While neither side announced it, the first effort by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) and 25 co-plaintiffs to appeal the decision in the case challenging the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) environmental review has failed, as the Appellate Division, First Department on June 30 denied leave to appeal.
(Here are some of the arguments raised in legal papers, and here are more; the petitioners argued, among other things, that there was evidence of corruption the ESDC's blight study. The Appellate Division, which in February affirmed a January 2008 ruling by Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden, was asked to agree to have the Court of Appeals hear the case.)
DDDB and fellow plaintiffs can now ask the Court of Appeals directly. The first motion in that appeal is due by the end of July.
It is not certain, however, that even a victory in the case would affect the ESDC's plan to have tax-exempt bonds for the arena or its plan to proceed with emiment domain. Victory might simply require a revision of the environmental impact statement--or it might upend the findings of blight.
Eminent domain oral argument scheduled
The one case that could block the pursuit of eminent domain just got a court date.
As announced by DDDB, the oral argument for the appeal of the Atlantic Yards eminent domain case, Goldstein v. New York State Urban Development Corporation, has been scheduled for Wednesday, October 14 at 2:00 pm at the Court of Appeals in Albany.
Friday, July 10, 2009
While Nets' attendance went down 3% last year, ticket revenue went down 29%
The New Jersey Nets in 2008-09 reported attendance of 15,147, a 3% drop from the reported attednance of 15,656 in the previous year.
But that apparently masked a far more significant decline in revenues. Ken Berger of CBSsports.comreports :
Fifteen teams suffered declines in gate receipts last season, the worst being the New Jersey Nets, whose ticket revenue declined $11.4 million, a 29 percent drop from 2007-08. It's no wonder the Nets want so badly to move to a new arena in Brooklyn.
I wrote last December about the history of inflated attendance figures at NBA arenas and especially Nets home games.
Why the discrepancy between the decline in revenue and the decline in reported attendance? It could be that the Nets last year inflated attendance even more. Or maybe they just gave away more tickets, thus filling seats but with less revenue.
But that apparently masked a far more significant decline in revenues. Ken Berger of CBSsports.comreports :
Fifteen teams suffered declines in gate receipts last season, the worst being the New Jersey Nets, whose ticket revenue declined $11.4 million, a 29 percent drop from 2007-08. It's no wonder the Nets want so badly to move to a new arena in Brooklyn.
I wrote last December about the history of inflated attendance figures at NBA arenas and especially Nets home games.
Why the discrepancy between the decline in revenue and the decline in reported attendance? It could be that the Nets last year inflated attendance even more. Or maybe they just gave away more tickets, thus filling seats but with less revenue.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Markowitz: "Please, please, please" get AY started (because he'd never support anything not in the interests of Brooklyn)
No elected official, not even state Senator Carl Kruger, showed up at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Finance Committee meeting or board meeting last month to testify in favor of Atlantic Yards.
The only elected official to offer pro-project views was Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who sent Chief of Staff Carlo Scissura, who presented several questionable arguments.
One of the lines was so classic Markowitz that it deserves its own excerpt.
"As we all know, the Borough President would never support anything that is not in the interests of all of Brooklyn and all Brooklynites," Scissura declared.
He wouldn't? Have the interests of Brooklyn been distilled into the consciousness of one enlightened BP? Can they be?
The testimony
"I'm here to here to urge all of you to vote yes for this important proposal. The Atlantic Yards project is one of the most ambitious projects ever to be considered in the city of New York and especially in the city of Brooklyn," Scissura declared. "And though it has faced several years of challenges during the approval process, we are confident that when it's completed, it will serve as a model for all cities in the United States. Atlantic Yards is the type of development that Brooklyn needs now; it needs the affordable housing, it needs the union jobs, it needs the permanent jobs."
Serve as a model? Is that why Mayor Mike Bloomberg won't even mention it on his campaign web site or why Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society suggested AY might be "this generation's Penn Station"?
National stage
Scissura continued, "It needs Brooklyn to be put on a national stage, and with having the Nets come into Brooklyn, that will do so."
Well, yes, a sports team is a national stage, but Brooklyn's doing pretty well already, as Markowitz is quick to remind us.
The only elected official to offer pro-project views was Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who sent Chief of Staff Carlo Scissura, who presented several questionable arguments.
One of the lines was so classic Markowitz that it deserves its own excerpt.
"As we all know, the Borough President would never support anything that is not in the interests of all of Brooklyn and all Brooklynites," Scissura declared.
He wouldn't? Have the interests of Brooklyn been distilled into the consciousness of one enlightened BP? Can they be?
The testimony
"I'm here to here to urge all of you to vote yes for this important proposal. The Atlantic Yards project is one of the most ambitious projects ever to be considered in the city of New York and especially in the city of Brooklyn," Scissura declared. "And though it has faced several years of challenges during the approval process, we are confident that when it's completed, it will serve as a model for all cities in the United States. Atlantic Yards is the type of development that Brooklyn needs now; it needs the affordable housing, it needs the union jobs, it needs the permanent jobs."
Serve as a model? Is that why Mayor Mike Bloomberg won't even mention it on his campaign web site or why Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society suggested AY might be "this generation's Penn Station"?
National stage
Scissura continued, "It needs Brooklyn to be put on a national stage, and with having the Nets come into Brooklyn, that will do so."
Well, yes, a sports team is a national stage, but Brooklyn's doing pretty well already, as Markowitz is quick to remind us.
Note this 5/11/09 press release in which the BP proclaims that "Lonely Planet, which named Brooklyn one of the world's 'hottest destinations' in 2007, chose it to be one of the first pullout mini guides in its inaugural, international Lonely Planet Magazine in December, 2008, alongside Edinburgh, Scotland and Singapore."
Empty site?
Scissura then offered a canard: "For more than 100 years, the footprint where Atlantic Yards will be built--is planning to be built--has been an empty railroad yard."
No, it hasn't. First, the Vanderbilt Yard occupies less than 40% of the site, which also includes buildings that served as factories, housing, and commercial space. The Borough President's Office should know better.
Second, rather than an empty railroad yard, it has been a working yard, used to store and service trains. It was just never economically feasible to build a deck. As land became scarce and more valuable, building over the railyards finally became viable, but before Forest City Ratner's proposal, there was never any attempt to market the "empty railroad yard," as a Department of City Planning official acknowledged.
New city center
Scissura continued, "This is a historic opportunity to join many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, to create a city center for all of Brooklyn, and for all of New York City to enjoy."
A city center? With eight acres of open space for 15,000 new residents? Is the open space at Stuyvesant Town a city center for all to enjoy? The open space would come only in Phase 2; by contrast, as Anne Schwartz wrote in Gotham Gazette, at Battery Park City the open space came first.
As for an arena, it would be a venue for ticketholders, not a public park. Is Madison Square Garden a city center for all to enjoy, or just those who can pay?
Timing issues
Scissura continued, "it is the perfect location to build this. It is your duty to ensure that this vote is yes, that work begins this year, that people can be put to work."
Translation: It is your duty to ensure that the deal proceeds so that Forest City Ratner can get tax-exempt bonds issued by the approaching December 31 deadline.
Need for jobs
Scissura continued, "Yesterday's job numbers were startling: almost ten percent of Brooklynitse are out of work. Imagine what this project will do over ten years to put people back to work, to give union jobs."
Yes, any large construction project creates jobs and yes, people need jobs. At the same time, public officials have the obligation to weigh the cost of creating jobs against other alternatives. And the MTA is not a job-creation agency but is supposed to seek the best value for its property to ensure a robust transit system for all New Yorkers.
New tax revenues
Scissura then started on some fuzzy math: "Atlantic Yards will create billions of dollars in tax revenue over the next decades. And I think as we look at this proposal, even though it's a little less than what was previously anticipated, in the long run, the tax revenue that will be generated by Atlantic Yards will be incredible, for the city, for the state and of course, for Brooklyn."
Billions? That's questionable. After all, the New York City Independent Budget Office already estimates that the arena would be a money-loser for the city.
As for whether the proposal would be "a little less" than previously anticipated, Scissura might have mentioned that Forest City Ratner would save $100 million on the railyard it promised and get generous terms--$20 million down, the rest of the $80 million over 22 years, at 6.5% interest--to pay its obligation.
Incredible tax revenue? Markowitz sure can use that word when he describes a performer at his summer concert series, but this situation requires a little more precision.
Trust Markowitz
Then Scissura offered the money quote: "As we all know, the Borough President would never support anything that is not in the interests of all of Brooklyn and all Brooklynites."
Would a Borough President concerned about the best interests of the borough misleadingly declare, "For more than 100 years, the footprint has been an empty railroad yard"? Would he have said it had the testimony under oath?
Need for a venue
Scissura continued, "I'll give you another perfect example of why this project is important. There are many graduations of large high schools in Brooklyn that cannot take place in Brooklyn because there is no venue for them. Imagine what the arena like the Barclays Center will do for children, for high school sports, for teens, for everything. Why do Brooklynites have to travel everywhere and not have things go on in a borough of almost 2.6 million people?"
Well, it's unfortunate there's no venue in Brooklyn. But solving that problem with the world's most expensive arena--which wouldn't exactly come cheap, and with FCR's pledge to make the arena available to community groups deemed trivial by a judge--is like saying hunger pangs can be sated only by serving caviar.
Empty site?
Scissura then offered a canard: "For more than 100 years, the footprint where Atlantic Yards will be built--is planning to be built--has been an empty railroad yard."
No, it hasn't. First, the Vanderbilt Yard occupies less than 40% of the site, which also includes buildings that served as factories, housing, and commercial space. The Borough President's Office should know better.
Second, rather than an empty railroad yard, it has been a working yard, used to store and service trains. It was just never economically feasible to build a deck. As land became scarce and more valuable, building over the railyards finally became viable, but before Forest City Ratner's proposal, there was never any attempt to market the "empty railroad yard," as a Department of City Planning official acknowledged.
New city center
Scissura continued, "This is a historic opportunity to join many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, to create a city center for all of Brooklyn, and for all of New York City to enjoy."
A city center? With eight acres of open space for 15,000 new residents? Is the open space at Stuyvesant Town a city center for all to enjoy? The open space would come only in Phase 2; by contrast, as Anne Schwartz wrote in Gotham Gazette, at Battery Park City the open space came first.
As for an arena, it would be a venue for ticketholders, not a public park. Is Madison Square Garden a city center for all to enjoy, or just those who can pay?
Timing issues
Scissura continued, "it is the perfect location to build this. It is your duty to ensure that this vote is yes, that work begins this year, that people can be put to work."
Translation: It is your duty to ensure that the deal proceeds so that Forest City Ratner can get tax-exempt bonds issued by the approaching December 31 deadline.
Need for jobs
Scissura continued, "Yesterday's job numbers were startling: almost ten percent of Brooklynitse are out of work. Imagine what this project will do over ten years to put people back to work, to give union jobs."
Yes, any large construction project creates jobs and yes, people need jobs. At the same time, public officials have the obligation to weigh the cost of creating jobs against other alternatives. And the MTA is not a job-creation agency but is supposed to seek the best value for its property to ensure a robust transit system for all New Yorkers.
New tax revenues
Scissura then started on some fuzzy math: "Atlantic Yards will create billions of dollars in tax revenue over the next decades. And I think as we look at this proposal, even though it's a little less than what was previously anticipated, in the long run, the tax revenue that will be generated by Atlantic Yards will be incredible, for the city, for the state and of course, for Brooklyn."
Billions? That's questionable. After all, the New York City Independent Budget Office already estimates that the arena would be a money-loser for the city.
As for whether the proposal would be "a little less" than previously anticipated, Scissura might have mentioned that Forest City Ratner would save $100 million on the railyard it promised and get generous terms--$20 million down, the rest of the $80 million over 22 years, at 6.5% interest--to pay its obligation.
Incredible tax revenue? Markowitz sure can use that word when he describes a performer at his summer concert series, but this situation requires a little more precision.
Trust Markowitz
Then Scissura offered the money quote: "As we all know, the Borough President would never support anything that is not in the interests of all of Brooklyn and all Brooklynites."
Would a Borough President concerned about the best interests of the borough misleadingly declare, "For more than 100 years, the footprint has been an empty railroad yard"? Would he have said it had the testimony under oath?
Need for a venue
Scissura continued, "I'll give you another perfect example of why this project is important. There are many graduations of large high schools in Brooklyn that cannot take place in Brooklyn because there is no venue for them. Imagine what the arena like the Barclays Center will do for children, for high school sports, for teens, for everything. Why do Brooklynites have to travel everywhere and not have things go on in a borough of almost 2.6 million people?"
Well, it's unfortunate there's no venue in Brooklyn. But solving that problem with the world's most expensive arena--which wouldn't exactly come cheap, and with FCR's pledge to make the arena available to community groups deemed trivial by a judge--is like saying hunger pangs can be sated only by serving caviar.
