against development. Rather, he said, he opposes the Sunnyside Yards proposal because of the enormous construction it will require — and when he points out the scale and costs of the construction, he said, supporters of the project sometimes see things in a new light.

“When you start getting into the nitty-gritty of really building this deck, they begin to see that this will have a multi-decade effect on their lives,” he said.

Besides transportation, supporters and opponents of the project agreed on one other thing: many of the arguments they make simply aren’t landing.

“At this stage, it’s just a political position,” said the Sunnyside resident. Just like the dispute over Amazon’s planned Queens headquarters, he said, opponents had a framework of the project that wasn’t going to change. He said that to opponents, Sunnyside Yard represented “a giant corporation taking advantage of the city.”

Sure enough, Stan Morse, a spokesperson for the Justice For All Coalition, said the development was “just another opportunity for wealthy developers.”

Knight, meanwhile, said that in the past, he had successfully shown skeptics how difficult it was for landlords to make money.

“I have gotten people to look at it and say, ‘ok, maybe my landlord isn’t evil,’” he said.

But not this time.

“This project is such a big scale,” he said, “that I haven’t had any luck.”