Mamdani defends secret meeting with Trump, pitch to build 12,000 housing units

Josephine Stratman, New York Daily News on Feb 27, 2026

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday defended his secret meeting with President Donald Trump a day earlier, as well as his proposal to the president to build 12,000 apartments in Queens.

At the White House meeting Thursday, the mayor asked Trump for the green light — and $21 billion — for the plan to build atop Sunnyside Yard. To drive home his pitch, Mamdani presented the president with a fake New York Daily News front page portraying Trump as a housing hero for New York City.

Mamdani said that he chose to focus on housing in his conversations with Trump because it’s “the foremost crisis in New York City” and because it’s an area of interest “across the political spectrum.”

“I was heartened by the fact that the president was interested in this proposal, and I anticipate it will be the subject of conversations to continue,” Mamdani said at a media availability at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. He did not specify if there was another meeting on the books between him and the president.

The city has struggled for years over what to do with the massive rail yard, with the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations forming plans to reimagine the site. The latest iteration, a 2020 proposal by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, is the one Mamdani is attempting to revive.

The Sunnyside Yards project would require federal approvals to get started. Building the mammoth deck atop which the 12,000 units would be constructed would cost at least $21 billion. Half of those units would be “Mitchell-Lama-style” affordable housing, according to City Hall.

Mamdani would need to get local politicians on board, as well as the support of Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to move forward with the project. Amtrak did not immediately issue a response. The mayor on Friday said his administration has had “a few conversations across elected officials, labor organizers.”

“New York needs more housing,” Jen Goodman, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said in a statement. “Any initiative that could deliver 12,000+ new homes would be good news for New Yorkers and a positive step toward lowering the cost of living. We look forward to seeing the details and partnering with the City to get more homes built.”

Local Council member Julie Won, who’s running for Congress against Mamdani’s pick for the seat, slammed the mayor for meeting with the president, and pushed for the project to go through the city’s local land-use approval process instead of going through the feds and state.

“Any proposal that reshapes Sunnyside Yards must begin with the neighbors who live here,” Won said in a statement. “Our community deserves a seat at the table long before anyone, including the mayor, makes headlines in the Oval Office especially for a project they have previously rejected.”

Mamdani’s remarkable, chummy relationship with the president despite their operating at different ends of the political spectrum has raised some eyebrows. Although on the campaign trail, Mamdani vowed to be Trump’s “worst nightmare,” he’s significantly tempered his public criticisms since being elected.

“I also said on that same campaign trail that I would be willing to work with anyone, no matter disagreements, so long as it was to the benefit of the city that we love,” Mamdani said when asked about his softened public stance toward the president. “That is what it comes back to — every conversation has to be advancing the agenda of working New Yorkers.”

Bo Dietl, a private security contractor and ex-New York Police Department detective who met with Trump in the White House Thursday right after Mamdani, said that the mayor found one of the few areas of common ground with Trump in housing.

“I guess that’s something he knows he can relate to (with) the president,” Dietl told the Daily News. “The president loves building and he loves that. This little Mamdani now knows that’s a sweet spot for the president. We’re all for it. As far as those other socialist values… I got a problem.”

Dietl said that Mamdani ran into him on his way out of the White House: “I put my finger in his face, and I said, ‘Lay off the cops, don’t f— with the cops,'” Dietl said. “He never responded to anything.”

“I said, ‘What was the f—ing communist mayor of New York City doing in here?'” Dietl recalled telling the president upon walking into the Oval Office. “… (Trump) didn’t say a word. He smiled.”