At least Scissura didn't mention Hasidic weddings.
In closing
Scissura closed: "This is an important project. The Borough President urges all of you to vote yes on this, and to please, please, please, let's get this project moving."
What name did Scissura not pronounce? The biggest beneficiary: Forest City Ratner.
In closing
Scissura closed: "This is an important project. The Borough President urges all of you to vote yes on this, and to please, please, please, let's get this project moving."
What name did Scissura not pronounce? The biggest beneficiary: Forest City Ratner.
Journalism of verification? Times won't back down from claim that there will "soon be a Barclays Center"
The New York Times won't correct errors in two articles that contained sloppy unequivocal statements that the Barclays Center will be built.
It's making me wonder whether, when it comes to Atlantic Yards, the New York Times really believes in, as Executive Editor Bill Keller says, "the journalism of verification."
The naming rights article
A June 24 article on naming rights for the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street subway station stated:
There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project, and the developer, Forest City Ratner, has agreed to pay the transportation authority $200,000 a year for the next 20 years to rename one of the oldest and busiest stations in the borough.
I wrote a note to the Times:
There may soon be a Barclays Center. And certainly the MTA's passage of the deal today with Forest City Ratner, coupled with the Empire State Development Corporation's preliminary approval Tuesday of a new Atlantic Yards plan, make it more likely than before.
However, when the Atlantic Yards arena was announced in 2003, it was supposed to open in 2006. Every year the goalposts move. A little skepticism--or at least a little hedging--is in order. Especially since Forest City Ratner is the NYT Co's business partner.
Error recurs
No correction was printed and, five days later, in a roundup article June 29 on arenas, the Times reported:
Five major complexes — four existing and one planned — will soon be slugging it out within an area 30 miles wide.
...By the time the arena in Brooklyn, which will be called Barclays Center, is built, there will be a total of nearly 100,000 seats to fill, 365 days a year.
Later in the article, the Times hedged a bit more:
the proposed Barclays Center in Brooklyn is positioned to be a rival of the Garden and the Nassau Coliseum.
So this article contains three mentions, one with a very mixed caveat ("one planned... will soon be slugging it out") and one with more of a caveat ("the proposed Barclays Center").
But one mention was unequivocal and it should have left room for doubt. I'd suggest a revision:
Should the arena in Brooklyn, which would be called Barclays Center, be built, there would be a total of nearly 100,000 seats to fill, 365 days a year.
Reminding the Times
I reminded the Times that its boilerplate response to a correction request now promises:
If we decide that a correction is not necessary, an editor will be in touch to explain our reasons.
The Times's response
Senior Editor Greg Brock responded:
We have been very responsive to your queries in the past and have run corrections when appropriate. I do not think this rises to the level of a correction. I realize you monitor every word in these articles because you have your own perspective. But at some point, we have to use common sense on these points. I am sure you will not agree: but I think this is splitting hairs and not worthy of a correction.
My rebuttal
Well, putting aside Brock's unnecessary snark, he might have a case if I'd complained only about the second article. A reader of the entire text--despite an awkward and misleading sentence--should have gotten the message that the Barclays Center was not certain.
But there was no such equivocation in the first article.
Let's look at the sentence again:
There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project.
In this sentence, I read "planned" as simply referring to the intention that it serve as the focal point, not indicating any doubt that it would be built.
Let's try a thought experiment. What if the Times were to report today:
There will, however, soon be a nuclear war, a tactic planned as the focal point of North Korean foreign policy
For Mayor Bloomberg, there will, however, soon be a third term, a period planned as the focal point for his sustainability initiatives
These would not pass muster with the Times, I am sure, because they are not certain.
Despite Brock's claim that I "monitor every word in these articles because [I] have [my] own perspective," it's much less complicated. I just don't think the Times should mislead its readers.
I have no reason to believe there was any intent in the newsroom to boost Forest City Ratner. The reporters and editors were just sloppy and, in this case, unwilling to admit it. But that sloppiness has consequences.
Errors and imprecisions
At the very least, if the Times didn't want to admit error, it could have used the phrase "referred imprecisely," as it often does (see examples 1, 2, 3).
Brock in October 2007 told an interviewer:
I don’t know if you read our corrections much, but we often say we referred “imprecisely” to something, which means that we weren’t 100 percent wrong.
Keller's standards
Keller famously praised the Times for practicing:
A journalism of verification," rather than of "assertion," and maintaining an "agnosticism" as to where any story may lead.
Not often enough.
It's making me wonder whether, when it comes to Atlantic Yards, the New York Times really believes in, as Executive Editor Bill Keller says, "the journalism of verification."
The naming rights article
A June 24 article on naming rights for the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street subway station stated:
There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project, and the developer, Forest City Ratner, has agreed to pay the transportation authority $200,000 a year for the next 20 years to rename one of the oldest and busiest stations in the borough.
I wrote a note to the Times:
There may soon be a Barclays Center. And certainly the MTA's passage of the deal today with Forest City Ratner, coupled with the Empire State Development Corporation's preliminary approval Tuesday of a new Atlantic Yards plan, make it more likely than before.
However, when the Atlantic Yards arena was announced in 2003, it was supposed to open in 2006. Every year the goalposts move. A little skepticism--or at least a little hedging--is in order. Especially since Forest City Ratner is the NYT Co's business partner.
Error recurs
No correction was printed and, five days later, in a roundup article June 29 on arenas, the Times reported:
Five major complexes — four existing and one planned — will soon be slugging it out within an area 30 miles wide.
...By the time the arena in Brooklyn, which will be called Barclays Center, is built, there will be a total of nearly 100,000 seats to fill, 365 days a year.
Later in the article, the Times hedged a bit more:
the proposed Barclays Center in Brooklyn is positioned to be a rival of the Garden and the Nassau Coliseum.
So this article contains three mentions, one with a very mixed caveat ("one planned... will soon be slugging it out") and one with more of a caveat ("the proposed Barclays Center").
But one mention was unequivocal and it should have left room for doubt. I'd suggest a revision:
Should the arena in Brooklyn, which would be called Barclays Center, be built, there would be a total of nearly 100,000 seats to fill, 365 days a year.
Reminding the Times
I reminded the Times that its boilerplate response to a correction request now promises:
If we decide that a correction is not necessary, an editor will be in touch to explain our reasons.
The Times's response
Senior Editor Greg Brock responded:
We have been very responsive to your queries in the past and have run corrections when appropriate. I do not think this rises to the level of a correction. I realize you monitor every word in these articles because you have your own perspective. But at some point, we have to use common sense on these points. I am sure you will not agree: but I think this is splitting hairs and not worthy of a correction.
My rebuttal
Well, putting aside Brock's unnecessary snark, he might have a case if I'd complained only about the second article. A reader of the entire text--despite an awkward and misleading sentence--should have gotten the message that the Barclays Center was not certain.
But there was no such equivocation in the first article.
Let's look at the sentence again:
There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project.
In this sentence, I read "planned" as simply referring to the intention that it serve as the focal point, not indicating any doubt that it would be built.
Let's try a thought experiment. What if the Times were to report today:
There will, however, soon be a nuclear war, a tactic planned as the focal point of North Korean foreign policy
For Mayor Bloomberg, there will, however, soon be a third term, a period planned as the focal point for his sustainability initiatives
These would not pass muster with the Times, I am sure, because they are not certain.
Despite Brock's claim that I "monitor every word in these articles because [I] have [my] own perspective," it's much less complicated. I just don't think the Times should mislead its readers.
I have no reason to believe there was any intent in the newsroom to boost Forest City Ratner. The reporters and editors were just sloppy and, in this case, unwilling to admit it. But that sloppiness has consequences.
Errors and imprecisions
At the very least, if the Times didn't want to admit error, it could have used the phrase "referred imprecisely," as it often does (see examples 1, 2, 3).
Brock in October 2007 told an interviewer:
I don’t know if you read our corrections much, but we often say we referred “imprecisely” to something, which means that we weren’t 100 percent wrong.
Keller's standards
Keller famously praised the Times for practicing:
A journalism of verification," rather than of "assertion," and maintaining an "agnosticism" as to where any story may lead.
Not often enough.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Mystery solved! Work on sewer chamber resumes, as Forest City Ratner ramps up construction activities
Now that the installation of sewer chambers are mentioned in an Atlantic Yards Construction Update issued for the weeks beginning July 6 and July 13, we finally have an answer to a mystery lingering from May--as well as an indication that life in the Atlantic Yards footprint, given new infrastructure work and the partial closure of Sixth Avenue, will become more complicated, at the least.
I had wondered back then what happened to plans for upgraded water and sewer installations, including, as stated in a Construction Update from last November, "Work will begin on a new sewer chamber on 6th Avenue at Pacific Street."
That new sewer chamber was not mentioned in subsequent Construction Updates, which are issued by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) via Forest City Ratner (FCR). So I observed that it looks like the utility work stopped abruptly instead of being completed.
I had wondered back then what happened to plans for upgraded water and sewer installations, including, as stated in a Construction Update from last November, "Work will begin on a new sewer chamber on 6th Avenue at Pacific Street."
That new sewer chamber was not mentioned in subsequent Construction Updates, which are issued by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) via Forest City Ratner (FCR). So I observed that it looks like the utility work stopped abruptly instead of being completed.
The ESDC wouldn't answer but instead sent me to FCR, which, of course, didn't respond. It was another reason to doubt the developer's claim that it had completed all the work it could do while lawsuits were pending
Now much work, including the sewer work, is resuming (though lawsuits are still pending).
Beginning to ramp up
The penultimate Construction Update, issued for the weeks beginning June 22 and June 29, cited relatively little work:
Long Island Rail Road/Vanderbilt Yard Work
Remobilization of contractors
General excavation in the Yard, starting on Block. 1120 -Work at the East Portal in preparation for concrete pour -Work in preparation for cap beams required for Trestle
Work is anticipated to continue through the end of the year.
Environmental Remediation
Rigs are on site, Block 1118, lot 1 and Block 1119, lots 1, 64, in connection with soil borings that are being conducted.
Ramping up
The latest Construction Update indicates a broader scope of work:
Long Island Rail Road/Vanderbilt Yard Work
Remobilization of contractors
Continuation of general excavation/finish grading in the Yard, Block. 1120 and 1121
Continuation of work at the East Portal in preparation for concrete pour
Assembly and launching of Trestle Bridge (BL1121)
Installation of electrical cable on Cable Bridge (BL1120)
Installation of conduit and cable within Yard (BL1120 and 1121)
Installation of underground water line (BL1120 and 1121)
Work is anticipated to continue through the end of the year.
Environmental Remediation
Previously installed rigs have been replaced by small crew and pick up truck.
Sampling on Block 1118, lot 1 and Block 1119, lots 1, 64, continues
Infrastructure
Contractor will be moving equipment -- caterpillar-tread machine to site as part of mobilization for infrastructure work
Work related to the required Maintenance and Protection of Traffic (MPT) will commence. MPT, as approved by DOT, will include:
Modifications to the signal at 6th and Pacific.
Barricades will be installed to isolate the Chamber 4 work from vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The west lane of 6th between Pacific and Dean will be closed and will not accommodate southbound traffic on that block. The crosswalk at the southwest corner of pacific and 6th will be closed.
As required by DOT’s , Traffic Enforcement Agents will be provided to direct traffic
Infrastructure work will consist of the installation of new sewer chambers at the intersection of 6th Avenue at Pacific Street. This work is part of the first of three phases of upgraded water and sewer installations previously commenced at the site. Chamber work is expected to take 12 weeks from commencement.
Long Island Rail Road/Vanderbilt Yard Work
Remobilization of contractors
General excavation in the Yard, starting on Block. 1120 -Work at the East Portal in preparation for concrete pour -Work in preparation for cap beams required for Trestle
Work is anticipated to continue through the end of the year.
Environmental Remediation
Rigs are on site, Block 1118, lot 1 and Block 1119, lots 1, 64, in connection with soil borings that are being conducted.
Ramping up
The latest Construction Update indicates a broader scope of work:
Long Island Rail Road/Vanderbilt Yard Work
Remobilization of contractors
Continuation of general excavation/finish grading in the Yard, Block. 1120 and 1121
Continuation of work at the East Portal in preparation for concrete pour
Assembly and launching of Trestle Bridge (BL1121)
Installation of electrical cable on Cable Bridge (BL1120)
Installation of conduit and cable within Yard (BL1120 and 1121)
Installation of underground water line (BL1120 and 1121)
Work is anticipated to continue through the end of the year.
Environmental Remediation
Previously installed rigs have been replaced by small crew and pick up truck.
