Appeals court rules no conflict, reinstates ESDC lawyer

I'll point to coverage in NoLandGrab and the Times, as well as the DDDB press release. Note that Forest City Ratner, in an E-Newsletter, called the decision a "Court Victory for Atlantic Yards," as if the project were a party to the case, rather than the Empire State Development Corporation or the developer.

E&P on the Times: loan obligation to Forest City Ratner demands more disclosure

In the June issue of Editor & Publisher, the monthly trade journal of the newspaper industry, "Ethics Corner" columnist Allan Wolper takes a look at the New York Times's dicey relationship with Forest City Ratner. The headline: 'NY Times' Coverage Hits Close To Home, with the subhead: Reporters challenged to objectively cover dealings of a real estate company directly involved with New York Times Co.

In barely 800 words, the column must skip over a lot of ground, and doesn't attempt to assess the Times's overall performance. (A longer version should be posted on the E&P web site, but not for at least a week.) Though I take issue with several shadings in the story and point out areas for closer analysis, the column makes two important points:
--though the Times Company has guaranteed a loan to Forest City Ratner, the newspaper doesn't disclose that loan in articles about the developer, and it should
--rival dailies had been stymied in getting Forest City Ratner to waive a gag order on people who sold their apartments to the developer, but only for the Times was the gag lifted.

Wolper's conclusion: it’s "dangerous for the paper to go into business with corporations they are supposed to be monitoring." While this is a worthwhile first step in raising the issue nationally, for those of us who look at the relationship closely, it's even more dangerous than his column lets on.

No-win situation?

The column begins by setting up the real estate deal between the New York Times Company and Forest City Ratner to build the new Times Tower in 2000, and then how the Times began covering the Atlantic Yards project. Wolper notes:
If that wasn't messy enough, the New York Times Co. Annual Commitment and Liability report notes the company is obligated to loan Forest City $119.5 million to finish the latter's share of the building if the real estate company can't come up with the money on its own.
It's obvious that the Times would want Forest City Ratner to make its Brooklyn project a financial success so that it won't have to ask the newspaper company to come up with the loan.

By the same token, he notes, reporters shouldn’t feel pressure either way to slant the news.

It's not just that the Times Company wants the Atlantic Yards project--a name unmentioned in this column--to be successful. The Times Company wants the Times Tower to be successful and the newspaper, even before the Atlantic Yards project was announced, provided inadequate coverage, while the New York Observer and the Village Voice have looked much more closely.

The loan has been mentioned in only one previous article about the project, and not in the Times. As noted in Afterword B of my report, a 10/28/03 article in the New York Post (Liberty Bonds Key To Ratner) explained that the Times would “guarantee” up to $100 million of the loan that Ratner needs to construct the tower’s top half.

Is disclosure all?

The column continues by quoting a Times Company spokesman on the policy of disclosure in articles, press releases, and the annual report. But Wolper finds a flaw, saying that the disclosure is insufficient:
Even though every Times news story on the subject includes a line identifying Forest City Ratner and the Times Co. as co-developers of the Manhattan midtown tower, there are no references to the loan agreement.

Every Times news story? The Times has been mostly scrupulous of late in disclosing the relationship; however, as noted in Chapter 10 of my report, several articles about the Atlantic Yards project, or about Forest City Ratner projects, have lacked the disclosure. One notable example: architecture critic Herbert Muschamp's 12/11/03 rave review, which also lacked an acknowledgement that Muschamp served on a committee with Forest City Ratner officials to choose an architect for the Times Tower. Another example: a 6/26/05 Times Magazine softball interview with company head Bruce Ratner, which even Times Public Editor Byron Calame criticized for its lack of disclosure.

Unmentioned in the column is the use of eminent domain in both the Times Tower and Atlantic Yards projects, and the Times's belated--though inconsistent--pattern of eminent domain disclosure.

Also, while disclosure is important--it should alert writers, editors, and readers to approach the topic carefully--it's not sufficient. Nor is objectivity. I'll again quote Daniel Okrent, the Times's first Public Editor, who stated in an 11/14/04 column headlined It's Good to Be Objective. It's Even Better to Be Right.: "Fairness requires the consideration of all sides of an issue; it doesn't require the uncritical reporting of any. Yet even the best reporters will sometimes display a disappointing reluctance to set things straight."

AYR obsessed with the loan?

Wolper's next paragraph mentions me:
But Brooklyn blogger Norman Oder, a news editor by day at Library Journal, a trade magazine, and an anti-Times blogger at night, rarely lets a day go by without posting a line about the loan.

Actually, I rarely mention the loan, though I do mention the business partnership frequently. Also, while my blog is frequently critical of the Times, the shorthand "anti-Times blogger" (as with "anti-Ratner blogger") discounts the amount of research and analysis that I do, not to mention the report that preceded my blog.

Onward to the ad

The column then goes on to mention the ad Forest City Ratner “purchased” in the Sunday City section celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Empire State Building. Wolper observes:
No matter how hard Times reporters may try to be fair, either the corporate side of the company or Forest City Ratner seems to do something to undermine them.

This raises a question: do Times reporters and editors try hard enough to be fair? I've identified several instances in which I believe they haven't; for example, I recently pointed to a pattern in which the Times three times has reported on poll results (two polls by the Times, one by Quinnippiac University), but neglected to include in the article negative attitudes, raised in the polls, toward the Atlantic Yards project.

Did the ad undermine Times reporters? Maybe, but why didn't they treat it as a news story and check on whether Forest City Ratner got a special discount in placing the ad? As I wrote, a Times spokeswoman was unwilling to answer that question. It remains an obvious question for reporters to ask Forest City Ratner: did they purchase the ad at full freight?

Gehry's skyline--blowback

The column makes an interesting point about a Times exclusive, suggestion that "the Ratner public relations machine self-destructed last summer when it leaked a full-color illustration of its Brooklyn project to the Times."

Was it a leak or a strategy that perhaps backfired? Frank Gehry's garish graphic did help alert the other dailies--and, more importantly, readers--to the development's size. But as I pointed out in Chapter 6 of my report, the Times had missed the story for six weeks: the developer had, at a City Council meeting the newspaper neglected to cover, proposed increasing the size of the project, trading office space for condos.

The Times's buyout story

Wolper moves forward to April 2006 and Forest City Ratner’s agreement to waive a gag order for the Times, but not other newspapers that had asked:
The article included comments from both opponents and supporters of the project, but the headline, “Forced to Move, Some Find Greener Grass,” was everything the developer could hope for.
To his credit, Nicholas Confessore, the Times reporter who wrote the story, made it clear he got his exclusive because of his paper’s relationship with the developer. “Forest City Ratner is the development partner in building a New Midtown headquarters of The New York Times Company,” Confessore wrote. “For this article, the company agreed to waive contractual restrictions limiting what whose who accepted buyouts could say.”

That's news to me; I didn't know how hard Daily News and Post reporters had apparently tried to gain the same access. And Wolper's right--the headline (not to mention the photo that appeared on the Metro front)--was everything the developer would want; after all, the article quickly was highlighted in an Atlantic Yards E-Newsletter. And the gag didn't just concern disclosure of the money; it also involved desisting from criticism of the project and from support for groups opposing the project.

As for Confessore making the connection clear, I think it was somewhat fuzzy. The two sentences Wolper cites were in consecutive paragraphs, rather than in the same paragraph. Forest City Ratner could have agreed to cooperate with the Times for other reasons, such as the reporter's track record in coverage and the importance of reaching the Times's audience.

More importantly, did the reporter look at the topic rigorously? I pointed out several flaws, notably too little examination of the pressure on rental tenants.

The "Downtown" correction

The column closes with a look at a recent mega-correction regarding “Downtown Brooklyn. While the Times made the correction, Forest City Ratner didn’t:
But two days later, Forest City Ratner hadn’t corrected its Web site, which described the project as being in downtown Brooklyn. That’s why it’s so dangerous for the paper to into business with corporations they are supposed to be monitoring.

But the Times's correction was not accompanied by a news story that explained why Forest City Ratner keeps asserting that the project would be in Downtown Brooklyn. (I had regularly pressured the Times on this correction.)

That final paragraph suggests that Forest City Ratner might be expected to correct the "Downtown Brooklyn" designation on its web site. The company has instead continued to use the term in its p.r. materials, like the brochure at right, and the Times has neglected to point it out. Nor, as I've noted, has the Times been willing to point out obvious misinformation from Forest City Ratner.

What about editorials?

Wolper's column doesn't prove that there's any internal pressure in the newsroom to go easy on Forest City Ratner--though the absence of any mention of the loan, in either a news story or in disclosures, is dismaying, as are the numerous instances of inadequate coverage. But let's accept that the Times maintains a separation between the company's business interests and its news coverage.

Does it maintain the same separation between business and the editorial page? Do the lapses in editorials, as noted in Chapter 13 of my report or my blog, or the absence of op-eds (only one in the entire history of the project), result from inattentive supervision or a thumb on the scale?

How many more columns could be written about this project? Let's see if anything more turns up in the longer version of this column.

What CBA? Gaps in Errol Louis's column about AY supporters

In a column today headlined A neighborhood welcome, Daily News columnist (and Atlantic Yards booster) Errol Louis counters news of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's new advisory board with mini-profiles of five Brooklynites who favor the Atlantic Yards plan.

He's welcome to do that. Opinion is hardly monolithic. But two of the five people Louis profiled have ties to the Atlantic Yards project Louis didn't see fit to mention. He describes Freddie Hamilton as "a community leader from Clinton Hill" who's concerned about gun violence. He describes Delia Hunley-Adossa as "president of the 88th Precinct Community Council," an activist who works with the cops in fighting drug dealers.

How about the CBA?

Well, they're also signatories to the controversial Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which Forest City Ratner signed with only eight groups (as opposed to the pioneering CBAs in Los Angeles, which involved 20 to 30 groups). Other signatories to the Atlantic Yards CBA, such as ACORN, are contractually required to publicly support the project. Hamilton is also a pro-Atlantic Yards candidate in the 57th Assembly District, another fact absent from Louis's column.

