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The proposal mentions that the NYC campus will largely serve graduate students and graduate school programming. Stanford already has a satellite campus in Monterrey, CA for marine biology and oceanography students where students split time between the main and satellite campuses. I expect that the NYC campus will follow the same model (i.e. spend a couple quarters at each campus to fulfill complete course load).

It's not that tricky, it's a problem easily solved with money.

Step one: "Hey big-name famous professor, want a job at Stanford NY? We'll pay you $big_face_money and you'll get all our fancy new facilities, plus the Stanford name, and whatever the hell else you want." Repeat 200 times.

Step two: The professors attract the grad students.

Step three: The grad students create the ecosystem.

I'd assume that getting into StanfordNYU would be just as hard as getting into Stanford in California, so I don't think it would be much of a safety school.

I'm not sure why you'd assume that. CMU's campus in Silicon Valley is very different than the primary CMU campus, for example.