Brian Lair on WNYC.

So when Mayor Mabaldani visited the White House recently, the big news was that President

Trump offered his support for a big new housing development in Sunnyside Queens.

But how do people in the neighborhood feel about it?

Our housing reporter David Brand joins us now to explain the pros, the cons, and the politics

of the Sunnyside Yards project.

We'll also touch on a court ruling Friday that will allow landlords to discriminate. Yes, I said, allow landlords to

discriminate against people using government housing vouchers to pay their rent. Hi, David, always good

to have you on the show. Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me. For the uninitiated, what is Sunnyside Yards?

Well, I think a lot of people have probably passed Sunnyside Yards and never really thought twice about it, except maybe questioning how there's this massive train yard, this massive open space surrounded by these giant skyscrapers of Long Island City.

And you've seen all of the development

take place in Western Queens right around the rail yard in LIC and in parts of Sunnyside,

and then there's just this huge open train yard, one of the biggest and busiest in the country.

So this plan that Mamdani went to D.C. to talk to Trump about would be to build a giant

platform over this rail yard and add thousands of new apartments and other elements of a city

neighborhood. Can you walk us through the proposal? This goes back to the de Blasio administration,

doesn't it?

Yeah. So about six or seven years ago, I was running a daily paper in Queens called the

Queen's Daily Eagle, and I was covering the master planning process that De Blasio's economic

development corporation was having with neighborhood residents, neighborhood groups in around Sunnyside.

And then finally, in March 2020, they released this plan for this proposed project with

12,000 affordable homes, so homes apartments with rents cap for low and mostly middle income

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