Sampling on Block 1118, lot 1 and Block 1119, lots 1, 64, continues
Infrastructure
Contractor will be moving equipment -- caterpillar-tread machine to site as part of mobilization for infrastructure work
Work related to the required Maintenance and Protection of Traffic (MPT) will commence. MPT, as approved by DOT, will include:
Modifications to the signal at 6th and Pacific.
Barricades will be installed to isolate the Chamber 4 work from vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The west lane of 6th between Pacific and Dean will be closed and will not accommodate southbound traffic on that block. The crosswalk at the southwest corner of pacific and 6th will be closed.
As required by DOT’s , Traffic Enforcement Agents will be provided to direct traffic
Infrastructure work will consist of the installation of new sewer chambers at the intersection of 6th Avenue at Pacific Street. This work is part of the first of three phases of upgraded water and sewer installations previously commenced at the site. Chamber work is expected to take 12 weeks from commencement.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
ACORN's Lewis, interviewed unskeptically in journal focused on labor issues, maintains AY deal is a success
An immersion in the Atlantic Yards story can lead to some hard truths about people we consider professionals:
The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy (CLD) , based at Hofstra University on Long Island, which is "a nonprofit research institute that aims to expand public understanding and discussion of important issues facing working people."
The Preview section of the journal promotes the Lewis piece as "one of the first full-length interviews for publication that Ms. Lewis has given since ACORN found itself the target of almost daily Republican criticisms during the 2008 campaign for the White House."
- Elected officials repeat Forest City Ratner talking points and imaginary numbers ginned up by a paid FCR consultant
- Elected officials miss the chance to pose tough questions to government officials (though they can recover)
- Appointed officials actively mislead the public at an oversight hearing
- A distinguished civil liberties lawyer makes campaign contributions to Brooklyn machine politicians
- Wall Street analysts fail to ask tough questions about an issue that demands skepticism.
- Academics avoid scrutinizing an organization that passes an ideological litmus test
The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy (CLD) , based at Hofstra University on Long Island, which is "a nonprofit research institute that aims to expand public understanding and discussion of important issues facing working people."The Preview section of the journal promotes the Lewis piece as "one of the first full-length interviews for publication that Ms. Lewis has given since ACORN found itself the target of almost daily Republican criticisms during the 2008 campaign for the White House."
Most of the interview does not concern AY, but a considerable chunk is devoted to the project.
Missing from the discussion
Even though the issues regarding Atlantic Yards were readily apparent when the interview was conducted February 9, 2009, the interviewer, a Ph.D economist, demonstrates no familiarity with:
Q: Can you say something about the current Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn?
BL: Sure. Atlantic Yards is an example of what’s going on across the country in urban environments, inner-ring suburbs. During the big heyday, when it was all boom, everywhere you looked, big arenas, big stadiums, big luxury housing was everywhere. The use of eminent domain is just everywhere. This has been going on for at least a decade. So what do you do? How do you come at this stuff? In the majority of instances, being unable to stop it, how do you in fact affect it?
So you fight these battles, and we have been crying about gentrification of our neighborhoods, developers not dealing with the community. So this was nothing new to us. So now we see this Atlantic Yards coming up, and this guy is saying he’s going to build 4,500 units of luxury housing and an arena and shopping and all the basic grab bag of these developers.
But in comes sexy, sexy, sexy Atlantic Yards. But we’re saying Atlantic Yards is the same as any other development. We had met with developers, and they would laugh in our face. Basically, they said, “It’s not about us losing money, but if we make one penny less in profit than we could make, we don’t want to hear anything. We don’t have to do it. We can do the absolute minimum. The government’s on our side. Back up, community group. Back up, crazy ACORN. We don’t have to listen to you. Get out of our face. Can’t you see that capitalism and the market is what reigns?”
If you don’t have a willing partner, if you have people who only do it begrudgingly or because they’re forced to or they’re put into a shotgun relationship, it never works. But you have to have that willing partner, and you need to be big enough and have the strength and have enough expertise and be able to bring the political capital to the table.
Missing from the discussion
Even though the issues regarding Atlantic Yards were readily apparent when the interview was conducted February 9, 2009, the interviewer, a Ph.D economist, demonstrates no familiarity with:
- the Atlantic Yards controversy
- the shifting contours of the affordable housing promises
- the long delays, should the housing even be built
- the dubiousness of Forest City Ratner's commitment
- ACORN's contractual obligation to support the project
- Forest City Ratner's bailout of ACORN.
The section of the interview regarding Atlantic Yards consists of two open-ended questions and long soliloquies by Lewis, with no interpolation for fact-checking.
The problems start with the footnoted description of the project:
iii The Atlantic Avenue Rail Yards in downtown Brooklyn is the site of a $1.2 billion residential and commercial center proposed by developer Bruce Ratner. In a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement with ACORN and other local organizations, Ratner pledged to reserve half of the 4,500 apartments for low- and moderate-income residents. Ten percent of these apartments will be reserved for seniors and residents currently living at the site who will be displaced. The CBA also includes programs that will train locals for construction and retail jobs at the sports arena and a deal to allocate at least 30% of pre- and post-construction contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. The project is called Atlantic Yards. The railyard would occupy less than 40% of the site. It was to cost $4 billion, at least according to the official documentation at the time of the interview, though it was once to cost $4.2 billion, a term that persists in press reports (and may have led, via a typo, to the $1.2 billion number).
And while the description of the CBA is not inaccurate, the use of the term "legally binding" obscures the fact that the remedies are hardly guaranteed, and the CBA need not apply to a successor should Forest City Ratner sell the project.
AY as example
Q: Can you say something about the current Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn?
BL: Sure. Atlantic Yards is an example of what’s going on across the country in urban environments, inner-ring suburbs. During the big heyday, when it was all boom, everywhere you looked, big arenas, big stadiums, big luxury housing was everywhere. The use of eminent domain is just everywhere. This has been going on for at least a decade. So what do you do? How do you come at this stuff? In the majority of instances, being unable to stop it, how do you in fact affect it?Well, it is an example and it isn't. Most of the other projects proceeded according to the applicable zoning, in many cases the product of a rezoning. Most crucially, AY is the product of a state override of zoning, and the affordable housing deal is essentially a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus.
Lewis, like other signatories of the AY CBA, made the calculation that the benefits were worth the costs--and, most likely, that the institutional benefit to New York ACORN was important, as well. Since then, given FCR's financial bailout of national ACORN, the institutional benefit is clear.
Fighting gentrification
Lewis's answer continues:
We started in Brooklyn 27 years ago. Downtown Brooklyn actually was a vast wasteland. It was the Wild West. People that lived on the periphery, in Crown Heights, what they now call Prospect Heights, but it was always Crown Heights. Once they start changing the name of a neighborhood, that’s when you know gentrification is coming. But the marching prior to gentrification was coming. And our neighborhoods and people always were left out. And since there was no built-in commitment to affordable housing and no commitment to jobs or to hiring from the neighborhood, politicians would make their deals and run. Developers would come in, do what they wanted, and they would run away. And the next thing you know, thousands and thousands of people are displaced.
Lewis ignores the fact that ACORN was AWOL on the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning it now decries.
Lewis's answer continues:
So when the Atlantic Yards project first came up, it was a notion. And we’re always doing stuff 24/7. So then people began to talk about the idea of this thing happening. They were like, “Whoa. What the hell?” And here we were, once again. We’ve been doing housing campaigns since our first breath of existence, back in Little Rock, Arkansas, where we started in 1970. And housing has always been a basic plank of ours, affordable housing.
So you fight these battles, and we have been crying about gentrification of our neighborhoods, developers not dealing with the community. So this was nothing new to us. So now we see this Atlantic Yards coming up, and this guy is saying he’s going to build 4,500 units of luxury housing and an arena and shopping and all the basic grab bag of these developers.
This account ignores the fact that, when announced, AY was to have mixed-income housing. The deal was cut before anyone publicly backed the plan.
Promises vs. guarantees
Lewis's answer continues:
So we said, “You know what? We’re just sick of this.” But we had no illusions, either, because other development had been going on in downtown Brooklyn. We had been talking about all of the development that was going on in downtown Brooklyn, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to us. We kept pointing the finger. You know, “This project, that project.” We kept doing actions on these developers, and eminent domain was being used. “They’re tearing down public housing.” And we tried to save a whole public housing complex in downtown Brooklyn. Nobody wanted to pay any attention.
But in comes sexy, sexy, sexy Atlantic Yards. But we’re saying Atlantic Yards is the same as any other development. We had met with developers, and they would laugh in our face. Basically, they said, “It’s not about us losing money, but if we make one penny less in profit than we could make, we don’t want to hear anything. We don’t have to do it. We can do the absolute minimum. The government’s on our side. Back up, community group. Back up, crazy ACORN. We don’t have to listen to you. Get out of our face. Can’t you see that capitalism and the market is what reigns?”
As noted, it was not the same. And no one, including ACORN, has ever stated whether there would've been enough housing bonds to build the 2250 subsidized units at the promised ten-year project buildout.
Now the Empire State Development Corporation is essentially promising one building. Only 300 subsidized units are required in Phase 1, which the developer has up to 12 years (after the close of litigation and the delivery of property via eminent domain) to complete.
Talking to the members
Lewis's answer continues:
So we were expecting disappointment. But the one thing about us is this: We are developers also. We’ve built and rehabbed over 1,000 units of housing. So we know how this stuff works. We’re not just advocates who say what should happen. We can actually show people how to make it happen. So when we went, we did -- the first thing we did was we talked to our members, and we have about 30,000 members here in New York, in the city, and we have about 20,000 here in Brooklyn alone. So we said, “What have you heard about this thing? What do you think about it?” Some people liked the idea, some people thought the idea was horrible. So first we told the members, “What do you think?” Then we said to the members, “What should they be doing?” I mean, right off the bat, “Housing, housing, housing. Why aren’t they building housing for us? Housing, housing, housing.”
So then we sat down and said, “What, if you made a demand and you did a campaign, what would you demand?” “We demand 50% of the housing that’s being built be low and moderate income and affordable. We demand that there will be a community benefits agreement, where there will actually be real jobs, a real system.”
So then we sat down and said, “What, if you made a demand and you did a campaign, what would you demand?” “We demand 50% of the housing that’s being built be low and moderate income and affordable. We demand that there will be a community benefits agreement, where there will actually be real jobs, a real system.”
As noted, the CBA is in question. More importantly, most of ACORN's constituency couldn't afford at least 40% of the subsidized housing. In other words, they endorsed "affordable housing" without understanding the full spectrum of income ranges.
As I wrote in August 2006, members were asked about "set[ing] aside at least half the units for affordable housing," a ratio that later changed, with affordable housing limited to the rentals. (Here's further analysis of the bait-and-switch.)
More importantly, the concept of "affordable housing" was not clarified. Those polled were not asked about affordable housing accessible to those in their income bracket.
More importantly, the concept of "affordable housing" was not clarified. Those polled were not asked about affordable housing accessible to those in their income bracket.
Getting the deal
Lewis's answer continues:
So the membership came up with demands: a real CBA with a lot of different components. But for ACORN, our main thing was housing. So we said, “Okay, we’re going to go in there and we’re going to see if we can meet with this guy and see what he says.” We fully expected to be rebuffed. You know, you’re so used to getting kicked that, the first time we sat down and met with these folks, and they said, “Well, let’s talk about it,” we didn’t really hear it. We just kept wailing. They’re like, “No. Let’s talk about it. Show us how to do this.” And it was amazing.
Now, politically, we are who we are. We’ve built up a reputation. You know, we’re strong, we’re a political group, we’re a housing group, and people pay attention to us. I mean, these folks wanted to not have us as their enemy. But we came in and actually got a CBA, got a 50/50 housing deal, were able to shape the affordable piece of the housing. I was able to show these folks who had never done affordable housing. They didn’t have a clue about how to do it and brought in other folks to deal with this. Tied it down by having subsidies for the whole project tied to making certain deliverables in the community as well as housing.
Now, politically, we are who we are. We’ve built up a reputation. You know, we’re strong, we’re a political group, we’re a housing group, and people pay attention to us. I mean, these folks wanted to not have us as their enemy. But we came in and actually got a CBA, got a 50/50 housing deal, were able to shape the affordable piece of the housing. I was able to show these folks who had never done affordable housing. They didn’t have a clue about how to do it and brought in other folks to deal with this. Tied it down by having subsidies for the whole project tied to making certain deliverables in the community as well as housing.
The deliverables and subsidies are rather loosely tied. As noted, only 300 affordable units are required to be built in Phase 1. There's no timetable for Phase 2.
And ACORN is obligated to support the project, which it does, sending representatives to dutifully testify at public meetings like the ones held by the ESDC and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. No one mentioned Forest City Ratner's bailout of ACORN.
