The soccer team will play in Queens.

It is time to say goodbye to the junkyards where you can buy any piece of equipment you need for your car and hello soccer stadium-village at a piece of property in the Willets Point section of New York City in Queens. The planned stadium-village, which is adjacent to Major League Baseball’s New York Mets’ stadium and across the street from the National Tennis Center where the U. S. Open is played in the late summer will house Major League Soccer’s NYCFC franchise. There will be housing built on the property, a hotel, a school along with retail space. The soccer stadium will seat 25,000 people and is scheduled to open in 2027. The owners of the NYCFC franchise and the soccer team’s partners claim that the project will be privately funded although that is never the case in these sorts of stadium or arena-village plans. There are always costs such as a reduction in property tax and other tax incentives. Nothing is ever done without tax breaks. New York City residents will help pay for infrastructure which includes roads, water and sewer lines. The cost might be as much as $516 million over a 49-year period. The NYCFC soccer stadium-village is about a 20-minute ride from the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders’ arena village at Belmont Park.

The NYCFC ownership had an eye on that Belmont Park property but lost in its bid to get the New York state-owned land to Scott Malkin and the Islanders ownership in 2017.  NYCFC ownership had looked to build a stadium at other sites including land near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, a spot in Upper Manhattan and on the West Side of Manhattan. New York City has been trying for decades to push the junkyards out of what is called the Iron Triangle area.

NYCFC stadium village.

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