One of New York’s longest-stalled redevelopment sites has begun to fill with residents. Willets Point Commons, the first building in the Willets Point transformation in Queens, officially opened to tenants in May 2026 with 880 affordable apartments — the leading edge of a 2,500-unit, fully affordable development rising on the industrial tract beside Citi Field.

City officials and the developer, the Queens Development Group, marked the opening on May 19, 2026, and simultaneously broke ground on a third building of senior affordable housing, per QNS and the Queens Daily Eagle.

What opened

Willets Point Commons holds 880 units ranging from studios to three-bedrooms. The income mix was structured to reach a broad band of working households: roughly half of the apartments were offered to applicants earning up to 120% of Area Median Income, with 219 units set aside for households at or below 60% of AMI. The units were filled through the city’s Housing Connect affordable-housing lottery, which drew heavy demand.

The building is the first piece of what the city has called the largest 100% affordable housing development it has approved in roughly 40 years. Phase 1 is committed to 1,100 affordable homes — the 880 just opened, plus a 220-unit senior building now under construction. Phase 2, approved by the City Council in 2024, is slated to deliver the remaining 1,400 affordable apartments, for 2,500 in total.

The developer and the site

The Queens Development Group is a joint venture of Related Companies and Sterling Equities, the firm tied to the Wilpon family, working alongside the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The site — a roughly 23-acre stretch long known as the “Iron Triangle” for its tangle of auto-body shops and unpaved, flood-prone streets — had defied redevelopment for decades. Earlier plans collapsed over financing, litigation and environmental remediation of the heavily contaminated ground.

The current plan revived the project by pairing the housing with a privately financed sports anchor and substantial public infrastructure: new sewers, raised and paved streets, and flood mitigation that the city argued were prerequisites to building anything on the land.

The stadium piece

The redevelopment’s highest-profile component is Etihad Park, a roughly 25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium for New York City FC — the first such stadium in the five boroughs and, the club says, the first fully electric stadium in Major League Soccer. NYCFC broke ground on the stadium and has said it is on track to open in 2027, a year behind the first housing.

Crucially, the stadium is being built with private money. When the City Council approved Phase 2 in April 2024, officials stressed that the housing was “100% affordable” and that the stadium carried no direct city subsidy for construction — a structure designed to blunt the criticism that has dogged other New York sports-venue deals.

What it means

The Willets Point opening lands as housing affordability dominates city politics under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January 2026 on an affordability platform. A large block of permanently affordable units delivered on a single site is the kind of output city housing officials have struggled to produce at scale, and the project will be watched as a test of whether the public-private model — major infrastructure plus a private anchor plus deep affordability — can be repeated elsewhere.

For now, the more immediate change is on the ground in Corona: families are moving into apartments on a parcel that, a few years ago, was a flood-prone field of scrapyards across the street from a ballpark.

Verification

Frequently Asked Questions

How many apartments opened, and how affordable are they?
The first building, Willets Point Commons, holds 880 units from studios to three-bedrooms. Roughly half were offered to households earning up to 120% of Area Median Income, with 219 units reserved for households at or below 60% of AMI. The full Willets Point project is planned as 2,500 permanently affordable homes — the largest 100% affordable development the city has approved in roughly four decades.
Who is building it?
The developer is the Queens Development Group, a joint venture of Related Companies and Sterling Equities (the Wilpon family's firm), working with the city's Economic Development Corporation. The project sits on a long-blighted industrial tract known as the 'Iron Triangle' near Citi Field.
What about the soccer stadium?
New York City FC is building Etihad Park, a privately financed, roughly 25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium on the same site — the first such stadium in the city. NYCFC has said the stadium is on track to open in 2027. The stadium and housing are part of the same Phase 2 plan the City Council approved in 2024.
What else is coming to Willets Point?
Beyond the 2,500 affordable homes and the stadium, the plan calls for a new public school, a roughly 250-key hotel, retail and more than 150,000 square feet of public open space, to be delivered across phases.