He's also trying to get a grant for
the most retarded urban development project ever. Do you wanna know why it's a bad idea to build housing on top of old rail infrastructure? Because you have to spend billions making steel reinforced concrete support beams and Lord forbid you have to close or relocate several train tracks to build that because it'll become a fucking nightmare and bisect the entire North East Corridors rail network thus forcing trains to stop early at stations they aren't meant to (or cancel service entirely) and cause huge backups.
You only do shit like this when you have no space left to build up which just isn't the case when you have parking lots (that rarely get used) all throughout Brooklyn, Manhatten, and Queens. The only reason why they never get turned into something else is because locals always find a way to bitch and moan about something benign like the shadow. NYC has had like 4 different large scale "affordable housing" projects in the past 20 years and they're never actually affordable and look like shit.