Other signatories, such as BUILD and Herbert Daughtry's Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, have received financial support from Forest City Ratner. We've yet to learn what support, if any, the groups Hamilton and Hunley-Adossa represent have received. But they're not simply neutral neighborhood activists.

The superblock that dares not speak its name

It's a word that Forest City Ratner and architect Frank Gehry dare not speak: superblock. Nobody loves a superblock. The discredited feature of 1960s mega-designs, according to the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, "designates very large, usually residential, city blocks often formed by consolidating several smaller blocks and often barred to through traffic and crossed by pedestrian walks." (Overlay site plan from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.)

And that's what would happen in the eastern section of the proposed Atlantic Yards project: Pacific Street would be demapped. (See graphic below.) That allows Forest City Ratner, already facing the challenge of much too little open space for the expected population, to gain some three acres of the proposed seven acres for privately-run parks. The superblock also would allow the developer to claim a lesser Floor Area Ratio (FAR) than a project that didn't absorb the street. Note that Pacific Street and Fifth Avenue in the western portion of the site also would be demapped, creating another superblock; with an arena at the center, it certainly would depart from a classic superblock.

But creating "towers in a park" is frowned on these days; the community-developed UNITY plan, by contrast, proposed extending streets from Fort Greene to better connect the neighborhood with Prospect Heights and Park Slope.

A chorus against superblocks

Superblocks come in for regular criticism. Julia Vitullo-Martin observed in the March 2005 Manhattan Institute newsletter:
The superblock erased New York's tight street grid, famously maligned by writer Lewis Mumford as the soulless invention of commercial capitalism, a pernicious device for dividing land into salable parcels. But today we recognize that Mumford was utterly wrong.
(Graphic from NoLandGrab.org)

In a review of Philip Nobel's book on Ground Zero, Sixteen Acres, Clay Risen wrote in the 1/30/05 New York Times:
For residents of nearby neighborhoods, it provided an opportunity to correct the massive planning mistake that was the original World Trade Center superblock.

Regarding the Atlantic Yards plan, Brooklyn developer David Walentas on 10/10/05 told the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate:
“I think the Nets are good. I think the transportation is good. I think the housing is too dense and I think the superblocks they have there is a bad idea. I think superblocks don’t work anywhere in America. I think you need streets between buildings. You need traffic and pedestrians for safety and activity and shops and restaurants. But architects like these utopian kinds of ideas. They don’t work…"

Who notices the Atlantic Yards superblock?

The term has been used infrequently in public discussions of the Atlantic Yards plan. The New York Observer used the term in a caption (graphic at right) in its 5/11/06 report in The Real Estate on Frank Gehry's press conference.

The authoritative trade magazine Architectural Record, in a 5/17/06 article headlined Revised Atlantic Yards Plan Less Bulky, Yet Still Huge, laid it out:
The eastern edge of the site, which creeps into the more residential, low-density neighborhood of Prospect Heights, would form a superblock, with seven residential buildings of 20 to 40 stories.

This week, New York magazine didn't quite spell it out, but suggested an alternative plan with "No more 300- and 400-foot slabs surrounding a park."

Architecture critics punt

Have architectural critics writing about the project used the term? Not James Gardner, in his 5/16/06 piece in the Sun. Not Justin Davidson, in his 5/22/06 assessment in Newsday. Dan Bischoff, in his 5/28/06 review in the Star-Ledger, didn't use the term but did criticize the design mentality:
But this design looks less like the new Shanghai than the old Eastern Europe, with its enormous high-rise blocks that bring a Le Corbusier geometric fantasy to mind.

Muschamp's myopia

The two biggest raves for the design, albeit earlier iterations of it, have come from the two New York Times architecture critics. Herbert Muschamp, in a 12/11/03 review headlined Courtside Seats to an Urban Garden, not only didn't mention the superblock, he had the gall to compare Atlantic Yards to Rockefeller Center, writing:
Those who have been wondering whether it will ever be possible to create another Rockefeller Center can stop waiting for the answer. Here it is.

But Rockefeller Center was no superblock. It added a new street, Rockefeller Plaza, to the street grid, rather than subtracted streets. (Map from About.com.)

Ouroussoff's redefinition

Nicolai Ouroussoff, in his 7/5/05 review, headlined Seeking First to Reinvent the Sports Arena, and Then Brooklyn, declared Gehry's design "an intriguing attempt to overturn a half-century's worth of failed urban planning ideas."

He went on to make a distinction between superblocks and developments that may look like superblocks but, in his judgment, do not qualify as such:
From the dehumanizing Modernist superblocks of the 1960's to the cloying artificiality of postmodern visions like Battery Park City, architects have labored to come up with a formula for large-scale housing development that is not cold, sterile and lifeless.
...Extending east from the arena, the bulk of the residential buildings are organized in two uneven rows that frame a long internal courtyard. The buildings are broken down into smaller components, like building blocks stacked on top of one another. The blocks are then carefully arranged in response to various site conditions, pulling apart in places to frame passageways through the site; elsewhere, they are used to frame a series of more private gardens.

Ouroussoff maintained this distinction in a public appearance with Gehry in January, asserting that the Atlantic Yards design wouldn't involve a superblock. However, the definition cited above says nothing about whether the buildings are "dehumanizing" or "carefully arranged." A superblock is created when large blocks are formed by consolidating streets, usually for residential buildings.

Other coverage

I could find only a few other mentions of a superblock in press coverage. The Brooklyn Papers' Vince DiMiceli, in a 10/16/04 opinion piece headlined Bring Mets and Nets to Brooklyn, wrote:
And while any of those would be better than Ratner’s suburban campus superblock — which would complete the separation of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill from Prospect Heights that he started with the failed Atlantic Center mall — none of them are going to happen.

A 3/11/06 editorial in The Brooklyn Papers, headlined Yards plan not just Nets, stated:
Ratner says the project’s elimination of the Long Island Rail Road “cut” will heal an open wound that separates Fort Greene from Prospect Heights, but those towers and that superblock will actually do the opposite, permanently cutting the neighborhoods off from each other.

A Lexis-Nexis search of news coverage turned up three other examples. A 7/22/05 article in the New York Sun, headlined Report: Arena Vulnerable to Terrorists, quoted a report on security issues:
"Unfortunately, once these security measures are implemented, the complex will become a fortress-like superblock,” according to the report.

A 9/26/05 article in the New York Observer, headlined At W.T.C. and Brooklyn Arena, Death and Life of the Superblock, noted:
Add to that a project in Brooklyn that seeks to create a superblock where there isn’t one, and scattered calls to bring back Robert Moses, and this isn’t looking like a great season for the legacy of Jane Jacobs.
...But there certainly is one aspect of Mr. Gehry's design for Atlantic Yards that Ms. Jacobs wouldn't like: superblocks.

FCR on the record

And reporter Matthew Schuerman got Forest City Ratner on the record:
"For FCRC, it is less about superblocks and more about working blocks," Mr. [Jim] Stuckey said in an e-mail. "What we like most about the plan is how the buildings and the public space respect one another and surrounding areas by encouraging movement along the sidewalk and within the interior. These buildings will very much look out to the larger city and surrounding communities while creating a public space that remains alive because it too is open to the street."

Note Stuckey's effort at Changing the Subject, which is Tactic #4 in the Joe DePlasco playbook.

Just the bloggers?

And the Times, in a 4/16/06 article about bloggers, cited Jonathan Cohn, the architect behind the Brooklyn Views blog:
His argument -- that the Atlantic Yards would be more dense than advertised because it eliminated otherwise open city streets to create the "superblock" on which the project will be built -- was quickly added to opponents' talking points.

But is the superblock a subject just for bloggers and opponents, or should it be part of the ongoing discussion of the Atlantic Yards project?

Forest City Ratner's new ad campaign, riding the Daily News editorial

In terms of gush, the 5/14/06 Daily News editorial in support of the Atlantic Yards project has become the reigning champ, surpassing the effort of former New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp in 12/11/03 essay. The critic wrote that "A Garden of Eden grows in Brooklyn;" the Daily News called it, in strained mall-speak, A super design for a great project.

I've already dissected the editorial, but I just had a chance to read it again, since Forest City Ratner has not only reproduced the editorial in one of its Atlantic Yards E-Newsletters (right), it has done so in ads in this week's Brooklyn Downtown Star and Courier-Life chain. (Has the developer given up on the more critical Brooklyn Papers? Note the Papers' comments near the end of the slideshow.)

Additional flaws are evident on a second reading, especially given the discussion of the project in the last two weeks. Why no mention of the interim surface parking that would last for years on the land that the editorial anticipates would become a "welcoming landscape"? Why no effort to assess the appropriate scale of the project? And, given the very mixed reviews the project has gotten from three architectural critics, how exactly does the Daily News editorial board claim its expertise, other than its consistent cheerleading for the project?

New York Magazine offers a scaleback plan to reduce "shocking size"

New York Magazine, in a feature headlined Building the (New) New York: The Bob and Jane way, takes a look at the city in 2016, and pronounces the projected result a mix of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. A segment on the Atlantic Yards project is odd; on the one hand, it assumes that the project would be completed on time as currently scheduled (despite past delays and likely litigation) and would be located in Downtown Brooklyn; on the other, it muses about a scaleback plan (uncredited) that could be far more dramatic than than anything proposed so far.

The intro to the article offers a caveat about starchitects:
One can’t help but get a little giddy with all the big names, but there is a dark side to hiring all these out-of-towners. Too often they serve as ambassadors to the upper-middle class for owners with an agenda, cloaking the same old towers in a park.

While the author doesn't spell it out, that could well be a description of the Atlantic Yards project: an owner with an agenda; a need to win over the upper-middle class (both as tenants and as influentials); and a gussied-up superblock. Indeed, the scaleback version of Atlantic Yards offered later in the article (see below) would involve "[n]o more 300- and 400-foot slabs surrounding a park."

