New York City Reaches Deal to Build Soccer Stadium in Queens
The New York City Football Club will pay roughly $780 million to build the stadium in Willets Point in Queens as part of a project that will include housing and a hotel.
By
Dana Rubinstein and
Ken Belson
Nov. 15, 2022
New York City officials have reached an agreement to build the city’s first professional soccer stadium, the centerpiece of a giant mixed-use development that would transform a long-underutilized waterfront section of Queens.
The 25,000-seat stadium for the New York City Football Club is slated to rise on city land by 2027 in the Willets Point neighborhood of Queens, across the street from the right field foul pole of Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets, Mayor Eric Adams and the soccer team’s officials confirmed on Tuesday.
The stadium would be the first significant major-league sports venue to be built in the city since 2012, and is set to be the focal point of a 23-acre project that includes a 250-room hotel and 2,500 units of housing. Officials say the project would be the city’s largest development of entirely affordable housing since the Mitchell-Lama developments of the 1970s
The deal represents Mayor Eric Adams’s most ambitious economic development initiative and comes as he is about to complete his first year in office. It also spells the end of two sagas: the team’s decade-long search for a dedicated soccer stadium and an even longer conundrum about the future of Willets Point, a once thriving conglomeration of auto body shops.
“Queens, which is the world’s borough, now will become the home of soccer, which is the world’s sport,” Maria Torres-Springer, the deputy mayor for economic and workforce development, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Unlike many stadium deals, including one for the Buffalo Bills
negotiated this year by Gov. Kathy Hochul that included nearly $900 million in public funds, city officials said subsidies for this project are largely limited to infrastructure improvements at the site and property tax breaks for the stadium.
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