In the multiyear fight between the global home-sharing conglomerate Airbnb and a relatively small union representing hotel workers in New York City, Airbnb’s string of losses has iced the company out of the city’s lucrative short-term rental market.

Now, with over a million tourists expected to flood the region for the World Cup tournament, Airbnb, an $84 billion company, has rekindled its fight to gain a foothold in the city. And central to its multipronged strategy are Black church leaders and property owners — a key voting bloc in New York — who say that they deserve the chance to make extra cash.

The company has hosted town halls and listening sessions in Harlem; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; and Jamaica, Queens — neighborhoods where Black homeowners are a significant force — to bolster support for proposed City Council legislation that would loosen regulations on short-term rentals. It gained the backing of influential Black pastors, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who met with the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, to argue that allowing more of such rentals would benefit Black homeowners.

“We have always been supportive of the hotel workers’ union, but there is, in this particular case, unintended consequences, and that is Black homeowners,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “Who are we protecting when the hotels are not sold out and people cannot rent rooms in their homes right there in Southeast Queens?”

For years, New York politicians have severely restricted the short-term rental company’s growth through at least four pieces of legislation and local enforcement activity. The union, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, has capitalized on its mighty political influence to keep Airbnb at bay. Under state law, short-term rentals in New York for less than 30 days are illegal, unless the host is present at the time of the rental.

And Airbnb’s nearly $900,000 lobbying effort for more favorable local legislation has failed in the face of politicians who cite the company’s impact on the rental market — but also are more concerned about running afoul of the savvy hotel workers’ union than enjoying the largess of a well-heeled corporation.

Chief among them is New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who fought off Airbnb’s digital ad campaign attacking him during last year’s primary race — even though he was not endorsed by the hotel workers’ union.

Mr. Mamdani, an avid soccer fan, has touted the World Cup’s economic potential for the city. But the mayor declined to heed a request aligned with the company’s goals to roll back short-term rental regulations during the tournament.

His stance — along with the proposal he floated and then backed away from to raise property taxes, which angered some Black homeowners — could exacerbate tensions between him and that Democratic constituency.

In a statement, Joe Calvello, a spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, said that the World Cup should not create an opening for changes to housing policy and that the mayor supports regulating short-term rentals to stave off encroachment from the real estate industry.

“Homes should be for New Yorkers, not investment opportunities for predatory actors looking to cash in,” he said. “The mayor continues to oppose efforts to weaken these laws at the behest of corporate interests.”

To counter Airbnb’s appeal to Black New Yorkers, the hotel workers’ union has also sought out Black pastors to denounce the home-sharing company.

“Short-term rentals are driving up housing costs and contributing to displacement in Black communities that have already endured generations of disinvestment,” the Rev. Robert Waterman, lead pastor of a church in Brooklyn and president of the African American Clergy and Elected Officials organization, said in a statement.

In an interview, he added that he was approached to back Airbnb, but would not until the company or its allies provide more assurances that the company’s presence would not harm Black communities.

Corporations seeking to make political headway have relied on influential Black leaders in the past, as with a 2023 proposed ban on menthol cigarettes and before that, a proposed ban on the sale of fur products. But Airbnb’s fight comes against the backdrop of an enduring debate over how to keep longtime Black New Yorkers economically stable enough to remain in the city as rising prices and gentrification fuel their exodus.

On May 1, a coalition of more than a dozen Black religious leaders penned a letter to Ms. Menin that called reforms to short-term rental properties “a crucial financial lifeline for Black homeowners.” (Ms. Menin won her leadership post with the backing of the hotel workers’ union and remains closely aligned with it. Through a spokesman, she declined to comment on her meeting with Mr. Sharpton.)

Airbnb has further tried to ingratiate itself into the city’s civic scene through marquee events like the Way to Win Gala, which it paid several hundred thousand dollars to co-sponsor last week, according to someone involved in the soiree. A week earlier, it announced plans to give away 1,000 free tickets to the World Cup at an event for young soccer players in Queens. And on Friday, it opened a new soccer pitch in the Bronx.

The City Council bill to loosen short-term rental restrictions has only four sponsors, and in the unlikely event it is passed, it would not take effect for six months — making it irrelevant for any hope Airbnb has of breaking into the New York market in time for the World Cup.

The company is pushing for it anyway, and plans to maintain its presence in the city as the tournament takes place.

Nathan Rotman, Airbnb’s director of policy strategy, said the city will host more large-scale events that lure tourists — and provide more chances to demonstrate the company’s reach.

“There will always be something wonderful happening here,” he said. “And we want to make sure that the homeowners have those opportunities moving forward, whether it’s for events or just at a time of financial need.”

In turn, the union has mobilized its own forces.