Jacobs and the gadflies

The article hearkens back to Jacobs:
The planning phrase on everyone’s lips is “eyes on the street,” the reductio ad absurdum of the argument of the late Jane Jacobs’s 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs argued that the lifeblood of her then-threatened neighborhood, the Village, was the shopkeepers and homeowners and stoop-sitters who watched the sidewalks and parks for free. Under City Planning commissioner Amanda Burden, neighborhoods are being contextually zoned to preserve their “special character.”
Jacobs’s vision was lovely but limited, with little room for new buildings, new neighborhoods. Rereading her arguments, one develops a sneaking admiration for the size of Moses’s thoughts. For the city to grow, it needed major change. Under Bloomberg, big thinking is happening again. What we have is a—some would say unholy—alliance of Bob and Jane. Exaltation of the neighborhood, coupled with the idea of building new ones from scratch. The Bloomberg administration still lags in taste at times. Why does every economic-development initiative have to be as big as possible? (Note to gadflies: Many of these projects are not yet set in stone. If you hate it, you can still change it. Start your blog now. But also start imagining an alternative—preferably in PowerPoint.)

The article's snarky generalization about gadflies ignores that critics and opponents of the Atlantic Yards project long ago convened a community charrette and devised the UNITY plan, a mid-rise effort at developing the railyards.

Atlantic Yards

One segment of the article is headlined Downtown Brooklyn in 2016: Brooklyn (like it or not) will get a shimmering Frank Gehry Crown. It begins:
What’s in a name? In projecting the future of the intersection of Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth Avenues, what you call the area means a lot. Call it Atlantic Yards, as developer Forest City Ratner does, and you see a march—or perhaps a fashion show—of sixteen towers in glass, metal, and brick marching down Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, supplanting Grand Army Plaza’s arch as the gateway to the 21st-century borough. This name pulls Downtown Brooklyn to the heart of the brownstone belt, attracting tenants who want to look at, but not necessarily touch, the old Brooklyn at their feet.
“We don’t want to build tall for the sake of tall,” says Forest City Ratner spokesman Jim Stuckey. “Frank’s view—and this is shared by many architects and planners—is that this intersection should be more dense because of its proximity to the rail yards and public transportation. Frank Gehry can frame the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower”—the current tallest, at 512 feet, compared with the 620 feet of Gehry’s main tower, Miss Brooklyn—“and make it a postcard with other buildings around it.”

Well, at least the article acknowledges that Forest City Ratner wants to extend the boundaries of Downtown Brooklyn, rather than build within what is currently considered Downtown Brooklyn. Also, Stuckey shouldn't be allowed to utter his mantra about the need for density near public transportation without an actual assessment of how dense the project would be.

Good and bad

The article offers a summary:
The good things about the Atlantic Yards are the Nets and the promise of 15,000 union construction jobs, contracts for minority and women-owned businesses, 2,250 affordable rentals, and a day-care and senior center. The bad thing is the shocking size. “The challenge will be traffic management,” says Alper. “There’s already not great traffic in downtown Brooklyn.” Possible solutions focus on incentivizing use of the area’s abundant public transportation to get to games: congestion pricing on streets and in parking garages, ticket prices linked to transport mode, and residential-parking permits for adjacent areas.

All those good things should be assessed in context: do the public expenditures and public costs justify them? And if Andrew Alper, the outgoing head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, is acknowledging that traffic is a problem, then that really must be the consensus.

Costs and benefits

The article continues:
Opponents have been dissed, by Gehry himself, as both Luddites afraid of progress and as middle-class gentrifiers unsympathetic to the need for local jobs.

Again, both those statements deserve rebuttal. It's a battle between different versions of development, not stasis versus progress. And the number of local jobs is quite low compared to the size of the project and the public investment.

New York mag's alternative

The article offers an intriguing alternative:
But there could be a kinder, gentler, Brooklynized version of the titanium town, one which contains all the positive elements of Atlantic Yards but one with a little more of the local and cultural flavor of the BAM Cultural District next door. “We’re an important amenity for these other projects,” says BAM LDC president Jeanne Lutfy.
The tallest building in this scheme would remain the bank tower, now rebranded One Hanson Place, with a Borders bookstore in the landmarked lobby. Three Gehry towers, including a shorter Miss Brooklyn (and one with a better tiara), step down from that height on both sides of Flatbush, for that postcard view with plenty of room for offices and a hotel. Another tower, residential above arts spaces, is built on the BAM LDC’s north site. Beyond this, everything gets lower. No more 300- and 400-foot slabs surrounding a park, but an actual streetfront park, faced by blocks of new townhouses, shorter apartment buildings, and maybe even a school. To make sure Ratner makes his money back, apartment buildings of fifteen to twenty stories could be built opposite the taller structures on Atlantic.
The Nets will still play, but the new neighborhood is not built around a carpetbagger mix of sports bars, back-office white-collar jobs, and condo owners priced out of Manhattan. It is not Gehryville, but more of what people bought in Brooklyn for.

Very interesting, but how exactly could it preserve all the "positive elements"? (And what's the justification for eminent domain?) A smaller project would necessarily include fewer residential units, and likely fewer affordable units, and obviously would involve fewer construction jobs. As for making "sure Ratner makes his money back," well, that would require a discussion of the pro forma projections the developer has refused to make public. Could it be that the developer--any developer--could in fact make a good profit on a significantly-reduced project?

The conversation about the appropriate scale for this development--and any development at the railyards--should continue.

Gehry incidental?

A summary description of several buildings, including a projected theater by Gehry and library by Enrique Norten, ends with this description of Atlantic Yards:
When Bruce Ratner announced in 2004 that he had bought the New Jersey Nets, and hired Frank Gehry to build them a new stadium in Brooklyn, it caused some cognitive dissonance. Ratner’s previous Brooklyn developments had been the deserted-feeling MetroTech downtown, and the actively unpleasant Atlantic Center Mall. But this time, he said, he was going to do it right, give Brooklyn a team, give the borough a skyline, bring in the stars. As soon as the neighbors saw the plan—8.2 million square feet, then 9.2, now 8.7 again—with sixteen towers from 180 to 620 feet, the fighting began. Gehry seems almost incidental in this battle about what makes Brooklyn Brooklyn.

Well, it's an arena, not a stadium. But Gehry is hardly incidental. Without a marquee architect, Ratner would have more trouble winning public support for the project. And Gehry has been a selling point in the developer's p.r.

Transportation wizardry?

Finally, a segment in the article headlined Air and Sea: How you'll be traveling in a decade or so, describes new roles for river taxis and for trams. The segment is short; no new solution is presented for the intersection at Atlantic and Flatbush.

Does Gehry have a stake in the Atlantic Yards development?

In the Spring 2006 issue of the Urban Design Review, published by the Forum for Urban Design, journalist and critic Alex Marshall offers a toughminded review of Deyan Sudjic's The Edifice Complex, then interviews the London-based Sudjic about, among other things, Frank Gehry. And Sudjic raises an issue that might help explain Gehry's commitment to the Atlantic Yards project.

AM: As you say, “There can never have been a moment when quite so much high-visibility architecture has been designed by so few people.” Does this alter the relationship between architects and the powerful? Who has more power: Frank Gehry, or the beleaguered City Council of an aspiring Bilbao?

DS: I understand that Gehry now has the power to name his price. He’s now using his position—and the sense that his signature can transform the prospects of a commercial development—to actually take points in the development, which is fascinating.

Now Sudjic was not talking directly about the Atlantic Yards project, the biggest project Gehry ever designed. Does Gehry's enthusiasm for the project extend beyond the opportunity to design his first arena, or a "neighborhood from scratch," as he erroneously said? Does he have a financial stake in the deal beyond his typical fee? We don't know, since it hasn't been discussed publicly, but the question's worth asking, especially given Gehry's assiduous support for the project.

Creative freedom?

AM: Beyond the commercial, does Gehry have the opportunity to take more creative freedom? Is he less hemmed in by the imbalance of power your book describes?

DS: I think Gehry is a very sophisticated architect. He has managed to resist the temptations and seductions that tend to be the downfall of many architects who begin to believe their own myth. In the end, architecture is based on the belief that the architect can invent a whole world. I think it’s important to understand the limitations of that. There’s a constant ambiguity between the architect who sees himself as being the form-giver, the inventor of systems, and the reality, which is rather less elevated. It’s always a nuanced relationship, and successful architects are ones who understand their limitations and create ways to manipulate the situation to their advantage.

The imbalance of power regards the client. In this case, Gehry has obviously been given some reign to follow his muse; that's why he calls the largest tower, Miss Brooklyn, "my ego trip." He has praised Forest City Ratner for being "very fastidious in supporting the things that I think are important." Then again, he also has said that he wanted to bring in other architects to work with him, and that's been denied--perhaps because a Frank Gehry-designed apartment building would sell better than one designed by a lesser name.

An architecture critic (from Newark) looks at the bigger picture

So, in the third review of the new architectural plan for the Atlantic Yards project, after reviews in the Sun and Newsday (hey, where's the Times?), a critic finally looks at the bigger picture, not just the social forces behind the building battle but also whether it's worth it all. In an essay today under the cliched (and 16-towers avoiding) headline An arena grows in Brooklyn, Star-Ledger art/architecture critic Dan Bischoff notably opines that the community "givebacks... seem relatively paltry compared to the scale of the overall project."

Also, he acknowledges skepticism "about whether anything even remotely approaching these models will be built," given architect Frank Gehry's age and the typical fits and starts in an architectural project.

No, Bischoff doesn't try to assess the appropriate scale. He doesn't mention Forest City Ratner's sketchy architectural track record in Brooklyn. And he errs in describing the site as "just one of two or three large parcels of land within the core of New York City available for the kind of imaginative urban reconstruction that so many cities in Europe, China and India have used to modernize their cityscapes in the past two decades." Maybe the 8.3-acre railyard site would qualify, but the rest of the 22-acre site isn't so much available as assembled by a developer with deep pockets and the threat (and likely exercise) of eminent domain.

Still, he's notably not dazzled by Gehry.

It's about celebrity?