Strategy for cities
Lewis's answer continues:
We believe nationally that the community benefits agreement movement and strategy is a way for small cities, especially small cities and inner-ring suburbs and other groups to actually be able to wring something out of these developers. And other cities have -- You know, there is a CBA movement, as small as it may be, in the country, and are using CBAs to wrest concessions and not have the government negotiate for you.
It's an important issue, deserving more analysis. Consider that Good Jobs New York, part of the national movement for CBAs, criticized this one. And that longtime community planner Ron Shiffman, a board member of AY opponent Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, thinks such guarantees should be governmental, part of a level playing field.
The AY story
Lewis's answer continues:
So that’s the Atlantic Yards story. They brought their bean counters. We brought our bean counters. They brought their lawyers, we brought our lawyers. It took about a year to hammer out a CBA and an agreement around the affordable housing.
So that’s the Atlantic Yards story. They brought their bean counters. We brought our bean counters. They brought their lawyers, we brought our lawyers. It took about a year to hammer out a CBA and an agreement around the affordable housing.
That is only part of the Atlantic Yards story.
Why it "worked"
Q: Bottom line, why do you think it worked?
BL: I think it worked because, one, we were very clear on what we wanted and we had solutions to what we wanted. We had a way to show this developer by spreadsheets and other stuff, we spoke development language. We actually understood what we were talking about, and we had a concrete proposal. Two, we were value-added:one, in expertise; two, in political cover – let’s face it – and political might and our ability to fight them.
Indeed, that's how the deal got done, but whether it worked remains in question. The MTA, for example, no longer calls the housing "critically needed," perhaps because it's unlikely it will be delivered quickly.
Gaining an ally
Lewis's answer continues:
You know, you make an analysis as if you’re going to lose. But we would have put up a hell of a fight, and they didn’t want to fight with us. So you have to be big enough, deep enough, have the expertise, have a real plan. You can’t come to these folks with vagaries. You know, “We want affordable housing.” “When do you want it?” “Now.” “What does it look like?” “We don’t know. You figure it out.” You can’t do that. You really have to know your shit.
For Forest City Ratner, $1.5 million for ACORN is a lot easier to come up with than funding for affordable housing.
Lewis's answer continues:
So that’s why I think it worked. I think we were the right group at the right time with the right stuff in the right place, and finally you have to have a willing partner. As I said, we’ve met with developers for 30 years, and they just have contempt. I’m going to give the devil his due. Forest City was willing to sit down, like I say, bring their bean counters, bring their lawyers, bring their experts and actually sit at the table with us and not talk to us like we were children, actually have real conversations. They wanted to find a way to do this.
If you don’t have a willing partner, if you have people who only do it begrudgingly or because they’re forced to or they’re put into a shotgun relationship, it never works. But you have to have that willing partner, and you need to be big enough and have the strength and have enough expertise and be able to bring the political capital to the table.
Forest City Ratner concluded that it did need ACORN's political capital. Now, essentially, it owns ACORN's support.
Monday, July 06, 2009
In editorial, Newsday channels two of RPA's relatively mild AY reforms (that the MTA ignored)
A Newsday editorial on Atlantic Yards sounds like it came directly from the mend-it-don't-end-it Regional Plan Association (RPA), but the writers don't acknowledge that part of their prescription is already out of date.
The editorial, headlined Public's interests must be preserved at Atlantic Yards, begins:
Atlantic Yards - a project to build a Nets arena, housing and other development in downtown Brooklyn - also holds out hope of local jobs, better Long Island Rail Road facilities and a much-needed financial boost for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But the project is on life-support. Famed architect Frank Gehry has departed, and developer Bruce Ratner needs financial help.
No, it wouldn't be downtown Brooklyn. And how exactly would it be a financial boost for the MTA, given that it would deliver far fewer dollars than the MTA initially expected in the short term?
Preliminary approval?
The editorial continues:
The Empire State Development Corp. and the MTA recently gave Ratner preliminary approval for a deal that may or may not be in the MTA's best interest. Before a final pact is signed, state officials should be sure they are protecting the agency and, by extension, the public in this $4.9-billion behemoth.
As I understand it, the ESDC gave preliminary approval but the MTA gave final approval. Perhaps a stall by the ESDC could provoke the MTA board to reopen the deal, but that's highly unlikely.
Channeling the RPA
The editorial continues:
Instead of the original $100 million paid upfront for the right to develop the LIRR's rail yards, Ratner wants to stretch payments over 21 years, with interest, which works out to $193.5 million. The MTA should require a share of future revenue in addition, to take advantage of a market recovery.
The editorial doesn't say that the interest rate would be a notably low 6.5%. As for the share of future revenue, that's a not unreasonable concept should the project go forward, but it should be way more specific. When the RPA suggested it at the June 24 hearing, no one took it up.
Smaller railyard - new subsidiary?
The editorial concludes:
The developer also is proposing to rebuild the rail yard, which is needed for storing, cleaning and inspecting trains. This yard will support LIRR service into Grand Central Terminal. But Ratner is now planning that the new yard accommodate 56 train cars instead of 76. Such major, continuing changes argue for the creation of a new government subsidiary to oversee progress and ensure that the project's public benefits are not relegated to the back burner.
Well, as the RPA and BrooklynSpeaks have suggested, not unreasonably, other large projects are overseen by their own subsidiary.
The editorial, headlined Public's interests must be preserved at Atlantic Yards, begins:
Atlantic Yards - a project to build a Nets arena, housing and other development in downtown Brooklyn - also holds out hope of local jobs, better Long Island Rail Road facilities and a much-needed financial boost for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But the project is on life-support. Famed architect Frank Gehry has departed, and developer Bruce Ratner needs financial help.
No, it wouldn't be downtown Brooklyn. And how exactly would it be a financial boost for the MTA, given that it would deliver far fewer dollars than the MTA initially expected in the short term?
Preliminary approval?
The editorial continues:
The Empire State Development Corp. and the MTA recently gave Ratner preliminary approval for a deal that may or may not be in the MTA's best interest. Before a final pact is signed, state officials should be sure they are protecting the agency and, by extension, the public in this $4.9-billion behemoth.
As I understand it, the ESDC gave preliminary approval but the MTA gave final approval. Perhaps a stall by the ESDC could provoke the MTA board to reopen the deal, but that's highly unlikely.
Channeling the RPA
The editorial continues:
Instead of the original $100 million paid upfront for the right to develop the LIRR's rail yards, Ratner wants to stretch payments over 21 years, with interest, which works out to $193.5 million. The MTA should require a share of future revenue in addition, to take advantage of a market recovery.
The editorial doesn't say that the interest rate would be a notably low 6.5%. As for the share of future revenue, that's a not unreasonable concept should the project go forward, but it should be way more specific. When the RPA suggested it at the June 24 hearing, no one took it up.
Smaller railyard - new subsidiary?
The editorial concludes:
The developer also is proposing to rebuild the rail yard, which is needed for storing, cleaning and inspecting trains. This yard will support LIRR service into Grand Central Terminal. But Ratner is now planning that the new yard accommodate 56 train cars instead of 76. Such major, continuing changes argue for the creation of a new government subsidiary to oversee progress and ensure that the project's public benefits are not relegated to the back burner.
Well, as the RPA and BrooklynSpeaks have suggested, not unreasonably, other large projects are overseen by their own subsidiary.
But the subsidiary has nothing to do with agreeing to a smaller railyard when a larger one--remember, the previous railyard could hold 72 train cars--was promised, to support not only service to Brooklyn but the above-mentioned East Side Access.
The latter decision simply reflects power politics, and the MTA's willingness to let the developer save $100 million. However reasonable, the RPA's suggestions don't challenge the MTA's questionable justifications for renegotiating the deal.
Elected officials shocked, shocked at changes in AY; DePlasco, Daughtry maintain talking points
A couple of elected officials who wouldn't mind a little press coverage are shocked, shocked by changes in Atlantic Yards.
An article in the Daily News, headlined Atlantic Yards beginning to look like pie in Brooklyn sky for pols, states:
Five and a half years later, a state agency's recent vote to adopt a plan for a new Nets arena and 16 towers - which will take longer, cost more, and look radically different than the original - has left [Assemblyman Hakeem] Jeffries and some other officials disillusioned.
"The way in which the project was sold is dramatically different than the one in which the developer appears prepared to deliver," he said. "The promises made by this developer have disappeared like a house of cards."
...Ratner still promises 2,250 units of affordable housing, but critics doubt it will ever happen.
City Councilman David Yassky (D-Brooklyn) said he always thought the towers were too big, but supported the arena because he was "excited about a professional basketball team in Brooklyn and an architecturally significant arena."
He soured on that as it became clear taxpayers would end up footing much of the bill.
"The MTA changing the deal just added insult to injury," he said. "This was already a bad deal for taxpayers and now it's an appallingly bad deal."
Changes long evident
Beginning? The Daily News article doesn't actually explain that the project was long promised to take ten years, a dubious assertion maintained by the Empire State Development Corporation and, most notably in the pages of the Daily News itself, by developer Bruce Ratner.
An article in the Daily News, headlined Atlantic Yards beginning to look like pie in Brooklyn sky for pols, states:
Five and a half years later, a state agency's recent vote to adopt a plan for a new Nets arena and 16 towers - which will take longer, cost more, and look radically different than the original - has left [Assemblyman Hakeem] Jeffries and some other officials disillusioned.
"The way in which the project was sold is dramatically different than the one in which the developer appears prepared to deliver," he said. "The promises made by this developer have disappeared like a house of cards."
...Ratner still promises 2,250 units of affordable housing, but critics doubt it will ever happen.
City Councilman David Yassky (D-Brooklyn) said he always thought the towers were too big, but supported the arena because he was "excited about a professional basketball team in Brooklyn and an architecturally significant arena."
He soured on that as it became clear taxpayers would end up footing much of the bill.
"The MTA changing the deal just added insult to injury," he said. "This was already a bad deal for taxpayers and now it's an appallingly bad deal."
Changes long evident
Beginning? The Daily News article doesn't actually explain that the project was long promised to take ten years, a dubious assertion maintained by the Empire State Development Corporation and, most notably in the pages of the Daily News itself, by developer Bruce Ratner.
Well, the State and City Funding Agreements signed in September 2007--which surfaced in the spring of 2008-- provided no timetable for Phase 2 and allowed the developer 12 years (after the delivery of property via eminent domain) to build a smaller Phase 1, with only 300 affordable units.
In other words, the changes in the plan have long been evident.
Now there's a 25-year timetable for Phase 2, though it's not guaranteed either.
Defenders say
The article quotes a defender:
The Rev. Herbert Daughtry of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance said he still backs the project because Ratner will provide jobs, a health center and money for a community foundation.
He acknowledged it's not what it once was.
"Everybody wishes it would be what was originally planned, but given the realities the project had to face, it's a wonder that it's still there," he said. "I think it's the best we can do at this point."
But when, Rev. Daughtry, and how much? And how much does his organization get from Ratner?
In other words, the changes in the plan have long been evident.
Now there's a 25-year timetable for Phase 2, though it's not guaranteed either.
Defenders say
The article quotes a defender:
The Rev. Herbert Daughtry of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance said he still backs the project because Ratner will provide jobs, a health center and money for a community foundation.
He acknowledged it's not what it once was.
"Everybody wishes it would be what was originally planned, but given the realities the project had to face, it's a wonder that it's still there," he said. "I think it's the best we can do at this point."
But when, Rev. Daughtry, and how much? And how much does his organization get from Ratner?
The article closes with this assertion:
Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said all the promised jobs and affordable housing will be delivered.
If it's not legally required, and it's not, the paid flack DePlasco can say whatever he wants. Remember, he's the guy who once said, “There’s no reason to think the team is not moving to Brooklyn for the 2007 season."
Who's missing
Missing from the article are two elected officials who have posed more substantive questions: both Assemblyman Jim Brennan and state Senator Bill Perkins have questioned the legal authority of the MTA to renegotiate its deal with Forest City Ratner. And those questions may be answered in court.
Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said all the promised jobs and affordable housing will be delivered.
If it's not legally required, and it's not, the paid flack DePlasco can say whatever he wants. Remember, he's the guy who once said, “There’s no reason to think the team is not moving to Brooklyn for the 2007 season."
Who's missing
Missing from the article are two elected officials who have posed more substantive questions: both Assemblyman Jim Brennan and state Senator Bill Perkins have questioned the legal authority of the MTA to renegotiate its deal with Forest City Ratner. And those questions may be answered in court.
Jeffries didn't show up (or send a rep) at either of the MTA meetings when the deal was considered in June. Yassky did attend the June 24 hearing, but arrived late enough to speak last, rather than with Brennan, Perkins (via a rep), and City Council Member Letitia James.
