NYCFC stadium plan enters land review phase: What it means, and what comes next

May 01, 2024

The process to start building New York City FC’s stadium in the Willets Point neighborhood of Queens is slowly taking shape.

The 25,000-seat stadium, announced last year, will be part of a sprawling neighborhood being built across the street from Citi Field, home of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, and where NYCFC will play its final game of the regular season on Saturday. This week, plans for the stadium took a small step towards city approval, and now begin the long process of a land use review.

The fate of that process, though, hinges on a local politician, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who says he doesn’t want his neighborhood to miss out on the billions in economic gains expected from the project over the next three decades.

“I will always utilize every power of my scope to ensure that this neighborhood just doesn’t have a stadium built next door without them reaping the benefits,” Richards told The Athletic this week.

Richards made clear to local press his willingness to leverage his necessary sign-off for the stadium’s approval to address issues in his district, most recently an ongoing dispute over the future of a street vendor market in nearby Corona Plaza. The city shut down the market early this year over complaints of cleanliness and crime.

News of Richards’ threat to withhold stadium approval barring a deal to re-open the market raised alarms, indicating a potential snag in NYCFC’s plans to finally put an end to its decade-old search for a permanent home.

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In 2015, the MLS club began playing its home games at Yankee Stadium, which like Citi Field is a baseball stadium that is not well-suited for fans watching the games in-person or at home. The team has since become somewhat nomadic, playing its home matches at several venues in New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut (along with one nominal “home” game at LAFC’s stadium in California). It had to be reliant on the schedules of those venues’ home teams, including the Yankees and even the club’s MLS rivals, the New York Red Bulls, when their games were played at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J.

The team’s incoming soccer-specific stadium is the centerpiece of a 23-acre proposal, which includes thousands of affordable housing units, a public school, open space, and hotel. The stadium is estimated to cost $780 million and will be privately financed by NYCFC. City officials expect the project will generate more than $6.1 billion in economic impact over 30 years.

City officials on Monday certified that the project’s application was complete, advancing it into the ULURP process – short for Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. That in turn has kicked off the public review phase of the process, which will involve the local community board.

In New York City, every neighborhood is represented by a community board, which is not able to author or enact legislation but does advise and present opposition where necessary in a number of areas, including development and land use. The community board representing the stadium site at Willets Point is expected to hold a public hearing within 60 days of receiving the certified application for the stadium. That application should be with the community board within nine days of being certified. The final step in that two-month timeframe would be for the board to submit a written recommendation to the applicant, the City Planning Commission and Richards, the Borough President

Richards anticipates he’ll see the proposal “sometime next year,” depending on how long this next phase takes.

“In order for the stadium to be built, I have a special power that allows me to de-map a street,” Richards said. “So, if I didn’t de-map the street, then there would be no stadium. They couldn’t even put a shovel in the ground.”

The street vendors’ dispute is expected to be resolved well before the application reaches the Borough President’s desk. Richards said he has been working with City Hall, and both sides reached a “tentative agreement” to resolve the dispute. They are working through final details before announcing a plan, he said.

“I relatively feel it’s a perfectly imperfect deal that we’ve reached, where we’ll start to see some of those vendors returned back to work, perhaps in the next few weeks,” Richards said on Wednesday. He did not elaborate on what the deal entailed specifically.

Richards said he envisioned local vendors having a more integral role in stadium plans.

“You want a taste of the world, you come to Queens, and, of course, football is the world’s sport, right? So, there’s really an opportunity,” Richards said. “I think we should be thinking, largely, on the concessionaire opportunities, definitely thinking how we can incorporate them into the stadium.”

Next week, he said stakeholders for the local community and stadium are planning “to share general information with the public on the process to make sure that MWBEs – minority and women-owned businesses – have an opportunity, as well, to build generational wealth through this opportunity.” It’s an ongoing process, he said.

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The stadium is expected to be completed by the 2027 MLS season, on the tail end of the FIFA men’s World Cup coming to the United States, Mexico and Canada in 2026. Once finished, the soccer stadium will be within walking distance of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open. Mets owner Steve Cohen also has been vocal about his own plans to eventually construct a casino adjacent to Citi Field, too.

Together, these plans would eventually transform this section of Queens into a sports hub.

But it’s the disconnect between this existing sector and the local neighborhood that is pushing officials like Richards to demand more from these future proposals.

“It’s beautiful to have people come in here and generate billions of dollars in a few weeks. But how is that translating on the ground for the people who live in Corona? How does that benefit them?” Richards said. “We’re not going to make the same mistakes that we’ve seen in the past here. We’re going to correct that very early through these negotiations.”

Richards, a long supporter of the Willets Point project, did clarify one thing: his speaking up about his demands was never about delaying plans for the soccer stadium.

“Of course, my goal was never to hold up the stadium. I mean, come on, it’s a $780 million economic opportunity,” Richards said, “but at the end of the day, this is about also making sure that we treat people in these neighborhoods with respect, and if the stadium comes in, we don’t want them seeing it in their backyard without an opportunity for them to be in the game.”

(Top photo courtesy NYCFC)

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