Bischoff begins:
Looking at the model for millionaire developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, a 17-building development designed around a state-of-the-art arena where the New Jersey Nets hope to move some time between 2010-16, you want to talk about modern architecture: You know, the massing of forms, the use of color, the cantilevered strusses in the arena's vast ceiling, maybe Frank Gehry's affection for cladding buildings with shiny metal surfaces--that sort of thing.
But somehow, it keeps coming out as a story about the uses of celebrity.
To begin with, there's Gehry himself, now 75, a gnomic, grey-haired, pleasantly self-effacing man (at least, that is how he is portrayed in the recently opened movie shot by film director Sydney Pollack, a long-time buddy of the architect, called "Sketches of Frank Gehry"). Gehry is one of those rarities, an architect who has become, by jingo, a celebrity in his own right, largely on the strength of his titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain....
Clearly, Ratner engaged Gehry for this project because he thought the architect's fame would smooth the way for the whole vast and long-troubled project, which faces determined neighborhood opposition.
But that opposition is itself not exactly celebrity-challenged. Part of the Atlantic Yards site abuts the indie movie studios where actor and director Steve Buscemi works, and he is unalterably opposed to the project. Also opposed is Museum of Modern Art photography curator Peter Galassi, who lives in the nabe, along with '80s painting star David Salle and movie stars Heath Ledger and Rosie Perez, who live there too. All of them decry the truly hulking size of the buildings, even in the new design unveiled this month, which shaves some 500,000 square feet off the total of last year's Gehry submission.

Bischoff makes a good point, echoing Kurt Andersen's observation that Bruce Ratner engaged Gehry to win over some of the chattering classes. Still, had Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn not assembled a celebrity-studded advisory board, would the valid criticisms being aired of this project just be ignored?

Only partly designed

Bischoff continues:
The core of Gehry's design -- and, as it happens, the only section of the tripartite design that he has yet to put a great deal of effort into -- is the arena section, at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, which Forest City Ratner Companies would like to open in 2010. Gehry proposes to solve the problem of the inevitable neighborhood-killing, forbidding blank curtain walls of an urban arena by essentially hiding the oval behind four high-rise buildings, the most spectacular of which he calls "Miss Brooklyn" because it reminds him of a Brooklyn bride trailing her elaborate train. It is a 650-foot-tall prow of glass and steel that opens at its point as a jagged, glass-encased "urban room," some four or five stories high, that would serve as a principal entrance to the arena. The narrowing wedge of sidewalk where the two avenues come together would be topped by a bleacher-sized set of stone steps that Gehry calls "the biggest stoop in all of Brooklyn."
The site is part of what's called the Atlantic railroad yards, the third largest mass transit hub in the city, where 10 subway lines and the Long Island Railroad come together. The land slopes rather steeply down toward Hudson Bay, and Gehry uses the grade to nestle the arena floor below the top level of the "stoop." That means passersby on the street could peer through the Post-Mod sheaths of glass on the outside of "Miss Brooklyn" to see the glow of the basketball court and its centrally-suspended scoreboard at eye-level, and presumably hear the roar of the crowd.

Bischoff makes a point that has seemed true since the project was unveiled in December 2003--Gehry has put the most work into the arena, the first arena he has ever designed.

The Atlantic railroad yards? Everyone has a problem with nomenclature. The hub is called Atlantic Terminal, the railyards are the Atlantic railyards or the Vanderbilt Yard, and the site as a whole has been dubbed Atlantic Yards by Forest City Ratner.

Questions of scale

After discussing the new Newark arena for the New Jersey Devils, Bischoff continues:
Gehry's plan, though, would trump the Newark arena with towering new construction, much of it residential -- something no arena has yet achieved (would you pay $1 million and up to live over the Meadowlands?)

He raises an important point--why exactly would people want to live so close to an arena? He might have acknowledged that the buildings around the planned Brooklyn arena were initially supposed to house offices, before Forest City Ratner traded office space for more lucrative housing.

Bischoff continues:
But that's just the start. If you include the other 13 high-rises proposed for the site, which stretches past four long urban blocks all the way to Vanderbilt Avenue, overall the project would generate 606,000 square feet of office space, 6.79 million square feet of residential space, 247,000 square feet of retail use and seven acres of open space cultivated by Bryant Park designer Laurie Olin. Taken altogether the project clocks in at $3.5 billion.
These secondary buildings would harbor the bulk of the project and march in a double line down the old rail lines toward the bay like plump and stately soldiers. Each would be 20 to 30 stories tall, and for now they are only sketched in by Gehry as square blocks stacked one upon another (with the occasional cube hanging over the one beneath or twisted slightly on its axis, like the way a child stacks his ABC blocks). Gehry also suggests a second iconic high-rise, taller than the rest, sheathed in shiny metal and subtly torqued to give interesting reflection patterns.

Only sketched in? Does Gehry really want to design the whole project, which is what (he says) he's been told to do?

Done deal?

Bischoff writes:
Ratner already controls 90 percent of the site. Momentum seems building toward an approval. There is little doubt that the site is just one of two or three large parcels of land within the core of New York City available for the kind of imaginative urban reconstruction that so many cities in Europe, China and India have used to modernize their cityscapes in the past two decades. New York does increasingly seem to be a quaint, 19th century environment of red brick tenements and '30s skyscrapers. It needs something bold to stay in the game.
But this design looks less like the new Shanghai than the old Eastern Europe, with its enormous high-rise blocks that bring a Le Corbusier geometric fantasy to mind. The givebacks to the community offered by Ratner's concept -- the outsized stoop, the "urban room" (closed four hours every day for clean-up only), 2,250 rental units priced at low- and moderate-income levels (out of 4,500 rentals, and not counting another 2,360 market-rate condos), promises to provide schools, day care, art galleries and health services sites, as well as reserving a sliver of seats in the arena for seniors and neighborhood folks at every Nets game -- seem relatively paltry compared to the scale of the overall project.

Well, his skepticism about the givebacks is welcome, but the environmental review remains in the early stages.

Getting "hairy"

Bischoff's final paragraphs:
Skepticism about whether anything even remotely approaching these models will be built can be forgiven, and not just because of the well-known divigations of the World Trade Center project. Gehry is, as we said, 75 years old -- they're making valedictory movies about him now -- and we can't be sure he will really be around to give his full attention to the completion of the design. Anyway, up to now he has proposed nothing that unifies the vast site, or that imaginatively reconfigures the neighborhood in a way that pleases all the different claimants to its use.
Part of the problem is Gehry's method. He rather famously proceeds in fits in starts, proposing designs, changing them, engaging his (usually) billionaire clients in the sturm und drang of artistic creation. It works great when you're focussed on the relationship between a single client and the architectural genius, but when the client is a thousand people, few of whom have ever wanted to live in an American suburb, it gets hairy. And we do remember the billion-dollar museum plan Gehry unveiled for the Guggenheim a few years back, slated for the East River just off the South Street Seaport. That'll never happen.
Celebrity is as celebrity does.

So, nothing unifies the site or reconfigures the neighborhood? The critic might have assessed the effect of the superblock, or whether the recently-modified view corridors in between buildings would increase site permeability. And he might have pointed out that "the client" is far more than a thousand people, given that the project could include more than 17,000 residents, some 2500 office workers, and a 20,000-seat arena--and some densely-populated nearby neighborhoods surely want a voice in the discussion.

Still, Bischoff's criticism raises a question: How "hairy" is it going to get?

Hakeem Jeffries: a tougher stand on Atlantic Yards?

Hakeem Jeffries, a candidate for the seat being vacated by Roger Green in the 57th Assembly District, placed a half-page ad in this week's Brooklyn Downtown Star, an "open letter in an attempt to continue the dialogue" about the Atlantic Yards project. Maybe he's been listening to constituents, maybe he needs to nudge closer to rival Bill Batson's anti-Atlantic Yards stance, or maybe he's just reframing his previous sentiments. (Click on the ad for a closer view.)

Affordable housing

Jeffries looks at Atlantic Yards in the same way Forest City Ratner officials have begun to frame it, mainly as a housing program, not--as originally billed--"Jobs, Housing, and Hoops." He wrote:
There is a housing crisis that is suffocating our neighborhoods. Without a signficant infusion of affordable housing, working families, the middle class and senior citizens will continue to be pushed out of Central Brooklyn. The Atlantic Yards project does have the potential to help alleviate our housing crisis by setting a high standard for the inclusion of affordable apartment units here and in future development.
(Emphasis in the original)

There is a strong argument for the inclusion of affordable housing in projects that get tax breaks, as this one would, and especially at projects, like this one, using public subsidies and on public land. And numerous new developments in the area in and around Downtown Brooklyn are getting tax breaks without including affordable housing.

However, anyone who claims that this project sets a standard must acknowledge that the scale of the project and the provision of affordable housing have been privately negotiated, outside any public review process. By contrast, inclusionary zoning, which provides a zoning bonus for projects that include affordable housing, has emerged as a City Council-approved policy in several neighborhoods.

Jeffries expressed three specific concerns.

Eminent domain

Jeffries stated:
I do not support the use of eminent domain by a private developer to build a basketball arena.
(Emphasis in the original)

Does this mean that Jeffries opposes the project in its present configuration and would like to see the arena dropped from the project? Or does it mean, as he said upon announcing his candidacy, that the arena (as reported by the Courier-Life chain) may be necessary?
“If it’s necessary to create the jobs and housing, then I think we have to take a hard look at the arena,” said Jeffries.

The arena, of course, is not necessary to create the jobs and housing; it's there to gain political and public support. The profit to the developer would come mainly from the market-rate housing: 2360 condos and 2250 rentals, not to mention solid revenue from the 2250 affordable rentals.

Excessive density

Jeffries stated:
The proposed project is too dense and would dramatically change the character of the tree-lined residential neighborhoods that it borders. It is important that the developer present a comprehensive plan to mitigate the potentially adverse impact that massive construction will have on our community's social infrastructure and public services.... The commercial office towers are inconsistent with the residential nature of the surrounding communities and a persuasive case has not been made on behalf of the need for additional office space.
(Emphasis in the original)

The above statement isn't fully coherent. If the project is too dense, then what might be the appropriate density? Does Jeffries support Assemblyman Jim Brennan's plan to reduce the project by more than one-third--which has also been endorsed by Roger Green? Does Jeffries support further cuts?

As for a comprehensive mitigation plan regarding construction impacts and public services, that's the job of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which is expected within weeks from the Empire State Development Corporation.