What's missing
Also missing is an acknowledgment that the Independent Budget Office now estimates that the arena is a money-loser for the city--and that the IBO is supposed to be conducting an expanded cost-benefit analysis.
MTA CFO's justification for Forest City Ratner renegotiation: "too speculative" to consider another deal
The central question behind the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's June 24 decision to renegotiate more generous terms for the Vanderbilt Yard with Forest City Ratner--$20 million rather than $100 million down, and a replacement railyard worth $100 million less, was whether another deal was possible.
No one asked that question of the MTA, though board members Jeff Kay and Mark Page at the meeting offered justifications, Kay saying "The market is what the market is" and Page asserting, "I think that this is as good a deal as is going to be available to us for this property in the foreseeable future.”
The rebuttal, of course, comes from the New York Times, which in 1994 editorialized regarding the Coliseum site at Columbus Circle:
The most sensible course now is for the city to find out anew the market value of this property, and that cannot be accomplished through negotiations with one bidder.
As noted below, MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson told the press the opposite, that "I have no idea when it would be more propitious than now to engage in a second transaction on this property."
Was an appraisal needed?
Discussion at the 6/24/09 board meeting referenced the Public Authorities Accountability Act, which states:
Method of disposition. Subject to section twenty-eight hundred ninety-six of this title, any public authority may dispose of property for not less than the fair market value of such property by sale, exchange, or transfer, for cash, credit, or other property, with or without warranty, and upon such other terms andconditions as the contracting officer deems proper, and it may execute such documents for the transfer of title or other interest in property and take such other action as it deems necessary or proper to dispose of such property under the provisions of this section. Provided, however, that no disposition of real property, any interest in real property, or any other property which because of its unique nature is not subject to fair market pricing shall be made unless an appraisal of the value of such property has been made by an independent appraiser and included in the record of the transaction.
(Emphasis added)
The resolution passed by the board stated:
So, did the MTA board get any advice from its counsel that the 2005 appraisal, which was for $214.5 million--not $100 million, which is what FCR offered only after bidding $50 million and seeing rival Extell bid $150 million--was still legitimate?
No one asked that question of the MTA, though board members Jeff Kay and Mark Page at the meeting offered justifications, Kay saying "The market is what the market is" and Page asserting, "I think that this is as good a deal as is going to be available to us for this property in the foreseeable future.”
The rebuttal, of course, comes from the New York Times, which in 1994 editorialized regarding the Coliseum site at Columbus Circle:
The most sensible course now is for the city to find out anew the market value of this property, and that cannot be accomplished through negotiations with one bidder.
As noted below, MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson told the press the opposite, that "I have no idea when it would be more propitious than now to engage in a second transaction on this property."
Was an appraisal needed?
Discussion at the 6/24/09 board meeting referenced the Public Authorities Accountability Act, which states:
Method of disposition. Subject to section twenty-eight hundred ninety-six of this title, any public authority may dispose of property for not less than the fair market value of such property by sale, exchange, or transfer, for cash, credit, or other property, with or without warranty, and upon such other terms andconditions as the contracting officer deems proper, and it may execute such documents for the transfer of title or other interest in property and take such other action as it deems necessary or proper to dispose of such property under the provisions of this section. Provided, however, that no disposition of real property, any interest in real property, or any other property which because of its unique nature is not subject to fair market pricing shall be made unless an appraisal of the value of such property has been made by an independent appraiser and included in the record of the transaction.
(Emphasis added)
The resolution passed by the board stated:
Whereas, the Boards of the MTA, LIRR and NYCT further find that an appraisal of the value of such MTA Property was previously made by an independent appraiser and is included in the record of the transaction.
(Emphasis added)
(Emphasis added)
So, did the MTA board get any advice from its counsel that the 2005 appraisal, which was for $214.5 million--not $100 million, which is what FCR offered only after bidding $50 million and seeing rival Extell bid $150 million--was still legitimate?
I asked MTA and was told to file a Freedom of Information Law request, which is pending.
(Note that FCR contends that the total value of its bid was greater than that of Extell's bid, though the latter was never given a chance to flesh out its bid.)
"Too speculative"
Two days earlier, after the MTA Finance Committee meeting, Dellaverson met the press and was questioned by Matthew Schuerman of WNYC.
(Audio is here, with the exchange beginning at 3:40. Note that a small part is inaudible.)
MS: Given the fact that you're not getting all this money for another 22 years and, y'know, you're not getting as big a railyard or as good a railyard, why not wait a few years until the economy recovers and until the real estate market in Brooklyn improves...?
GD: Does WNYC know when that's gonna take place?
MS: Well, no, but everyone's saying by the end of the year.
GD: So I think, and I don't mean to be glib, but I think that the point of it is that... is there value associated with warehousing, deciding not to engage the transaction, to warehouse the property, and re-transact at another time? People suggested in public speaking that now would be a good time to put the property back up. I would respectfully disagree; I don't think that MTA would like to do that.
I think that, in terms of trying to anticipate what is the future market... for this kind of developable parcel, given what the fixed expenses are associated with moving the railyard and platforming the space, because you can't use it until you do those things, is really--it's a very speculative exercise, one that I would not want to engage in.
So the simple answer to your question, I have no idea when it would be more propitious than now to engage in a second transaction on this property. I simply cannot guess. I can tell you that it would turn on answers to questions that nobody has, which is: when does the financial market begin to change, when does the credit market change, when does the housing market change... So I think it's too speculative.
(Note that FCR contends that the total value of its bid was greater than that of Extell's bid, though the latter was never given a chance to flesh out its bid.)
"Too speculative"
Two days earlier, after the MTA Finance Committee meeting, Dellaverson met the press and was questioned by Matthew Schuerman of WNYC.
(Audio is here, with the exchange beginning at 3:40. Note that a small part is inaudible.)
MS: Given the fact that you're not getting all this money for another 22 years and, y'know, you're not getting as big a railyard or as good a railyard, why not wait a few years until the economy recovers and until the real estate market in Brooklyn improves...?
GD: Does WNYC know when that's gonna take place?
MS: Well, no, but everyone's saying by the end of the year.
GD: So I think, and I don't mean to be glib, but I think that the point of it is that... is there value associated with warehousing, deciding not to engage the transaction, to warehouse the property, and re-transact at another time? People suggested in public speaking that now would be a good time to put the property back up. I would respectfully disagree; I don't think that MTA would like to do that.
I think that, in terms of trying to anticipate what is the future market... for this kind of developable parcel, given what the fixed expenses are associated with moving the railyard and platforming the space, because you can't use it until you do those things, is really--it's a very speculative exercise, one that I would not want to engage in.
So the simple answer to your question, I have no idea when it would be more propitious than now to engage in a second transaction on this property. I simply cannot guess. I can tell you that it would turn on answers to questions that nobody has, which is: when does the financial market begin to change, when does the credit market change, when does the housing market change... So I think it's too speculative.
Who didn't show up at the MTA meetings? State Senator Carl Kruger and his topsy-turvy view of Atlantic Yards
I can't believe everyone missed this. More than two weeks before the state Senate hearing on Atlantic Yards, where state Sen. Carl Kruger, oddly enough, was accusing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of intransigence as Forest City Ratner tried to reduce its obligations to pay cash and provide and upgraded railyard, Kruger telegraphed his stance in a press release.
The press release issued May 13 (though I'm not sure when it was actually posted), is headlined DON’T STAND IN THE WAY OF ATLANTIC YARDS, SEN. KRUGER TELLS MTA . It's notable for its bizarre inversion of reality and Kruger's assurances, since demolished, that the project would be built as promised with benefits as promised.
Kruger, a Democrat with an untouchable seat, has been a recipient of Forest City Ratner campaign contributions and comes out of the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, which produced Forest City Ratner aide Bruce Bender.
The press release
The press release begins:
Senator Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) is demanding that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hand over its financial records concerning the Atlantic Yards project in the wake of the MTA’s “apparent refusal to move forward on a project that is critical to New York City’s economic future.”
Atlantic Yards’ developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, has requested permission from the MTA to undertake the project in two steps instead of one.
That's hardly all Forest City requested. As we learned, the developer got to put only $20 million down, pay the rest of the promised $80 million at a low interest rate, build a smaller permanent yard worth $100 million less, and to keep a smaller temporary yard twice as long as originally intended.
Ironically enough, the MTA has been unresponsive--not to Kruger but to state Sen. Bill Perkins, who sent the agency numerous questions that were not answered.
Trusting the developer
The press release continues:
Sen. Kruger noted that “all of Forest City’s project obligations will be honored – the affordable housing commitment, plans for a new permanent Long Island Rail Road yard and subway entrance, the eight acres of open space – and there are no new or significant adverse impacts.”
“Forest City wants to see this project built and is committed to seeing it built. It’s the MTA that’s standing in the way of progress,” he said.
What planet is Kruger on? The revised Modified General Project Plan issued by the Empire State Development Corporation on June 23 asserts that the project would be built in ten years as scheduled, but leaves open the option for significant delays. Most of the affordable housing and all the open space would come in Phase 2, which could take at least 25 years.
Good of the public?
The press release continues:
In a letter to the MTA today co-signed by other legislators, Sen. Kruger said, “The MTA’s refusal to act on Forest City Ratner Companies’ revised agreement, and, in fact, to completely ignore the plan that FCRC presented to you, succeeds in fulfilling the MTA’s widely-held image as a secretive entity that works not for the good of the public but for its own financial benefit.”
Kruger is so concerned about the good of the public that he neglected to attend, or send a representative, to the June 22 MTA Finance Committee meeting or the June 24 MTA board meeting.
Going after the MTA
The press release continues:
Sen. Kruger has asked for a meeting with the MTA where he plans to see the financial records pertaining to Atlantic Yards. He said that if the MTA fails to produce the necessary documentation, he’ll take the matter to the next step. “If these records are not produced, I will immediately call for a Senate hearing and invoke the authority of the Finance Committee to investigate this matter fully and exhaustively,” he said.
"At the moment, the MTA’s dismissive attitude and infuriating inaction will mean that the Barclay’s Center might not be built, that the Nets might not come to Brooklyn, and that the many thousands of New York City residents who have invested their hopes and dreams into the jobs and affordable housing units that will result from Atlantic Yards might see their future go up in smoke – or, more accurately, lying dormant in land that sits, unused and fallow, like so many MTA real estate holdings,” Sen. Kruger said. “This is unacceptable.”
Of course, the MTA real estate is being used--as a railyard. The question, unresolved, is whether the agency got a decent price for its prime real estate.
Note that a search on the Senate web site shows no other legislators announced that they had co-signed the letter.
Golden's press release
Kruger's ally at the May 29 hearing and in Albany--though they're ostensibly from opposing parties--is state Senator Marty Golden, who issued his own bizarre press release after the hearing.
The press release begins:
State Senator Martin J. Golden (R-C-I, Brooklyn), strongly advocated for ending the government generated delays that have prevented the Atlantic Yards project from moving forward at a meeting of the New York Senate Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions held this past Friday.
Funny numbers
The press release continues:
Senator Golden, speaking at the hearing stated, “The Atlantic Yards project will go a long way in helping Brooklyn recover from the current economic crisis this City, State and Nation is facing. When completed, this project will create 2,250 units of affordable housing and create thousands of jobs, including 17,000 construction jobs of which 8,500 will be permanent. Additionally, this will create $6.5 billion in total economic output during construction and $5.6 billion in new tax revenue for the City and State for more than 30 years into the future. Why is the government holding this project hostage? It is surely going to be beneficial now and in the long term.”
Golden needs a fact-checker. No, there wouldn't be 8500 permanent construction jobs. No, there wouldn't even be 17,000 jobs--ESDC CEO Marisa Lago said 12,000.
The tax revenue figures are a fantasy, from Forest City Ratner. Golden apparently saw Lago's statement that the numbers were unchanged as including tax revenue figures the ESDC didn't produce.
The press release concludes:
Golden continued, “The Atlantic Yards Project, when completed, will include more than 8 million acres of new open space and $3 million dollars for our local parks. And of course, the New Jersey Nets, a major professional basketball team, will relocate to Brooklyn. This Arena will serve as the site for more than 200 events each year, including the circus, family shows, concerts, and more than 10 community events such as local college graduations. This project would be the real stimulus that Brooklyn needs to turn our economy around. It’s time we see action on this plan.”
(Emphasis added)
No, Atlantic Yards would not create 8 million acres of public space, it would create 8--that's off by a rather large factor--and that could take at least 25 years.
It's too bad that neither these legislators, nor Forest City Ratner, had the guts to make these claims in public at the MTA hearing.