It has teamed up with the Legal Aid Society of New York and housing advocates, who have published a raft of opinion pieces raising concerns about Airbnb, and it has held clinics addressing problems voiced by homeowners who support the short-term rental company.

The union has also formed a coalition with other labor groups and advocates ahead of the World Cup to address potential exploitation around housing and workers.

“The affordable housing crisis we face will be solved by creating long lasting affordability and generational homeownership opportunities — not short-term gimmicks that benefit tech billionaires at the expense of already marginalized communities,” the hotel workers’ union president, Rich Maroko, said in a statement.

Despite its relatively small membership, the union has long been revered and feared among New York politicians. It routinely turns out big rallies and spends big money for candidates it supports, while working ferociously against those it views as opponents.

But some of those efforts have caused blowback. Several of Airbnb’s Black allies also have taken issue with the union’s advertising, pointing to an attack ad that claims Airbnb will not check customers’ criminal history and uses the image of a man with dark skin and a hoodie.

The hotels also raise an economic reason to oppose Airbnb’s efforts: Early data suggests that the World Cup is unlikely to provide the boost hotels were expecting, despite projections that tourists will spend $1.8 billion, according to New York City Tourism and Conventions.

Vijay Dandapani, who runs the Hotel Association of New York City, said that hotels in the city have experienced a 10 percent bump in revenue based on present bookings related to the World Cup. But they expected more. He blamed the slower-than-anticipated World Cup bump on volatile energy prices, high tournament costs, airline troubles and what he called “draconian” federal visa policies.

“The hotel industry is still struggling post-Covid,” Mr. Dandapani said.

Asked why Airbnb would be spending so much time and money trying to win over politicians who are usually beholden to the union, Mr. Dandapani replied, “This is their model; they have a lot of money and they keep at it.”

On a recent spring afternoon, the renowned artist and designer Maya Lin clambered up and down a rocky outcropping in Central Park in New York, undeterred by the crowd of tourists that was shooting photos nearby.

While they snapped selfies, she reflected on how this place — and similar geology near her childhood home in Athens, Ohio — had inspired her latest creation: the stone facade on the western walls of the 60-story JPMorgan Chase skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Estimated to have cost from $3 billion to $4 billion, and with glowing artwork at the summit visible citywide, it opened last fall and occupies the block between 47th and 48th Streets and Madison and Park Avenues.

Her project, “A Parallel Nature,” is a sculpture composed of two 59-foot-tall and 55-foot-wide gray stone walls set in an intricate design, with plants that peek out from the crevices. An array of flowers has been newly planted on the walls this spring.

Lin’s long career and passion for the environment made her a natural choice for the project.

Now 66, she began her career as a 21-year-old senior at Yale University when she won a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Among her many recent projects is the water fountain installation titled “Seeing Through the Universe” for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, set to open to the public next month.

Five of Lin’s works will also be on view at Pace Gallery’s booth at Frieze New York this week. There are pieces that call attention to bodies of water that are disappearing or that have already disappeared — Lake Chad in North Africa and the Aral Sea in Central Asia — along with a piece focused on the Antarctic Circle, and a new silver sculpture, “Silver Yellowstone,” that is inspired by the Yellowstone River, widely considered to be the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states.

In a recent series of interviews in her home office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the JPMorgan Chase building and during the ramble through the rocky terrain near the lower eastern end of Central Park known as the “Dene,” a British term for a valley, Lin described the woods and rock cliffs she remembered from growing up in Ohio.

“Water would just subtly drip down the cliffs, and there would be ferns and grasses and things growing there,” she explained, adding, “I was definitely out there in nature almost daily, and very concerned about environmental issues.”

Central Park, which Lin explores regularly when she is in Manhattan, was its own inspiration. Her family also has a home in southwestern Colorado, where she hikes and bikes every summer.

In 2022, she and representatives of JPMorgan Chase and Tishman Speyer, the development manager of the new skyscraper, took a daylong walk through the park, looking for a rock formation that could serve as the model for “A Parallel Nature” and “bring a little bit of the character” of the park to the building, Lin said.

They initially failed to identify anything appropriate. Lin returned the next morning on her own and came across the Dene, which she had seen on previous walks through the park.

“When I first got a call to look at the building site, I realized that the subway would be running underneath it,” Lin explained. “And I saw an excavation photo of Grand Central Station that showed that its construction cut through Manhattan’s bedrock. And I just had an idea, ‘What if I could bring bedrock to the surface in the middle of Manhattan?’”

“What I am interested in is, quite literally, grounding you in what might be right below your feet that you might not be aware of,” she added.

Capturing the Dene on the exterior wall of the skyscraper, Lin explained, would enable her to express the character of an exposed stone outcropping in Manhattan, quite literally bringing bedrock to the surface, in a way that echoes the Dene in Central Park.