As for commercial office space, note that the originally announced amount, at about 2 million square feet, has been cut by more than two-thirds. That likely means that two buildings, at most, would contain office space. Even if they were converted to residential space, would Jeffries support 16 high-rise residential buildings?

Bypassing ULURP

Jeffries stated:
I am troubled that this project has bypassed the city's invaluable Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) as a result of a mayoral decree. Moving forward, it is important that there is an open process and active public participation at every step, so that whatever is ultimately built is consistent with the neighborhood's values and aspiration.
(Emphasis in the original)

What exactly does he mean? Shouldn't he define "open process and active public participation"? For example, does he believe Forest City Ratner should answer questions in open public forums?

Looking to a compromise

Jeffries stated:
As your elected representative, I will work day and night to bring about a principled resolution that both alleviates the affordable housing crisis and addresses the serious concerns raised in opposition to this project.

Borough President Marty Markowitz has already stated of the project: "It has to be that big, for the affordable housing."

However, as long as Forest City Ratner won't reveal the required pro forma statement, we have no idea of their expected revenues. And the announced number of affordable housing units would not solve the affordable housing crisis. Yes, the percentage of affordable housing units should be a significant fraction of what gets built at the site, but the larger question of affordable housing must be addressed through such things as reform of the 421-a program of tax breaks.

Revising his stance?

Jeffries said last month: "There has been progress made by the developer and I am very encouraged by the affordable housing component of the project, but there are some additional steps that need to be taken by the developer before I’m prepared to come on board and support the project.”

Does this new ad mean that Jeffries is stepping back from his announced expectation that, given some additional steps, he could support the project? Or is he just rephrasing his previous stance? It's unclear.

The Hamilton factor

Another reason for the Jeffries' stance may be an effort to distinguish himself from the third candidate in the race, 57th Democratic District Leader Freddie Hamilton, who unequivocally supports the Atlantic Yards project. A friend of Roger Green, she also was a signatory to the controversial Community Benefits Agreement for the Atlantic Yards project.

In an article in the Courier-Life chain headlined District Leader Says She’ll Challenge For Green’s Seat, Hamilton said affordable housing was a priority, but didn't offer specific policy prescriptions. The article summarized her take:
This includes bringing together housing experts to help think through innovative ways to meet the housing needs for special populations such as seniors, young adults and very low-income families, she said.

Hamilton, who lost a son to gun violence in 1993, also said she would push for stronger laws against firearms trafficking. She was the lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action suit against gun companies, 15 of which were found liable for negligent marketing and distribution of their firearms.

Extreme density: Atlantic Yards plan would dwarf Battery Park City, other projects

How big should the Atlantic Yards project be (or, for that matter, any project over the railyards)? If you compare AY to other major developments around the city, it would include more than twice as many apartments per acre than at Stuyvesant Town and Battery Park City, and thus a much more dense population--one that would surpass the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side.

As of now, the 16 towers and arena would encompass 8.66 million square feet, according to the Final Scope. This represents about a 5 percent scaleback from the version described last year, but still about a 6 percent increase from the plan that was announced in December 2003.

The proposal by Assemblyman Jim Brennan to shrink the project by 3 million square feet represents the most serious effort by elected officials to assess the appropriate scale. (Note that Borough President Marty Markowitz has long said the project should shrink, but has been unwilling to comment on whether the recent scaleback was sufficient.)

Looking at zoning

Another way to look at density is zoning. Forest City Ratner executive Jim Stuckey likes to say that taller buildings were approved in the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning, even though this project would not be located in Downtown Brooklyn (despite Forest City Ratner's effort to claim it so), and that no rezoning has been approved for this project.

Architect Jonathan Cohn, on his Brooklyn Views blog, recently drew on the rezoning effort and projected a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of 6:
An FAR of 6, on an existing site of 825,320 sf (not counting the streets, to make the FAR measure relative to other sites) would result in a total building size of 4,951,920 sf. Don’t provide venue parking, don’t close the streets, provide for intermodal connections, and with significantly reduced infrastructure costs, building under 5 million square feet would be doing the right thing for Brooklyn

Brennan: seven times Manhattan's density

Brennan didn't testify at the public hearing held last October by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) on the scope of the environmental review, but he did send to the agency a powerful letter, which got virtually no attention, about the scale of the plan. He wrote:
The current Project Description describes a 22-acre site of 9.132 million gross square feet, developed with a mix of residential and commercial uses:
of the total site area, less than 10% (850,000 gross square feet) is to be devoted to the Nets professional basketball team arena; 7.2 million gross square feet is to be occupied by 7,300 residential units; approximately 1 million gross square feet is to be devoted to commercial, retail and hotel uses.
In short, the Project Description envisions a virtual new city within the confines of the 22-acre site. This correlates to a density of 500,000 people per square mile, seven times the density of the population of Manhattan.
(Emphasis added)

Brennan continued by calling for consideration of proposals to reduce the scale and density of the project by 50% or more--an even greater cut than the reduction he recently proposed.

Given the recent 5 percent scaleback, Brennan's numbers would change slightly. Still, the proposed density remains striking. Currently, 6860 apartments are planned for the Atlantic Yards project. At a conservative figure of 2.5 people per apartment, the project would house 17,150 residents, or nearly 780 people per acre. There are 640 acres per square mile, so that would represent about 499,000 people per square mile.

The Lower East Side, at its peak in 1910, housed 375,000 people per square mile. (Of course, the buildings were mostly walk-up tenements, packed together.)

More dense than other projects

Would Atlantic Yards be more dense than other major developments? Yes, especially in terms of apartments per acre. By way of comparison, Battery Park City includes 9000 apartments over 92 acres, going up to 14,000 apartments at full buildout.Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town is comprised of 11,250 apartments spread among 110 buildings over 80 acres. In the Bronx, Co-op City (right) contains 15,372 units in 35 high-rise buildings and 7 townhouse clusters, over 300 acres. In Brooklyn, Spring Creek, also known as Starrett at Spring Creek, contains 5881 apartments over 153 acres. In Queens, Lefrak City has 5000 apartments over 40 acres.

Caveats and comparisons

Note that these comparisons are preliminary and inexact--a starting point for discussion rather than a conclusion. I'm using an average of 2.5 people per apartment at Atlantic Yards, though the population per apartment at some other sites is higher. (And the population at Atlantic Yards could be even higher.) On the other hand, Atlantic Yards would have a larger percentage of non-residential space; all these complexes include retail, but Battery Park City is the only other one, I believe, that includes an office component.

There's a case that any project built near Brooklyn's transit hub could be more dense than those built elsewhere. On the other hand, Battery Park City contains a network of streets; the master plan designates 19 percent of the site as streets and avenues. There was a distinct effort to avoid creating superblocks. With the Atlantic Yards project, it's unclear whether any streets are included as part of the 22-acre site. Moreover, the demapping of Pacific Street at the east end of the project, and of Pacific Street and Fifth Avenue at the west end would create superblocks.

Comparing the projects

Project Name	Number of Apts.	Acres	Apts. per Acre
PC Village/Stuy Town	11,250	80	140.6
Battery Park City now	9000	92	97.8
Battery Park City later	14,000	92	152.2
Starrett at Spring Creek	5881	153	38.4
Co-op City	15,372	300	51.2
Lefrak City	5000	40	125

Atlantic Yards variations

Note how the Atlantic Yards plan has evolved. As the projected population has grown significantly, thanks to a shift of office space to residential space, the residential density has grown significantly, much more than the square footage.

I've also included the Extell plan for building just over the railyards, which is also quite dense, compared to other projects. And because the apartment sizes are larger in the Extell plan, it could create a larger population per apartment than in the Atlantic Yards plan; on the other hand, the Extell proposal would not involve an arena and the taking of city streets.

Project Name	Number of Apts.	Acres	Apts. per Acre
Atlantic Yards 12/03	4500	21	214.3
Atlantic Yards 7/05	7300	22	331.8
Atlantic Yards 5/06	6860	22	311.8
Extell	1940	8.3	233.7

Another variation

I also tried to calculate the density of the Atlantic Yards plan without the arena. This is somewhat arbitrary, since it's not clear exactly how much the four buildings around the arena would overlap the arena footprint. But subtracting two acres for the arena (though not subtracting the hotel/office/retail space), the number of apartments per acre would grow even more.

Project Name	Number of Apts.	Acres	Apts. per Acre
Atlantic Yards 12/03	4500	19	236.8
Atlantic Yards 7/05	7300	20	365
Atlantic Yards 5/06	6860	20	343

With some reductions

What would the density be under the cuts Brennan and Cohn have proposed? Take the Brennan plan, at 5.85 million square feet, and subtract 850,000 square feet for the arena, leaving 5 million square feet for housing, offices, hotel, retail. Assume a 20 percent cut in office, retail, and hotel space. (Office space would go from 606,000 to 484,800 square feet, retail space from 247,000 to 197,600 square feet, and hotel space from 165,000 to 132,000 square feet, for a total of 814,400 square feet.) That would leave 4,185,600 square feet for housing, or 4186 apartments.

Cohn's suggested cut would leave the project at 5 million square feet. Subtracting 850,000 square feet for the arena and 814,400 square feet for office/retail/hotel space, that would leave 3,335,600 square feet for housing, or 3336 units. The ratio of 151.6 units per acre would be close to that of Battery Park City after its full buildout. However, if you subtracted two acres for the arena and considered the project over 20 acres, the density would go up.

Scaleback plan	Number of Apts.	Acres	Apts. per Acre
Brennan plan	4186	22	190.3
Cohn reduction	3336	22	151.6
Scaleback plan #2	Number of Apts.	Acres	Apts. per Acre
Brennan plan	4186	20	209.3
Cohn reduction	3336	20	166.8

Further considerations & open space

All these numbers deserve further discussion and debate, especially since the size of the apartments at these projects helps determine the total population. (At right, Spring Creek, formerly Starrett City.) But consider this. State standards call for 2.5 acres of open space for every 1,000 residents, which is an ideal infrequently met, while the city average is 1.5 acre per 1,000 residents. The projected 17,150 new residents at the Atlantic Yards project, to meet the state standard, would deserve nearly 43 acres of open space. To meet the city average, they'd need nearly 26 acres of open space.