The press release issued May 13 (though I'm not sure when it was actually posted), is headlined DON’T STAND IN THE WAY OF ATLANTIC YARDS, SEN. KRUGER TELLS MTA . It's notable for its bizarre inversion of reality and Kruger's assurances, since demolished, that the project would be built as promised with benefits as promised.Kruger, a Democrat with an untouchable seat, has been a recipient of Forest City Ratner campaign contributions and comes out of the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, which produced Forest City Ratner aide Bruce Bender.
The press release
The press release begins:
Senator Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) is demanding that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hand over its financial records concerning the Atlantic Yards project in the wake of the MTA’s “apparent refusal to move forward on a project that is critical to New York City’s economic future.”
Atlantic Yards’ developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, has requested permission from the MTA to undertake the project in two steps instead of one.
That's hardly all Forest City requested. As we learned, the developer got to put only $20 million down, pay the rest of the promised $80 million at a low interest rate, build a smaller permanent yard worth $100 million less, and to keep a smaller temporary yard twice as long as originally intended.
Ironically enough, the MTA has been unresponsive--not to Kruger but to state Sen. Bill Perkins, who sent the agency numerous questions that were not answered.
Trusting the developer
The press release continues:
Sen. Kruger noted that “all of Forest City’s project obligations will be honored – the affordable housing commitment, plans for a new permanent Long Island Rail Road yard and subway entrance, the eight acres of open space – and there are no new or significant adverse impacts.”
“Forest City wants to see this project built and is committed to seeing it built. It’s the MTA that’s standing in the way of progress,” he said.
What planet is Kruger on? The revised Modified General Project Plan issued by the Empire State Development Corporation on June 23 asserts that the project would be built in ten years as scheduled, but leaves open the option for significant delays. Most of the affordable housing and all the open space would come in Phase 2, which could take at least 25 years.
Good of the public?
The press release continues:
In a letter to the MTA today co-signed by other legislators, Sen. Kruger said, “The MTA’s refusal to act on Forest City Ratner Companies’ revised agreement, and, in fact, to completely ignore the plan that FCRC presented to you, succeeds in fulfilling the MTA’s widely-held image as a secretive entity that works not for the good of the public but for its own financial benefit.”
Kruger is so concerned about the good of the public that he neglected to attend, or send a representative, to the June 22 MTA Finance Committee meeting or the June 24 MTA board meeting.
Going after the MTA
The press release continues:
Sen. Kruger has asked for a meeting with the MTA where he plans to see the financial records pertaining to Atlantic Yards. He said that if the MTA fails to produce the necessary documentation, he’ll take the matter to the next step. “If these records are not produced, I will immediately call for a Senate hearing and invoke the authority of the Finance Committee to investigate this matter fully and exhaustively,” he said.
"At the moment, the MTA’s dismissive attitude and infuriating inaction will mean that the Barclay’s Center might not be built, that the Nets might not come to Brooklyn, and that the many thousands of New York City residents who have invested their hopes and dreams into the jobs and affordable housing units that will result from Atlantic Yards might see their future go up in smoke – or, more accurately, lying dormant in land that sits, unused and fallow, like so many MTA real estate holdings,” Sen. Kruger said. “This is unacceptable.”
Of course, the MTA real estate is being used--as a railyard. The question, unresolved, is whether the agency got a decent price for its prime real estate.
Note that a search on the Senate web site shows no other legislators announced that they had co-signed the letter.
Golden's press release
Kruger's ally at the May 29 hearing and in Albany--though they're ostensibly from opposing parties--is state Senator Marty Golden, who issued his own bizarre press release after the hearing.
The press release begins:State Senator Martin J. Golden (R-C-I, Brooklyn), strongly advocated for ending the government generated delays that have prevented the Atlantic Yards project from moving forward at a meeting of the New York Senate Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions held this past Friday.
Funny numbers
The press release continues:
Senator Golden, speaking at the hearing stated, “The Atlantic Yards project will go a long way in helping Brooklyn recover from the current economic crisis this City, State and Nation is facing. When completed, this project will create 2,250 units of affordable housing and create thousands of jobs, including 17,000 construction jobs of which 8,500 will be permanent. Additionally, this will create $6.5 billion in total economic output during construction and $5.6 billion in new tax revenue for the City and State for more than 30 years into the future. Why is the government holding this project hostage? It is surely going to be beneficial now and in the long term.”
Golden needs a fact-checker. No, there wouldn't be 8500 permanent construction jobs. No, there wouldn't even be 17,000 jobs--ESDC CEO Marisa Lago said 12,000.
The tax revenue figures are a fantasy, from Forest City Ratner. Golden apparently saw Lago's statement that the numbers were unchanged as including tax revenue figures the ESDC didn't produce.
The press release concludes:
Golden continued, “The Atlantic Yards Project, when completed, will include more than 8 million acres of new open space and $3 million dollars for our local parks. And of course, the New Jersey Nets, a major professional basketball team, will relocate to Brooklyn. This Arena will serve as the site for more than 200 events each year, including the circus, family shows, concerts, and more than 10 community events such as local college graduations. This project would be the real stimulus that Brooklyn needs to turn our economy around. It’s time we see action on this plan.”
(Emphasis added)
No, Atlantic Yards would not create 8 million acres of public space, it would create 8--that's off by a rather large factor--and that could take at least 25 years.
It's too bad that neither these legislators, nor Forest City Ratner, had the guts to make these claims in public at the MTA hearing.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Journalists vs. bloggers: new book "Say Everything" dissects the debate
The gap between journalists and bloggers is increasingly porous, and Scott Rosenberg's new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, offers a useful chapter on the question of Journalists vs. Bloggers, excerpted below.
The New York Times's City Room blog only includes news from the three dailies, plus other "professional" publications, so its "Morning Buzz" round-up of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's June 24 vote excluded my more comprehensive report (like, um, which had video). (My report did make Blogtalk, along with several pieces on biking.)
The gatekeepers of Google News, which deems "news" anything produced by an official, multi-employee news organization, no matter how secondhand (right) or boilerplate (below). So my blog has been rejected from appearing in Google News.
I understand the challenge. A blogsearch on "Atlantic Yards" invariably turns up blogs that simply reproduce press releases. (Actually, a news search does that too, to a lesser extent.) And Google should--but doesn't--have the personnel to make an examination.
As NYU professor Clay Shirky recently told Brooklyn the Borough, "the idea that there is a mainstream media and an alternative media on the internet – you know, that was looking like a fantasy even a couple of years ago – that’s done now."
Except not everybody knows.
Below are some excerpts from Say Everything, with my added reflections on the Atlantic Yards saga.
An unlimited supply of space
Rosenberg writes about how, as newspapers began losing longstanding ad revenue to new web-based forms, they found their authority questioned by bloggers, but this time the battle was different.
He writes:
There was an old saying that advised, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” But this was something new: a fight between those who bought ink by the barrel and those who published without any ink at all. That meant there would, practically speaking, be no limits to how long the argument might last. In one lengthy public correspondence between blogger Jeff Jarvis and New York Times editor Bill Keller, Keller, apparently exasperated by Jarvis’s dogged, detailed replies, distilled his sense of frustration with the open-ended nature of the Journalists-versus-Bloggers dispute: “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world.”
Of course, editors are busy people. And one prerogative of an editor has always been the ability to declare, “This argument is at an end.” The job of a news editor is to say, “And now this.” The news cycle has turned! Time to move on. The trouble was, bloggers were under no obligation to pay attention to such marching orders. If you ran a blog that obsessively tracked the fluctuation of oil prices or the rise and fall of hemlines — or, for that matter, the arguments between bloggers and journalists — then nothing was going to stop you from continuing to post about it. You followed your own news cycle — just as Josh Marshall and his peers did in keeping the Trent Lott story alive after the newspapers and networks had left it behind. This characteristic of blogging became a profound irritant to editors who were accustomed to being able to set the agenda of public dialogue. The bloggers had said their piece, and the editors had responded; couldn’t everyone just move along now?
In other words, for example, the story of the MTA vote on June 24 was a minor issue; the Times, in print, chose to concentrate on the financing challenges facing Forest City Ratner. Except the justifications for the vote by MTA board members were stunningly dubious (video), and deserved attention. So AYR did not move on.
“Is blogging journalism?”
Rosenberg sensibly demolishes the question, oft-raised by the mainstream media, of “Is blogging journalism?”
He writes:
The answer has always seemed simple and obvious: writing a blog neither qualified nor disqualified you for the “journalist” label. Blogging could be journalism anytime the person writing a blog chose to act like a journalist — recording and reacting to the events of the day, asking questions and seeking answers, checking facts and fixing errors. Similarly, journalists could become bloggers anytime they adopted the format of a blog as a vessel for their work.
A blog is just a format, which anyone can use. Some try to apply the standards of journalism--what New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller calls "the journalism of verification." Most don't, but more should, especially since fact-checking is much easier on the Internet.
Rosenberg points out that the usefulness to news sources of knowing who's a "professional":
Journalism has long straddled the line between craft and profession. ...we have instead are ad-hoc rules for the rationing of scarce resources — primarily, that of access to powerful people and important events. For instance, political reporters who work for major media outfits get press passes to cover presidential trips and press conferences, while small-town papers and bloggers usually don’t. So journalists didn’t have much of an answer to “Who appointed you?” beyond “My boss.”
He also notes that expertise can arise anywhere:
Most journalists view themselves as quick studies and generalists; part of the job’s appeal is that you’re always in a position to be learning something new. Good journalism required a variety of skills, from speedy research and source evaluation to interviewing technique and explanatory storytelling. Certainly, mastery of these skills often gave seasoned veterans and ace investigative reporters a valuable edge over less well-trained competitors. But these skills weren’t exactly particle physics. And now anyone who started a blog had at least the opportunity, if so inclined, to try to practice them.
Indeed, didn't we learn a lot from an architect's BrooklynViews blog (suspended since 2007)?
Citizen journalism?
Rosenberg points to the growth of the term "citizen journalism” to encompass the work by ordinary people:
Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s popular personal technology columnist, liked to make fun of citizen journalism by likening it to “citizen surgery,” and the joke always won him a laugh. But it was a poor analogy. It suggested that journalism was a field like medicine, one that required an elaborate training regime and rigorously policed professional standards. That has never been the case. And if it were, if our lives really did depend on the quality of journalists’ work, then in recent years much of the profession lay open to charges of malpractice.
Actually, independent blog journalism also increasingly involves journalists with professional experience either working on the side or starting a new venture after a layoff.
Frustration from all sides
Rosenberg points to a history of discontent with the media, and for some good reason, notably regarding the Iraq war:
The judgments American journalists passed on themselves, like this conclusion from a report on a 2008 panel at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, were often as harsh as the attacks of the most livid bloggers: “Covering one of the most important stories of our time — the run-up to war in Iraq — our nation’s top reporters and editors blew it. Badly. Their credulous, stenographic recitation of the administration’s deeply flawed arguments for war made them de facto accomplices to a war undertaken on false pretenses.”
There's criticism from the left:
...Many liberal Democrats already believed the press had helped deliver the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 by relentlessly focusing on trivial blemishes in Al Gore’s record; they blamed the media for abandoning its adversarial role. Their view was summarized by blogger Glenn Greenwald: “Propaganda thrives — predominates — in our democracy for many reasons, the principal reason being that we don’t have the sort of journalist class devoted to exposing it.”
And from the right:
If anything, conservatives’ belief in “liberal media bias” was more deeply entrenched than any equivalent belief on the other side of the political spectrum. For many conservatives, the watershed moment for giving up on the media came not during the Iraq debate, but later, during the 2004 election cycle, with the event they came to call “Rathergate.”
Can blogging replace journalism?
The curmudgeons, Rosenberg observes, have moved on to the argument that “Blogging can never replace real journalism!” He calls it a straw man, given that most bloggers have a symbiotic relationship with the traditional media.
The New York Times's City Room blog only includes news from the three dailies, plus other "professional" publications, so its "Morning Buzz" round-up of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's June 24 vote excluded my more comprehensive report (like, um, which had video). (My report did make Blogtalk, along with several pieces on biking.)
The gatekeepers of Google News, which deems "news" anything produced by an official, multi-employee news organization, no matter how secondhand (right) or boilerplate (below). So my blog has been rejected from appearing in Google News.I understand the challenge. A blogsearch on "Atlantic Yards" invariably turns up blogs that simply reproduce press releases. (Actually, a news search does that too, to a lesser extent.) And Google should--but doesn't--have the personnel to make an examination.
As NYU professor Clay Shirky recently told Brooklyn the Borough, "the idea that there is a mainstream media and an alternative media on the internet – you know, that was looking like a fantasy even a couple of years ago – that’s done now."Except not everybody knows.
Below are some excerpts from Say Everything, with my added reflections on the Atlantic Yards saga.
