Mayor Eric Adams formally announced Wednesday morning the city’s agreement with New York City Football Club to build a professional soccer stadium in the Willets Point neighborhood of Queens.

Speaking at the Queens Museum, Adams laid out the sweeping new project, which also includes the construction of a mixed-use development containing 2,500 new affordable housing units, a hotel and retail space.

The mayor said the stadium will be 100% privately financed, thanks to the city’s partnership with NYCFC and the Queens Development Group. Construction on the project, according to Adams, will begin in 2023 and continue on an “accelerated timeline.” Adams said the city expects it to be completed in 2027.

What You Need To Know

  • Mayor Eric Adams formally announced Wednesday morning the city’s agreement with New York City Football Club to build a professional soccer stadium in the Willets Point neighborhood of Queens

  • The sweeping new project also includes the construction of a mixed-use development containing 2,500 new affordable housing units, a hotel and retail space

  • The mayor said the stadium will be 100% privately financed, thanks to the city’s partnership with NYCFC and the Queens Development Group

Adams said the housing units will be affordable to families making $40,000 a year or less, and “every aspect of it will be union-built.”

“This is the biggest, 100% affordable housing project in New York City since the 1970s,” Adams said.

The stadium will be built across from Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.

It is a significant moment in the decades-long saga of development at the Willets Point site, an underdeveloped waterfront area of Queens. A plan created during the Bloomberg administration to build a mall at the site was ultimately rejected in the courts. 

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio worked out a plan in 2018 that, at the time, increased the amount of affordable housing planned for the site from 200 units to more than 1,000. The city said Wednesday that the new phase of the plan builds on that original phase of the plan, which included 1,100 affordable housing units, as well as a new public school.

Adams acknowledged and thanked his predecessors who toiled through early stages of the project.

“We want to thank Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor Bloomberg and others who saw what we could do here, and we had to come together to get it over the finish line,” Adams said.​

The city said the new phase of the project will need to undergo the Uniform Land Use Review procedure (also known as ULURP), which includes an environmental review. That process is expected to start in 2023. The new phase will also need to go through the New York City Public Design Commission, according to the city.