The current plan would include seven acres of "publicly accessible open space that everyone can enjoy," according to the Atlantic Yards web site. Given the enormous potential population and the relatively limited amount of open space planned, would that space more likely serve Brooklyn or be overwhelmed by the immediate residents?

Even at the scaledown example with 3336 apartments, the open space would be too little. Multiply the number of apartments by 2.5 people (again, a conservative example), and that's 8340 people. State standards would require nearly 21 acres of open space. To meet the city average, they'd need 12.5 acres. Again, the project would include seven acres of open space.

On "Brian Lehrer Live": a summary

I'll provide a summary but not a transcript of my appearance last night on Brian Lehrer Live; however, it will be rebroadcast on Channel 75 on Saturday, 10 a.m. and Sunday, 11 p.m. (time approximate following movie), and an archived videostream is available. Both Forest City Ratner and Borough President Marty Markowitz were invited to send representatives and declined, in part for logistical reasons, said Lehrer.

The topic was Forest City Ratner's deceptive brochure, and then the subsequent release of Frank Gehry's new renderings of the project. Lehrer introduced me as a "leading opponent" of the plan. I corrected him to say I consider myself a critic and analyst, since "the criticism that I come to is really grounded in facts." I'm not a member of any of the opposition groups, and while my skeptical take is far closer to that of the project opponents than project supporters, they don't speak for me. While my platform makes me a "blogger," I'm a journalist.

"This should really be treated as a campaign commercial," I said. Lehrer agreed that the term "political advertising... seems right to me," given that the company is not directly selling anything. So I, with his help, went through some of the images in the brochure, taking a close look, just as newspapers have begun to analyze and criticize political advertising. After looking at a stock photo of some happy people, I pointed out that, while the brochure does contain some information, it neglects to tell us, for example, about Forest City Ratner's plan for interim surface parking on two large blocks in the eastern portion of the site.

Lehrer pointed to a fisheye photo of the railyards, over a vertical view of the site plan, in which the 16 towers are outlined in red. I noted that a green fuzzy section is the projected arena location. Lehrer, channeling the average recipient of the brochure, declared, "That's a basketball arena, it looks more like a forest."

Community Benefits

We looked at the "guaranteed" seal promising community benefits. I pointed out that Forest City Ratner seems to have put aside its old slogan "Jobs, Housing, and Hoops," likely because the estimate of permanent office jobs has been cut from 10,000 to 2500. I noted that the concept of a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) is legitimate, and becoming more common, but that the Brooklyn CBA has some distinct differences with the ones signed in Los Angeles. The latter involve coalitions of 20 to 30 groups; in Brooklyn, it's eight groups. (I didn't have time to add that several have no track record in the issues they're supposed to monitor.)

And I pointed out that the strongest criticism didn't come from me, but from the head of the Community Board in West Harlem, which is negotiating a CBA with Columbia University; he said that they don't want to copy the Brooklyn model. (I didn't cite the source, which was the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate.)

What's missing


Lehrer pointed to images not in the brochure: the renderings of the 16-tower project from July 2005 (left) and May 2006. "It's really dense," he said. I pointed out that I'm working on a rough comparison: the Atlantic Yards project would be almost 7000 apartments over 22 acres; doubled, that would be 14,000 units over 44 acres. Battery Park City, at full buildout, will be 14,000 apartments over 92 acres. That makes Atlantic Yards twice as dense. It's more complicated than that, since each project has other buildings, but it's a striking contrast.

Commenting on Frank Gehry's 2005 design, Lehrer pointed to the tilted buildings, and called one "The leaning tower of Prospect Heights." I noted that the project had gone down five percent from the previous iteration, but was still bigger than the announced plan in December 2003, and that the New York Observer had called the recent scaleback "token" changes.

Miss Brooklyn

We took a look at the central tower, which Gehry has dubbed "Miss Brooklyn." I noted that Gehry has said he was inspired both by a Brooklyn wedding and also by the Brooklyn Bridge. "I'd like to hear him explain it a bit more," I said. "Do you see Brooklyn Bridge?" This is where a representative of the architect or the developer would have been helpful.

Lehrer read a quote from Gehry, who said of project opponents: "They should've been picketing Henry Ford." I said that it's distressing that Gehry's polarizing things, since he himself has said the project is "out of scale" and that it's "coming way back." Obviously, I said, he recognizes that the scale is an issue, but he has constraints and must work for a client.

Lehrer showed an image from OnNYTurf, in which Will James has tried to show--using a previous iteration of the plan--what the towers would look like from the neighborhood. I pointed out that Forest City Ratner has in fact released renderings with neighborhood views, but they downplay the towers.

What say to supporters

In a final question, Lehrer said that people support the project because of jobs and affordable housing, and asked how I'd respond to people who say those in Brownstone Brooklyn critical of the plan are privileged and elite. I pointed out that, essentially this is a luxury housing project, with nearly 2400 market-rate condos, probably at $1 million each, and 2250 market-rate rentals, along with 2250 affordable rentals.

I said it's not my role to debate supporters so much as to discuss how we frame the issues. At a cost of $3.5 billion, with over $1 billion in public investment (including subsidies and public costs), it's kind of a backward way to create jobs. (I inaccurately mentioned "3900 new jobs." Actually, Forest City Ratner cites 3740 new permanent jobs; by my calculation, including the temporary construction jobs, only 3090 jobs would be new.)

As for affordable housing, there's certainly a case for both density and affordable housing at the railyard site, I said, but we could build a lot more affordable housing if we reformed the city's 421-a subsidy program, which last year cost the city $320 million.

I didn't have time to connect the dots: affordable housing seems to be used as the justification for building something out of scale with zoning and the surrounding neighborhood. In other areas of the city, the inclusion of affordable housing allows developers to build bigger, but that's part of a publicly-negotiated zoning bonus. But there's been no rezoning for the Atlantic Yards project, so the deal between Forest City Ratner and ACORN is essentially a privately-negotiated zoning bonus, with no oversight.

The ATURA mystery: why doesn't it overlap with AY footprint?

As I've written, part of the proposed Atlantic Yards footprint sits within the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA), and part does not. (ATURA is in red, the footprint is in blue, and the overlap is both.) But if the southern blocks of the footprint, between Pacific and Dean streets, were important for the city's redevelopment plans, why did the city never add them to ATURA? The failure to do so, said Allison Lirish Dean, a Hunter College graduate student in urban planning, suggests "striking asymmetries" between city redevelopment/land use policies and Forest City Ratner's project.

Dean and fellow students in the Hunter College master's degree program, under the leadership of Tom Angotti, are analyzing the Atlantic Yards plan on behalf of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB). DDDB will use the analysis in comments and challenges to the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) environmental review process. The student team presented a preliminary version of their findings at a session Monday night. A written report is due next month.

ATURA was launched in 1968, and has gone through ten amendments. The boundaries have only changed once. Angotti pointed out that there was a rezoning on Pacific Street, to promote residential development at the old Daily News printing plant, now the Newswalk condos. "Implicit in the rezoning was the anticipation that it would promote residential development. If the city thought it not enough," he said, "the next step would be to include [the block] in ATURA."

Blight and beyond

Is the area blighted? That's the claim that the state is expected to employ to justify the use of eminent domain to acquire remaining properties in the footprint. But again, if the city wanted powerful tools to fight blight, the failure to extend the boundaries of ATURA raises questions. "There are no hard and fast rules to defining blight," Angotti added, noting that the ESDC plans a study of blight in the footprint as part of its review of the project. "They'll assign it to a junior staffer, he'll cook it up and it will pass muster."

Dean also noted how the language of the ATURA plan shifted. From 1968 through 1975, the plan stated that the housing "shall" be for low- and moderate-income residents; in 1982, it was amended to say that the housing "may" be such a population. By 1997, the shift was complete, to provide "new housing," and, rather than retain businesses, to "strengthen the tax base."

"Everyone is skittish"

Dean also added a piece of hearsay that must have encouraged some of the Atlantic Yards opponents in the room. A former staffer for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which supports the Atlantic Yards project, told her that "everyone is very skittish" about the plan. Similarly, I was recently told that, at a recent public meeting a staffer from the Brooklyn Borough President's office said, "At Borough Hall, we give it a 50-50 chance."

Given the controversy surrounding the project, some skittishness and doubt from official circles is not surprising. What's surprising is hearing it articulated.

I'll be on Brian Lehrer Live show tonight

Tonight I will on Brian Lehrer Live: Front Page, his live, hour-long weekly television program on CUNY TV. Time: 7:30 pm. Topic: Atlantic Yards. Will there be another guest, from Forest City Ratner? Unclear, but when I find out I'll update this.

The program will be repeated (Thursday morning, 2 a.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.; Sunday, 11 p.m.) and also available on streaming video.

HPD head mildly criticizes 421-a subsidies, defends "targeted eminent domain"

On the Real Deal Weekly Interview podcast this week, the real estate magazine talks to Shaun Donovan, commissioner of the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the nation's largest municipal developer of affordable housing. My transcript is below, but first, a few comments.

Mild criticism of subsidies

Perhaps it was because he was talking to a magazine catering to the real estate industry, but Donovan offered rather mild criticism of the 421-a tax incentive program, which provides a 10- to-15-year exemption from real estate taxes and only requires affordable housing with projects built in the "exclusion zone," mainly Manhattan between 14th Street and 96th Street.

In recent months, the 421-a program has been blasted in a report by ACORN, which blames the program for the plethora of market-rate development in Downtown Brooklyn and environs. In another report, the Pratt Center for Community Development and Habitat For Humanity-NYC charged that "421-a is subsidizing luxury housing in upscale neighborhoods, at a huge financial cost to the City. The program – which cost the City $320 million this year – is creating few of the affordable homes that average New Yorkers desperately need."

A citywide task force is studying the reform of 421-a, with a report expected by the fall. Donovan predicted reform in areas where the market is strong, to spur more affordable housing, but cited only Lower Manhattan, leaving open questions about reform in Brooklyn. Calling the program "a critical component," he emphatically declared that it would be sustained.