An unlimited supply of space
Rosenberg writes about how, as newspapers began losing longstanding ad revenue to new web-based forms, they found their authority questioned by bloggers, but this time the battle was different.He writes:
There was an old saying that advised, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” But this was something new: a fight between those who bought ink by the barrel and those who published without any ink at all. That meant there would, practically speaking, be no limits to how long the argument might last. In one lengthy public correspondence between blogger Jeff Jarvis and New York Times editor Bill Keller, Keller, apparently exasperated by Jarvis’s dogged, detailed replies, distilled his sense of frustration with the open-ended nature of the Journalists-versus-Bloggers dispute: “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world.”
Of course, editors are busy people. And one prerogative of an editor has always been the ability to declare, “This argument is at an end.” The job of a news editor is to say, “And now this.” The news cycle has turned! Time to move on. The trouble was, bloggers were under no obligation to pay attention to such marching orders. If you ran a blog that obsessively tracked the fluctuation of oil prices or the rise and fall of hemlines — or, for that matter, the arguments between bloggers and journalists — then nothing was going to stop you from continuing to post about it. You followed your own news cycle — just as Josh Marshall and his peers did in keeping the Trent Lott story alive after the newspapers and networks had left it behind. This characteristic of blogging became a profound irritant to editors who were accustomed to being able to set the agenda of public dialogue. The bloggers had said their piece, and the editors had responded; couldn’t everyone just move along now?
In other words, for example, the story of the MTA vote on June 24 was a minor issue; the Times, in print, chose to concentrate on the financing challenges facing Forest City Ratner. Except the justifications for the vote by MTA board members were stunningly dubious (video), and deserved attention. So AYR did not move on.
“Is blogging journalism?”
Rosenberg sensibly demolishes the question, oft-raised by the mainstream media, of “Is blogging journalism?”He writes:
The answer has always seemed simple and obvious: writing a blog neither qualified nor disqualified you for the “journalist” label. Blogging could be journalism anytime the person writing a blog chose to act like a journalist — recording and reacting to the events of the day, asking questions and seeking answers, checking facts and fixing errors. Similarly, journalists could become bloggers anytime they adopted the format of a blog as a vessel for their work.
A blog is just a format, which anyone can use. Some try to apply the standards of journalism--what New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller calls "the journalism of verification." Most don't, but more should, especially since fact-checking is much easier on the Internet.
Rosenberg points out that the usefulness to news sources of knowing who's a "professional":
Journalism has long straddled the line between craft and profession. ...we have instead are ad-hoc rules for the rationing of scarce resources — primarily, that of access to powerful people and important events. For instance, political reporters who work for major media outfits get press passes to cover presidential trips and press conferences, while small-town papers and bloggers usually don’t. So journalists didn’t have much of an answer to “Who appointed you?” beyond “My boss.”
He also notes that expertise can arise anywhere:
Most journalists view themselves as quick studies and generalists; part of the job’s appeal is that you’re always in a position to be learning something new. Good journalism required a variety of skills, from speedy research and source evaluation to interviewing technique and explanatory storytelling. Certainly, mastery of these skills often gave seasoned veterans and ace investigative reporters a valuable edge over less well-trained competitors. But these skills weren’t exactly particle physics. And now anyone who started a blog had at least the opportunity, if so inclined, to try to practice them.
Indeed, didn't we learn a lot from an architect's BrooklynViews blog (suspended since 2007)?
Citizen journalism?
Rosenberg points to the growth of the term "citizen journalism” to encompass the work by ordinary people:
Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s popular personal technology columnist, liked to make fun of citizen journalism by likening it to “citizen surgery,” and the joke always won him a laugh. But it was a poor analogy. It suggested that journalism was a field like medicine, one that required an elaborate training regime and rigorously policed professional standards. That has never been the case. And if it were, if our lives really did depend on the quality of journalists’ work, then in recent years much of the profession lay open to charges of malpractice.
Actually, independent blog journalism also increasingly involves journalists with professional experience either working on the side or starting a new venture after a layoff.
Frustration from all sides
Rosenberg points to a history of discontent with the media, and for some good reason, notably regarding the Iraq war:
The judgments American journalists passed on themselves, like this conclusion from a report on a 2008 panel at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, were often as harsh as the attacks of the most livid bloggers: “Covering one of the most important stories of our time — the run-up to war in Iraq — our nation’s top reporters and editors blew it. Badly. Their credulous, stenographic recitation of the administration’s deeply flawed arguments for war made them de facto accomplices to a war undertaken on false pretenses.”
There's criticism from the left:
...Many liberal Democrats already believed the press had helped deliver the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 by relentlessly focusing on trivial blemishes in Al Gore’s record; they blamed the media for abandoning its adversarial role. Their view was summarized by blogger Glenn Greenwald: “Propaganda thrives — predominates — in our democracy for many reasons, the principal reason being that we don’t have the sort of journalist class devoted to exposing it.”
And from the right:
If anything, conservatives’ belief in “liberal media bias” was more deeply entrenched than any equivalent belief on the other side of the political spectrum. For many conservatives, the watershed moment for giving up on the media came not during the Iraq debate, but later, during the 2004 election cycle, with the event they came to call “Rathergate.”
What if the media's wrong?
Rosenberg writes:
...Just as the Iraq story confirmed liberals in their belief that the conservative White House held the media in its thrall, the Rather story confirmed conservatives in their belief that the press promoted a liberal agenda. The newsroom was taking flak from both ends of the political spectrum. That’s a situation that actually reassures many newsroom veterans. Everybody’s mad at me, goes the thinking, so I must be doing something right! But there’s always another plausible explanation: you could be wrong all around.
He suggests that the web has meant a ratcheting up of expertise:
It was painful for dedicated journalists to contemplate this possibility, but the more you looked at the field in the middle of the decade of the 2000s, the less confidently you could dismiss it. No matter what your beat was, if you were writing regularly about any topic, you now had to contend with a welter of competing voices on the Web. Some were ill-informed and unlikely to threaten a professional journalist’s standing. But many others were experts or self-taught obsessives who were willing to post about their fields around the clock and in far greater depth than any commercial publication would ever provide.
...Many journalists, content in the penumbra of respect and entrée conferred by the institutions that employed them, had complacently accepted an ex officio basis for their authority. Now they faced discomforting challenges to that authority in a new environment where who you worked for mattered less than how good you were, and how good you were had become a question anyone could argue. “A passionate amateur almost always beats a bored professional,” wrote Chris Anderson (the professional who edited Wired magazine). Here and there, of course, you could still find passionate professionals, and they were priceless. But the bored pros found themselves outclassed and outgunned as never before.
Rosenberg's prime example is the polling analysis web site Fivethirtyeight.com:
Something similar was happening across the board: in field after field, the new brigades of blog-based specialists were offering devastating, and in many cases unimpeachable, critiques of mainstream media coverage, exposing it as at best shallow and at worst entirely unreliable.
Indeed--while the New York Times's coverage of Atlantic Yards has been highly variable, it's misses have been spectacular.
Time for original reporting
Rosenberg points to the potential of online journalism:
The world of the newsroom is a world of constrained resources — there are only so many reporters on staff, so many hours in the day, so many column inches to fill — and editors spend their workdays making choices within those limits. But bloggers lived outside these constraints... And they were just beginning to disprove the charge that bloggers only offered opinion or commentary and never pounded the pavement to provide original reporting.
When Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lieutenant, went on trial in January 2007 for his role in the leak of classified information about CIA operative Valerie Plame, among the reporters who descended on the Washington courthouse was a small swarm of bloggers. The controversy was one that liberal bloggers had helped fan in the first place, and their readers were hungry for more than the occasional terse summaries they were going to get from newspapers and broadcast outlets. So Firedoglake, a liberal blog operated by former Hollywood producer Jane Hamsher, sent a half-dozen volunteers to the trial and tag-teamed their coverage. The result was something new: a national event where the best on-the-scene reporting came not from professional press articles but from blog posts by volunteers.
For the Atlantic Yards story, I'd point, for example, to my lengthy coverage of the May 29 state Senate hearing.
Lacking standards?
Rosenberg points to criticisms posed by "curmudgeons" like Pete Hamill, who said blogging had no ethics and standards. But the author points out:
The curmudgeons’ arguments all shared a starting point in the tenets of professional journalism as practiced in mid-twentieth-century America: political impartiality; on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other “balance”; impersonal voice. The whole bundle of “objective” attributes — what Jay Rosen called “the view from nowhere” — was etched into the journalism school curriculum. These values were held out as timeless verities, but in fact they were of relatively recent vintage.
...But the curmudgeons often got their facts wrong, which tended to take the air out of their arguments.
His examples, an embarrassing attack on Talking Points Memo by journalism professor Michael Skube in the Los Angeles Times and an on-HBO meltdown by veteran sportswriter Buzz Bissinger (in the midst of a piece that cites some truly nasty blog comments from sports fans).
...Just as the Iraq story confirmed liberals in their belief that the conservative White House held the media in its thrall, the Rather story confirmed conservatives in their belief that the press promoted a liberal agenda. The newsroom was taking flak from both ends of the political spectrum. That’s a situation that actually reassures many newsroom veterans. Everybody’s mad at me, goes the thinking, so I must be doing something right! But there’s always another plausible explanation: you could be wrong all around.
He suggests that the web has meant a ratcheting up of expertise:
It was painful for dedicated journalists to contemplate this possibility, but the more you looked at the field in the middle of the decade of the 2000s, the less confidently you could dismiss it. No matter what your beat was, if you were writing regularly about any topic, you now had to contend with a welter of competing voices on the Web. Some were ill-informed and unlikely to threaten a professional journalist’s standing. But many others were experts or self-taught obsessives who were willing to post about their fields around the clock and in far greater depth than any commercial publication would ever provide.
...Many journalists, content in the penumbra of respect and entrée conferred by the institutions that employed them, had complacently accepted an ex officio basis for their authority. Now they faced discomforting challenges to that authority in a new environment where who you worked for mattered less than how good you were, and how good you were had become a question anyone could argue. “A passionate amateur almost always beats a bored professional,” wrote Chris Anderson (the professional who edited Wired magazine). Here and there, of course, you could still find passionate professionals, and they were priceless. But the bored pros found themselves outclassed and outgunned as never before.
Rosenberg's prime example is the polling analysis web site Fivethirtyeight.com:
Something similar was happening across the board: in field after field, the new brigades of blog-based specialists were offering devastating, and in many cases unimpeachable, critiques of mainstream media coverage, exposing it as at best shallow and at worst entirely unreliable.
Indeed--while the New York Times's coverage of Atlantic Yards has been highly variable, it's misses have been spectacular.
Time for original reporting
Rosenberg points to the potential of online journalism:
The world of the newsroom is a world of constrained resources — there are only so many reporters on staff, so many hours in the day, so many column inches to fill — and editors spend their workdays making choices within those limits. But bloggers lived outside these constraints... And they were just beginning to disprove the charge that bloggers only offered opinion or commentary and never pounded the pavement to provide original reporting.
When Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lieutenant, went on trial in January 2007 for his role in the leak of classified information about CIA operative Valerie Plame, among the reporters who descended on the Washington courthouse was a small swarm of bloggers. The controversy was one that liberal bloggers had helped fan in the first place, and their readers were hungry for more than the occasional terse summaries they were going to get from newspapers and broadcast outlets. So Firedoglake, a liberal blog operated by former Hollywood producer Jane Hamsher, sent a half-dozen volunteers to the trial and tag-teamed their coverage. The result was something new: a national event where the best on-the-scene reporting came not from professional press articles but from blog posts by volunteers.
For the Atlantic Yards story, I'd point, for example, to my lengthy coverage of the May 29 state Senate hearing.
Lacking standards?
Rosenberg points to criticisms posed by "curmudgeons" like Pete Hamill, who said blogging had no ethics and standards. But the author points out:
The curmudgeons’ arguments all shared a starting point in the tenets of professional journalism as practiced in mid-twentieth-century America: political impartiality; on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other “balance”; impersonal voice. The whole bundle of “objective” attributes — what Jay Rosen called “the view from nowhere” — was etched into the journalism school curriculum. These values were held out as timeless verities, but in fact they were of relatively recent vintage.
...But the curmudgeons often got their facts wrong, which tended to take the air out of their arguments.
His examples, an embarrassing attack on Talking Points Memo by journalism professor Michael Skube in the Los Angeles Times and an on-HBO meltdown by veteran sportswriter Buzz Bissinger (in the midst of a piece that cites some truly nasty blog comments from sports fans).
Indeed, I've questioned the standard goals of objectivity and neutrality in covering Atlantic Yards, suggesting it can lead to the "mushy middle."
Can blogging replace journalism?
The curmudgeons, Rosenberg observes, have moved on to the argument that “Blogging can never replace real journalism!” He calls it a straw man, given that most bloggers have a symbiotic relationship with the traditional media.