Lin identified a type of gray granite from Barre, Vt., for “A Parallel Nature” that she called a perfect match with the metamorphic rock known as gneissic schist on which the JPMorgan Chase skyscraper sits.

The 239 stone pieces mounted atop the artwork’s two walls were cut by the Quarra Stone Company, a Wisconsin-based stone fabricator that transported the stone on large, flatbed trucks from Vermont to Wisconsin and then to Manhattan. Lin called the installation of the walls on the facade of the skyscraper her most difficult commission yet.

“Trying to create something that would be a balance between natural and man-made was the aesthetic challenge,” she explained. “And to keep the artwork as a sculptural creation rather than an architectonic solution — also the engineering to fabricate and install — were intricate and extremely complex.”

The stonework on each wall is composed of over 100 pieces of granite, Lin said, “so by grouping 15 to 20 pieces together and ever so slightly tilting them, I was able to create larger groupings to help create what I call city states. These helped make each wall feel like it was comprised of larger plates.”

Each of the pieces is hung, in a puzzle-like formation, from a steel bracket system installed on a steel ladder frame system anchored to the concrete support wall on the lowest level of the building’s Madison Avenue facade.

At the foot of each wall is a streambed with waterworn rocks that came from near the headquarters of the Wisconsin fabricator, chosen to work well with the gray granite walls. Water gently flows in the beds, creating a burbling stream in the middle of Midtown traffic cacophony. Lin calls the stream “an unexpected natural moment in the busy city.”

There are also two sources of water on the walls themselves, meant to irrigate the plantings in the walls’ seams. One is a drip irrigation line installed behind what Lin calls “plant pockets,” holes 10 to 12 inches deep that range in length from 3 to 7 feet and that are designed to hold the artwork’s vegetation.

The second is a drip irrigation system that runs along the top of the rock walls. This gently drips continuous streams of water that find their way down and beneath the surface of the rock, nourishing the plantings in the crevices and ledges. The system is designed to encourage plant growth and to bring the sound of trickling water to the facade.

Lin is working with specialists on the plantings, including Blondie’s Treehouse, a Manhattan plant installer and supplier; Cecil Howell, a Brooklyn-based landscape architect who has worked with Lin on a number of recent environmental art installations; and Richard Hayden, the project’s consulting horticulturist, who is also the senior director of horticulture for the High Line, a public park built on a historic elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side.

Though some plants were installed in late October, it was understood that since water would not be available until late fall, spring would be the ideal time for fresh planting.

Urban environments are tough on plants, Lin explained, calling the site’s horticulture “an experiment.” The horticulture team is trying more than 30 varieties of plants to see which ones thrive where, she said, adding that she expected the plants to be monitored and plantings adjusted quarterly.

Lin said she wanted “to create a predominantly native New York landscape reminiscent of what you might find naturally growing on rocks and within crevices in actual rock faces and ledges” to make visitors aware of the nature around them.

New plants growing this spring include maidenhair fern, Eastern red columbine, creeping phlox, Christmas fern and dwarf crested iris.

Just across from each of the artwork’s walls are a flower garden and native red maple trees, as well as long, sinuous concrete benches designed by Norman Foster, the skyscraper’s architect, all meant to create a sort of public park.

“A Parallel Nature,” as its name implies, “neither tries to perfectly recreate nature, nor feel architecturally fabricated,” Lin explained. “It is a work that makes ambiguous the line between the natural and the man-made.”

The sculpture is one of five works of public art commissioned for the new building by JPMorgan Chase — whose art collection was founded in 1959 by David Rockefeller, then executive vice president and vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. The skyscraper’s other new works include that LED light work at the summit by Leo Villareal, whose art will also be on view at the Pace Gallery exhibit at Frieze; two paintings by Gerhard Richter in the building’s lobby; a 3-D printed, bronze column by Foster, also in the lobby; and a display of light and motion at the lobby’s elevator banks, driven by custom A.I. models by the Turkish artist Refik Anadol.

David Arena, head of global real estate for JPMorgan Chase, said the bank had deliberately lifted up both the Madison Avenue and Park Avenue bases of the new building 85 feet to create more outdoor space for pedestrians. “When passers-by step on the Madison Avenue curb,” he said, “they are awe-struck, think differently, have a moment of respite.”

“We thought it would be a great spot to make a gift to Manhattan and to people in the neighborhood who can come up, have a seat, enjoy a cup of coffee, enjoy some great art, maybe think differently,” he said.”

He also called Lin “one of the most accomplished modern-day artists, a strong enough talent to be a counterpoint to Norman Foster.”

Lin agrees with Arena’s predictions about the artwork. “Even though it can dialogue with the building in scale, it adds an unexpected, natural respite from the busy street life, offering a different feeling,” she said.