Harsher words from the Comptroller

Just yesterday Comptroller William C. Thompson released a report criticizing 421-a, suggesting that it "may have outlived its usefulness, as Manhattan luxury developers and apartment purchasers have reaped the bulk of the program’s benefits." The analysis "shows that most of the benefits have subsidized some of the most expensive housing in the City," Thompson said, with relatively little affordable housing financed compared with the value of the exemptions that have been taken.

The policy brief points out that, in 2005, Manhattan--home of the highest-priced real esteate--had 48% of the 421-a units by 78% of the exemption, in terms of total value. Subsidies are not capped, so at Trump World Tower, per-unit savings ranged as high as $160,000.

Even within the 421-a program, the developments that did produce affordable housing received subsidies of $50,000 per unit in 2005, or more than $520,000 per unit over the remaining years in the 421-a program. Thompson's report suggests further research on whether to extend the exclusion zone and whether to require more affordable housing, among other issues.

Targeted eminent domain?

Interestingly, Donovan brought up the imporance of using "eminent domain in a very targeted way in that community [Melrose Commons in the Bronx] to help revive it." He added that, in response to the Supreme Court's Kelo decision, Congress is considering legislation "that would limit our ability to use eminent domain for affordable housing and other economic development priorities. So we’re very concerned that the backlash from this may end up hurting New York and other cities in our efforts to revive struggling communities."

In this case, Donovan, seems to be conflating eminent domain used for affordable housing and eminent domain used for economic development. The former is much more clearly "public use," which would justify it constitutionally. The New York State Association for Affordable Housing points out that some projects include both affordable housing and other elements. But there's a big difference between Atlantic Yards, which would have a significant number of affordable units but remain mostly market-rate housing, and Melrose Commons, which includes "extensive affordable housing along with some commercial and non-profit uses."

Bloomberg, in a major speech, has conflated the two. A 5/3/06 New York Sun article headlined Mayor Ups the Ante On Eminent Domain, noted that Bloomberg has been distributing "a wallet card of priorities, including "Eminent Domain - Oppose legislation that would cripple affordable housing and responsible re-development (like Times Square)." But Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) offered a distinction: "If you're going to built a road or a highway or a subway for public purpose, but I do not support it for a private developer for a private purpose."

A 5/3/06 New York Times article, headlined Bloomberg Says Power to Seize Private Land Is Vital to Cities, reported:
"You would never build any big thing any place in any big city in this country if you didn't have the power of eminent domain," Mr. Bloomberg said, speaking at a ground-breaking ceremony in Times Square, which was redeveloped in part through government condemnation of private property. "You wouldn't have a job, neither would anybody else standing here today. None of us would."

The Times report allowed affordable housing to be cast under the rubric of economic development:
To the Bloomberg administration, however, the wheels of economic development would grind to a halt without the use of eminent domain. Low-cost housing developments like the Nehemiah homes in East New York, Brooklyn, and Melrose Commons in the Bronx would not have been built and Times Square would remain "the poster child for a seedy, dangerous, unattractive, porno-laced place," Mr. Bloomberg said.

The interview transcript

Q. Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to build and preserve 165,000 homes in the city over the next ten years. How likely is this to happen, to reach that goal?

A. First of all, I would say, it’s a very aggressive plan, in fact it’s the largest municipal housing plan in the nation’s history. And it follows—early in his first term, the mayor announced a plan to build or preserve 65,000 units and, in fact, we were making such good progress on that and, frankly, the real estate market in New York as you know has been so strong that, if anything, affordability is a growing challenge that we face. So that’s why he expanded the plan dramatically to 165,000 units. It is an ambitious goal, but I feel pretty confident that, with the support of the mayor and the real estate community in New York , we are going to achieve it. Last year, we were able to start on over 18,000 units. And so, if you do the math, if we keep up that pace, we’ll make it to our 165,000 unit goal.

Q: Where were these 18,000 units going?

A: All over the city. One thing we try to do is make sure that every community in New York City has affordable housing. The primary areas where we’ve focused. We’ve done a lot of units in Harlem, in Manhattan. We’ve done a lot of units in Brooklyn. We’re building right now on the waterfront in Brooklyn, as part of a major rezoning, Williamsburg and Greenpoint, but also in Downtown Brooklyn and other areas. We’re doing a lot of work in the Bronx as well. If you go to Melrose Commons, it’s a community that has just been completely transformed by the work we’ve done there, thousands of units of new housing. I might add, one of the things we’re real concerned about: we’ve used eminent domain in a very targeted way in that community to help revive it. In fact, what we’ve done is bring the housing market back to that community, with a jumpstart through our programs. And with some of the things being considered in Washington around eminent domain--it may kill our ability to do the kind of affordable housing projects like we’ve done all over the city.

Eminent domain

Q: What do you mean by that, if eminent domain were rolled back?

A: I don’t if all your listeners will know about this, but there was a Supreme Court decision last year in a Connecticut case called Kelo that affirmed the right of cities to use eminent domain. As a result of that, there are bills now being considered in Congress and Washington that would limit our ability to use eminent domain for affordable housing and other economic development priorities. So we’re very concerned that the backlash from this may end up hurting New York and other cities in our efforts to revive struggling communities.

Q: What would the city do if it didn’t have the power of eminent domain, to that degree?

A: The irony is, we’ve figured out over many, many years the ways to use public-private partnerships to create affordable housing. It’s evolved from what was originally a public housing model, where government owned and developed the housing, and then managed it, to these public-private partnerships. The irony of these changes is it might force us to go back to a model where the public sector replaces the private market, which is not something we want to do. That would really be our alternative under a lot of these proposals.

New financing

Q: Can you describe the financing that goes into this plan?

A: One of the advantages of being in New York is we have one of the most sophisticated real estate finance community in the world. And so, we work with hundreds of different private developers but also different kinds of financial institutions. All the biggest banks in the country are involved in the work that we do in New York City and finance the range of projects that we do. A lot of it is working with my agency, HPD, but we also have the largest, most successful, multifamily, tax-exempt or bond issuing agency, the Housing Development Corporation, located in New York City. Last year they did over a billion and a half dollars of bonds to support our affordable housing efforts. That’s more than the entire states of California, Texas, and a number of others combined. That’s one of the real weapons that we have on our side in the work that we do is a very sophisticated finance community and a very strong local housing finance agency in HDC.

Q: Do you have ever find it difficult to entice private developers into helping build affordable housing?

A: One of the centerpieces of the mayor’s New Housing Marketplace plan that you talked about earlier is, we really evolved—if you think about where New York was 20, 25 years ago--the big challenge was abandonment. If you went to the South Bronx, if you remember Howard Cosell during the 1977 World Series, declaring “The Bronx is burning.” The challenge then was abandonment, we were trying to stop the abandonment. Today, if you go back to those very streets that were burning in the 1970s, houses are now selling for $500,000 on Charlotte Street and in that area. The challenge has really changed from abandonment to affordability. Now we have to figure out how to meet the challenge of keeping prices down. People are coming to New York, crime is down, schools are getting better. People want to be in New York. Because the population is growing, because the demand is increasing, we have this affordability challenge. And that’s really what our focus is, in trying to work against that. So one of the ways that we’re doing that in this new plan is trying to harness the strength of that market, to benefit affordable housing. Let me give you an example. Greenpoint-Williamsburg, on the waterfront, we looked at that area, a two-mile strip of waterfront, with not a single active industrial company left, on the waterfront. We’ve rezoned it so we can create we think about 11,000 apartments in that area. What we did was to say to developers, you can build 100 percent market rate housing and we’ll let you build 30 stories. But if you’re willing to incorporate between 20 and 30 percent of your square footage as affordable, we’ll let you build up to 40 stories. So we’ve given them, using the strength of the market, we’ve given them a big extra incentive to create affordable housing as part of their projects because they also get to do extra market-rate units as well.

New incentives

Q: So the market rate units pay for the difference?

A: What they get--not only do they get the extra market-rate units, but they also get tax benefits and other incentives for doing the affordable housing. All together, if you put them all together that means if they build the affordable housing and they build the extra units, their returns are substantially better than they would be byy doing a 30-story purely market-rate tower. We think any rational developer looking at it will look at it and say, you know what, it makes sense to do the affordable housing. In fact, we’re going to break down on the first two projects on the waterfront this summer, and they are going to include the affordable housing.

Q: When are they supposed to be done?

A: Typically--these are going to be multiphase projects, it’s a lot of units. So the first phases will start construction this summer; we expect them to be done in about 18 months.

Quality in workmanship

Q: How would the city ensure the quality of the homes? The New York Post about a month ago, maybe longer, had a report about, some families won lotteries to buy city-subsidized homes. They were complaining about “leaky roofs, cracked foundations, second story back doors leading to nowhere.” Suppose the city will build some of these houses--how do you ensure the upkeep, after the fact? Is that going to be left to the developers who built them, the owners? Or will the city?

A: Obviously, if we’re building home ownership, a significant piece of what we do, that the homeowners will have responsibility for upkeep of the buildings. There are really two different issues that you’re talking about. The first is, quality design up front. And that has been--the projects you’re talking about I think were done 20-25 years ago, so obviously there’s wear and tear and other things that happen over time. Mayor Bloomberg has taken a real interest in raising the quality of both construction as well as design in all the work that we do. He has a design excellence initiative, which is focused both on city-constructed buildings, whether it’s libraries or community centers or other kinds of buildings. And we’ve won awards for those kind of projects.. But we’re also doing that where we’re working with the private sector as well. Just in the next couple of months, we’re going to kick off a program with the American Institute of Architects, located here in New York, to get some of the best architects in the world to come in and do some model projects for us. Overall, we really have raised the quality of the design of the work we’re doing all over the city.

A new acquisition fund

Q: Can you explain about the acquisition fund behind the mayor’s housing initiative?