He cites three arguments about the value of traditional journalism:
First, they asked, without media companies subsidizing it, who would undertake the expensive and politically perilous work of investigative journalism? Next they suggested that the proliferation of online news sources and the multiplicity of partisan blogospheres meant the triumph of the “echo chamber,” in which we only learn what we already know about, and only hear those with whom we already agree. Finally, they argued, the collapse of big media would cause the very unity of our culture to disintegrate, leaving us without a central narrative for our national life. Each of these arguments, unlike the most nostalgic carpings of the curmudgeons, was serious and substantive. And each provoked an important debate online.
However, Rosenberg suggests, the old media model didn't deliver all that much investigative journalism, and maybe the nonprofit sector is the solution. As for the echo chamber, he suggests that the web, "far from banishing serendipity, actually generated an oversupply of fascinating novelties and distractions." As for polarization, he suggests that "[t]his 'loss of a single national narrative' sounds grievous indeed, until you realize that such unity, if it ever did exist, represented only a short interlude in U.S. history."
Local reporting
What's missing from his critique? Analysis of who'll provide solid local reporting, the expertise that come from showing up and knowing the territory. I've seen the "citizen journalists" recruited by Brownstoner and The Local make errors or miss news, though surely something is better than nothing.
However, Rosenberg suggests, the old media model didn't deliver all that much investigative journalism, and maybe the nonprofit sector is the solution. As for the echo chamber, he suggests that the web, "far from banishing serendipity, actually generated an oversupply of fascinating novelties and distractions." As for polarization, he suggests that "[t]his 'loss of a single national narrative' sounds grievous indeed, until you realize that such unity, if it ever did exist, represented only a short interlude in U.S. history."
Local reporting
What's missing from his critique? Analysis of who'll provide solid local reporting, the expertise that come from showing up and knowing the territory. I've seen the "citizen journalists" recruited by Brownstoner and The Local make errors or miss news, though surely something is better than nothing.
I do believe that journalists using blogs and citizen bloggers can help fill in many gaps in local information. Whether unpaid or low-paid locals, with professional backgrounds or not, can provide true "watchdog journalism" is another question.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
In New York magazine, some (partly) misplaced regret for the lost Gehry design
Longtime critics of Atlantic Yards know that the removal of architect Frank Gehry is part of a pattern of not-so-trustworthy behavior by developer Forest City Ratner (whose reps swore for months that Gehry was still the architect), but New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson, like some other architecture aficionados, treats it as the ultimate betrayal.
In a recent article headlined The Unbuilding of Frank Gehry: Has New York lost its great chance with an architectural legend? Gehry speaks., Davidson offers the following observations about Atlantic Yards:
Atlantic Yards evolved from an exciting ideal to a battleground for the soul of Brooklyn to a sinkhole of betrayal and mediocrity.
By far the worst disappointment is Atlantic Yards. For years, opponents of the project, appalled by its scale and hostile to the developer Bruce Ratner, warned that Gehry was providing a fig leaf of avant-gardism to cover a real-estate magnate’s obscene greed. A project so debased couldn’t generate good architecture, they insisted. In 2007, the author Jonathan Lethem wrote an open letter pleading with Gehry to walk away. “These buildings,” he wrote, “have emerged pre-botched by compromise, swollen with expediency and profit-seeking.”
But for Gehry, Atlantic Yards represented an irresistible chance to do for an urban district what he had done for the museum and the concert hall: establish a new archetype.
I think Davidson grants Gehry a little too much credit here. The architect was spending most of his time on the arena, his first, and came up with the (much-praised by some) solution--given the enormous site constraints--of nestling the arena within four towers.
Gehry did not exactly walk around Prospect Heights--or talk to locals--to try to suss out a new urban archetype.
In a recent article headlined The Unbuilding of Frank Gehry: Has New York lost its great chance with an architectural legend? Gehry speaks., Davidson offers the following observations about Atlantic Yards:
Atlantic Yards evolved from an exciting ideal to a battleground for the soul of Brooklyn to a sinkhole of betrayal and mediocrity.
By far the worst disappointment is Atlantic Yards. For years, opponents of the project, appalled by its scale and hostile to the developer Bruce Ratner, warned that Gehry was providing a fig leaf of avant-gardism to cover a real-estate magnate’s obscene greed. A project so debased couldn’t generate good architecture, they insisted. In 2007, the author Jonathan Lethem wrote an open letter pleading with Gehry to walk away. “These buildings,” he wrote, “have emerged pre-botched by compromise, swollen with expediency and profit-seeking.”
But for Gehry, Atlantic Yards represented an irresistible chance to do for an urban district what he had done for the museum and the concert hall: establish a new archetype.
I think Davidson grants Gehry a little too much credit here. The architect was spending most of his time on the arena, his first, and came up with the (much-praised by some) solution--given the enormous site constraints--of nestling the arena within four towers.
Gehry did not exactly walk around Prospect Heights--or talk to locals--to try to suss out a new urban archetype.
Trusting Ratner
Davidson continues:
In his desire to believe, he made the mistake of trusting Bruce Ratner, or at any rate got himself so enmeshed that the developer’s company, Forest City Ratner, once represented 35 percent of Gehry’s business. When I visited the architect at his Los Angeles studio in April, he described Ratner as “a decent guy. He goes to concerts, buys art, can quote from Joyce. He wants an architectural legacy.” Gehry insisted to me that he has a nose for cynics, and that Ratner wasn’t one. “We turn work down if it’s not real, or if people have a warped image of what I do. This stuff works only when there’s a true partnership between client and architect. If they’re trying to build a monster on the landscape and they’re just using me to get more approvals, I usually opt out.”
A few weeks after that conversation, Ratner scrapped six years’ worth of design work. Pleading financial straits, he fired Gehry from the whole project and replaced his arena design with a graceless Cow Palace knockoff by the journeyman stadium-builder Ellerbe Becket. To judge by early renderings, the new offering isn’t simply inferior; it’s insultingly bad. Yet Gehry has served Ratner well. His involvement helped strong-arm the city and the state into delivering tax breaks, permits, and the power to evict holdouts. It helped beat back opposition, secure $400 million in naming rights from Barclays, and win over the architectural press. Ratner didn’t just toss Gehry into the drink; he betrayed the city, blighted a neighborhood he promised to transform, validated his opponents, and blew a colossal opportunity to bring great architecture to a city that badly needs it.
Opportunity blown in 2007
In his desire to believe, he made the mistake of trusting Bruce Ratner, or at any rate got himself so enmeshed that the developer’s company, Forest City Ratner, once represented 35 percent of Gehry’s business. When I visited the architect at his Los Angeles studio in April, he described Ratner as “a decent guy. He goes to concerts, buys art, can quote from Joyce. He wants an architectural legacy.” Gehry insisted to me that he has a nose for cynics, and that Ratner wasn’t one. “We turn work down if it’s not real, or if people have a warped image of what I do. This stuff works only when there’s a true partnership between client and architect. If they’re trying to build a monster on the landscape and they’re just using me to get more approvals, I usually opt out.”
A few weeks after that conversation, Ratner scrapped six years’ worth of design work. Pleading financial straits, he fired Gehry from the whole project and replaced his arena design with a graceless Cow Palace knockoff by the journeyman stadium-builder Ellerbe Becket. To judge by early renderings, the new offering isn’t simply inferior; it’s insultingly bad. Yet Gehry has served Ratner well. His involvement helped strong-arm the city and the state into delivering tax breaks, permits, and the power to evict holdouts. It helped beat back opposition, secure $400 million in naming rights from Barclays, and win over the architectural press. Ratner didn’t just toss Gehry into the drink; he betrayed the city, blighted a neighborhood he promised to transform, validated his opponents, and blew a colossal opportunity to bring great architecture to a city that badly needs it.
Opportunity blown in 2007
Oh, come now. Wasn't the whole thing blown in September 2007 with the State Funding Agreement, which allowed Ratner six years (after the delivery of property by eminent domain) to build the arena without penalty, 12 years for Phase 1, and no timetable for Phase 2?
That agreement, which came to light in March 2008, meant that building four towers around the arena within a tight time frame was unlikely, and thus Gehry's design was unlikely. It also meant that blight--in the form of surface parking lots and/or cleared land--was likely to persist for decades.
The conclusion
The conclusion
Davidson concludes:
The completion of Beekman Tower keeps Gehry yoked to Ratner for now, and the normally unguarded architect has retreated into silence, broken only by a single boilerplate press release. ("We remain extremely proud of our work," etc.) Even if he were never to work again, he has transformed enough pockets of the world to make him a Paul Bunyan among architects. He just hasn’t had a chance to change New York, which loved him too timidly and too late.
The completion of Beekman Tower keeps Gehry yoked to Ratner for now, and the normally unguarded architect has retreated into silence, broken only by a single boilerplate press release. ("We remain extremely proud of our work," etc.) Even if he were never to work again, he has transformed enough pockets of the world to make him a Paul Bunyan among architects. He just hasn’t had a chance to change New York, which loved him too timidly and too late.
Well, Gehry, who was barred by his client from attending any community meetings to answer questions, didn't love New York that much himself.
Some critique
A seemingly informed observer posted an interesting critique on the magazine's web site:
The issue with the Atlantic Yards site is another matter. Neither the developer nor the architect are qualified to deal with the demands of this site/program. Let's get real here- Gehry's design for the site is a hot mess. There's a kernel of a good idea- To bury the arena into the urban fabric- but he has no business designing residential buildings. His strength lies in the monumental gesture, not the dense, complex fabric of urban residential. As for Ratner- he's a total hack builder. He fancies himself on a steep learning curve, but look at his built work: The atrocious Atlantic Center Mall, and the not much better Atlantic Terminal Mall. Why is this man given the privilege of building another thing in Brooklyn when his track record is so abysmal?
Gehry lays off staff
From a 6/29/09 Architectural Record article headlined Gehry Trims Staff As Projects Hit Snags:
Gehry Partners, like many firms, has been pounded by the recession. The Los Angeles-based architecture practice recently lost one of its largest commissions, an arena in Brooklyn, and had another project—the Grand Avenue complex in L.A.— sidelined due to financing problems.
The setbacks have led the company to lay off half its staff: Today, it has 112 employees, down from 250 a year and a half ago. “Every economic cycle brings with it a unique set of challenges and opportunities,” explains Frank Gehry, FAIA. “We’ve worked hard over the years to build a firm that is nimble enough to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, and that is able to produce and embrace consistent innovation. These qualities are serving us well right now.”
Not looking back
A reader commented on the magazine's web site:
Apart from the relative architectural merit of Frank Gehry's buildings, I would think that any architect who had to resort to cutting half of his staff in a horrible recession would feel some pangs of conscience and remorse. So over a hundred people, many perhaps with children and dependants, are forced to seek work in a barren work climate. Gehry spins this as a testament to how his firm is "nimble." In his shoes, I would be ashamed to make that comment.
It's reminiscent of Gehry's behavior captured in the film Sketches of Frank Gehry.
As I wrote, Gehry in the film shows an impressive capacity to turn on a dime, with little apparent regret about the collateral damage. After he designed the Santa Monica Place, mall for the Rouse Company, he invited the company president to his unorthodox home.
Why’d he work on the mall, so different from his house, Gehry was asked. “Because I had to make a living,” the architect recalled saying. “He said ‘Stop it’… I said ‘You’re right.”
Apart from the relative architectural merit of Frank Gehry's buildings, I would think that any architect who had to resort to cutting half of his staff in a horrible recession would feel some pangs of conscience and remorse. So over a hundred people, many perhaps with children and dependants, are forced to seek work in a barren work climate. Gehry spins this as a testament to how his firm is "nimble." In his shoes, I would be ashamed to make that comment.
It's reminiscent of Gehry's behavior captured in the film Sketches of Frank Gehry.
As I wrote, Gehry in the film shows an impressive capacity to turn on a dime, with little apparent regret about the collateral damage. After he designed the Santa Monica Place, mall for the Rouse Company, he invited the company president to his unorthodox home.
Why’d he work on the mall, so different from his house, Gehry was asked. “Because I had to make a living,” the architect recalled saying. “He said ‘Stop it’… I said ‘You’re right.”
So Gehry and the Rouse official decided to part ways. “It was like jumping off a cliff, an amazing feeling," Gehry reflects. "And I was so happy from then on.” On camera, Gehry expresses no qualms about the 45 staffers in his office laid off without notice, but maybe he wasn't asked.
In the film, Milton Wexler, Gehry’s longtime therapist, recounts how Gehry was in limbo with his wife, and advised him to make up his mind, to either commit to work it out or to leave immediately. Gehry instantly moved to a hotel. “I had two daughters and a wife,” he says with a mildly incredulous laugh, but without remorse.
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