Community board endorses new NYCFC stadium next to Citi Field

New York City FC is one step closer to finally having a place of its own to call home.

On Monday in the NYC borough of Queens, Community Board 7 voted overwhelmingly in favor of a plan to develop a 25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium, a casino, residential housing and a public school next door to Citi Field and the Bille Jean King National Tennis Center. 

The vote had been in the making for months as part of a lengthy approval process for large scale developments. Back in October, Queens borough president Donovan Richards said he was withholding his vote until the street vendors who used to work on the site planned for development were allowed to come back to the market that was designated for them.

While the vote itself may have been a mere formality, concerns about who exactly gets to take advantage of the new project aren't going away. Speaking to Gothamist upon the vote, community organizer Arianna Martinez said that there was already an issue of inaccessibility when it comes to the sports already in the Corona neighborhood:

City Hall estimated the project would generate $6.1 billion in economic impact over the next 30 years, creating 1,550 permanent jobs and 14,200 construction jobs. And while Martinez said that kind of economic activity may be enticing to workers in the city, it would ultimately result in a venue that’s unaffordable to them.
"A lot of people may be soccer fans, they may be Mets fans, but they can't afford, especially residents of Corona, for example, they can't afford to actually ever buy tickets to get inside of these stadiums,” she said. “Like the U.S. Open stadium, how many people in the surrounding community actually go to the U.S. Open, right?"

NYCFC has been trying to find land for a soccer-specific stadium since its inception. Co-owned by Manchester City of the Premier League and the New York Yankees, there was a belief that the combined might of the powerhouse franchises could have expedited the construction of a new stadium next door to the new Yankee Stadium that opened in 2009. However, that plan never came to fruition as there had already been plenty of anger on the displacement of parkland for the new baseball stadium that spilled over into talks over a soccer facility. NYCFC looked elsewhere in the city before eventually being sold on moving next door to the Mets.

The new stadium is scheduled to open in 2027.