[NYguy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/n...c-willets.html

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

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.

The soccer team will pay for the entire construction of the stadium, which is estimated to cost $780 million, city officials said. Neither tax-exempt bond financing nor direct city capital infusions will be used, according to Andrew Kimball, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The developers are not getting abatements on mortgage recording or sales taxes, he said. But the stadium owners will not have to pay real estate taxes for the duration of the lease.

New York City owns the land on which the stadium and housing will be built, and will lease it to the football club and to a development team that includes Hudson Yards developer Related Companies and Sterling Equities, the development company partially controlled by the Wilpon family, the former owner of the Mets.

… The team considered nearly 20 locations around the city. Some were floated and then dropped, including land along the Hudson River near Greenwich Village and Baker Field, which is owned by Columbia University, because of complaints by neighbors, costs and other issues.

To build a bigger following in Queens, the team will play some of its games in Citi Field until the new stadium opens.

“It’s pretty much of a fantasy,” said Marty Edelman, the football club’s vice chairman. “We’ve been an itinerant tenant in a number of different spaces. I think our fans need a different GPS every week to figure out where they go to watch us play.”