A: You asked earlier about some of the financing we’re using to create some of these 165,000 units. One of the real challenges we have in today’s market is, back when abandonment was our challenge, the city started taking over lots of abandoned properties and vacant lots through tax foreclosure. At the height of it, believe it or not, my agency owned over 100,000 apartments around the city. We owned 60 percent of the real estate in Harlem, for example, and thousands of vacant lots all over the city. We’ve been so successful at creating housing, using those in rem properties, that we’re now down to under 2000 apartments left, and we’ve had our last competition for the vacant lots, over the last few months. So, the real challenge we have to figure out now is: how do we work to capture privately owned land for affordable housing? So one of the things we’ve done is to work with the biggest banks and financial institutions, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, and a whole range of others, to put together a $200 million fund, that will almost be like equity for affordable housing developers to use in acquiring sites. If they find a site available out in the market, they can come to this fund, quickly get the equity they need to purchase that site, and then put together the plan they need to finance the construction and other things. But if they can’t lock up that site early on in the process, they’re never going to be able to create that affordable housing.

Q: How many have tapped in?

A: We’ve raised $200 million, about 160 from the financial institutions that I talked about. What’s really making this work, in a way that’s going to make it successful for affordable housing developers, we’ve also raised more than $32 million from some of the biggest foundations in the country: Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and most importantly, the Starr Foundation has put in the largest contribution. All of that money is going to act as sort of an insurance policy and it’s going to allow us to make loans that aren’t available in the private market today. If you want to go to a traditional bank and raise money to buy a piece of land, you might get 50 cents on the dollar for the acquisition price. We can actually lend as much as a 100 percent or more of the acquisition price, using this fund, because we have this foundation money involved. So it’s a great resource--it’s really going to be a competitive advantage for developers that want to create affordable housing going forward. We’ve raised all the money, we’re on track to close late this month or early next month, and many of the lenders who expect to use this fund are already making acquisition loans in expectation of having this fund available for their use. It’s already beginning to have an impact in the market, and we’ll be closed next month.

Where it will be noticed

Q: Can you explain where some of those are, where this impact is going to be felt?

A: Just to give you a few examples, there’s pieces of land, in areas of the South Bronx, in East New York in Brooklyn, other neighborhoods where there’s still some vacant land is available, where developers have already acquired those parcels using loans that will be sold to this fund when it’s completed. So it’s already beginning to have an impact there. The other thing it’s doing is allowing developers to go in and purchase existing housing and keep it affordable using the fund. There are many buildings, whether they are rent stabilized, or maybe they’re Mitchell-Lamas, that have been protected for years, that are now under threat, because rents are rising all over the city, and there’s an increasing incentive for their owners to convert them to market rate.. What we’ve seen already is, using funding from this acquisition fund, developers are going out and purchasing these properties, to keep them affordable. So it’s an example where we really brought together cutting edge financial techniques, this really brings techniques that have been used in the most sophsiticated financial markets, Conduit and other lenders have used these kind of structured finance techniques, we’re using that, and bringing it to affordable housing, so that we can provide a competitive advantage for affordable housing developers in this strong market.

The future of 421-a

Q: Let’s turn to the 421-a tax incentive program. What is the future of 421-a right now?

A: 421-a is a program that’s going to be with us for a long time. It’s a program that started in the 1970s, has created over 100,000 units of housing. It’s an important piece of our overall efforts to make sure that we build as much housing to keep up with our growing population in New Yorl. So the 421-a program is going to continue. What the mayor announced recently was that we need to look at this program, in light of the way that the market has changed. This is one of the areas I talked earlier about: finding creative ways to harness the power of the real estate market to create affordable housing. When 421-a was created, there was almost no building in many parts of the market, and it was intended as a tool to jump-start the private market, building market-rate housing. And it’s worked. And so today--last year we had the highest number of housing starts that we’ve had in New York City since the 1970s, in over three decades. We really need to step back and take a look at the 421-a program and say: in certain areas, it’s no longer needed just to spur market-rate construction. So what we can do is to make some changes to the program so that we can maximize the amount of affordable housing that we’re getting through the use of the 421-a program, it’s a way of harnessing the strong market and directing that to creating affordable housing. We have a task force that started meeting in April. We’re going to make recommendations by the fall to the mayor and the city council. I think what you’ll see is we’ll make recommendations to harness the 421-a program, in areas where the market is strong, to create even more affordable housing.

Q: Can you speculate on what areas this might be?

A: Just to give you one example. Lower Manhattan has been one of the strongest areas in development the city has seen over the last few years, a huge growth in housing there. It’s an area where we think the market is probably strong enough to be able to sustain market-rate development without full 421-a benefits. That’s a perfect example of an area where we’ll be looking at potential changes.

Q: 421-a is not going to disappear?

A: Absolutely not. We think it’s a critical component of the overall set of tools that we have to create housing. Let’s be realistic here; New York City is growing. We’ve had a real success--the last thing we would want to do is, in the mist of a booming real estate market, to change the way that we do things in a way that would cut off that housing construction. So while we’ll make some changes, we don’t want to fundamentally undermine the strength of the construction boom that we have. We need those units to keep up with the growing population. If we cut off the real estate construction that we have, we’re only going to make our affordable housing problem worse, because demand will continue and supply will go down, and that’s a recipe for disaster.

Q: How closely is the task force working with private developers, real estate? I know there are some members on the task force itself, but are they getting input from the real estate community?

A: Absolutely, there’s been a lot of discussions within the real estate community. We have representatives from the Real Estate Board of New York on the task force, and I know they’ve been meeting extensively with their members. We have developers that are on the task force as well; we have representatives from affordable housing groups, so developers can specifically focus on affordable housing. We really did try to bring together the full range of the real estate community: for profit, nonprofit, government advocates, together with many city officials and the City Council. So we think we have great representation from across the board, and w’re certainly getting lots of ideas, which indicates to me that lots of different folks are weighing in.

Newsday critic: project would be west (?) of Atlantic/Flatbush intersection

In his 5/22/06 assessment of Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards project, headlined Time to catch the wave, Newsday critic Justin Davidson makes two basic factual errors. First, he describes the project as 16 buildings covering 21 acres. Actually, it's 17 buildings (16 towers + arena) covering 22 acres.

He makes a more fundamental error, writing:
The developer Bruce Ratner wants to import the New Jersey Nets and erect for them a majestic yet intimate arena on the arrowhead-shaped lot where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues cross. Stretching to the west would be a high-rise Xanadu of offices, apartments, stores and restaurants, turning a dingy-chic wedge of city into a bright new campus. (Emphasis added)

Now that error could have been averted had the critic spent a minimal amount of time reading the documents associated with the project or walking around the proposed footprint. If he can't get the basics right, how could we expect him to engage the broader issues?

Questions of scale

Davidson writes:
Gehry has not exactly endeared himself to the locals. His position is that his design represents inexorable progress, and opponents are, by definition, reactionary. "They should have been picketing Henry Ford," he scoffed at the news conference, which was another way of saying that small-minded people were objecting to a titan of creative thought.
As a matter of fact, that's exactly what he is. To wish that he would design something more self-effacing is to protest that the pyramids of Giza stand out too boldly. Gehry does not blend in. He builds blockbusters. He manufactures his own limelight.

But the issue isn't a question of whether the project is self-effacing or not; it's whether the scale--the sheer size of the project--is inappropriate for the site and would cause undue effects on traffic and other facets of urban life.

Gehry and Ratner

Davidson writes:
It would be a mistake, however, to write Gehry off as Ratner's corporate tool. Few architects are as sensitive to the cultural implications of steel and glass, or to the way human beings move through the spaces he molds. He is expert at accommodating a welter of conflicting agendas and making it seem like it was all his idea. Disney Hall, for instance, addresses and nearly solves an impossible conundrum: how to create an environment for symphonic music that combines democracy and luxe.

Well, Gehry may not be Ratner's corporate tool, but he has agreed to his client's policy of preventing him from meeting with community members, and he has acquiesced to the request that he design the entire project himself, rather than bring in other architects. As for Disney Hall, it may be a good neighbor, but Miss Brooklyn may be more of an "ego trip."

The critic's qualms

Davidson does wag his finger:
The most dismaying aspect of the project is neither the sore-thumbness of the design or even the traffic the complex might create. It's the fact that government has outsourced the building of public space to private developers. Gehry's plans call for an ungated community, enclosed but accessible and sumptuously landscaped by Laurie Olin.

He does not, however, point out that the amount of open space would be much too little for the proposed population, or that the much-ballyhooed open park space on top of the arena has been turned into private space.

Atlantic Center redux?

Davidson writes:
The protesters are technically correct: Atlantic Yards, Miss Brooklyn and the arena all violate the spirit of Brooklyn architecture. But if neighbors succeed in defeating this project, they may eventually regret it. They could get acres of more "sensitive" and "contextual" plain brown wrapping, a development slightly less massive but also far less nuanced than Gehry's. This alternative might look rather like Ratner's last project, Atlantic Center Mall, the architect Hugh Hardy's egregious attempt to tuck a hulk among brownstones and hope it would blend in.

Actually, the last project was the Atlantic Terminal mall that Hardy designed. (Though Hardy's web site says the firm designed Atlantic Center, it appears that was designed by Ehrenkrantz & Eckstut. People get confused.) Is the critic saying the choice is between Gehry and the mall (above)? Doesn't the developer bear any responsibility? Or, in the case of public land, should the community have any voice?

In conclusion

Davidson's concluding paragraph:
But if Gehry's preferred facades of wavy glass and shiny metal have nothing to do with Brooklyn, his hubris and imagination sure do. He and Ratner are not Manhattanizing Brooklyn, as his opponents claim. Rather they are selling the borough on a new boast. Manhattan may get a building or two, but only Brooklyn will have a whole New Jerusalem, signed Frank Gehry.

A whole New Jerusalem? Is Davidson channeling Herbert Muschamp? And does the hubris belong to Brooklyn, or to the developer?

FCE's 10-K: has developer spent more on Nets than for Atlantic Yards?

[on hold for revision]

"Sketches" of Gehry, but unencouraging hints for Brooklynites

The ads for Sydney Pollack's new documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry excerpt words from reviews: “absorbing,” “seductive,” “superb,” and “a very fine documentary about our era’s master builder. Refreshing, instructive, and satisfying.”

Yes, Gehry’s designed some terrific buildings and had an important influence on architecture--and the camera loves the curves of the Guggenheim Bilbao and other sinuous structures. But international fame does not equal responsiveness to the community. While the film makes no reference to the Atlantic Yards project, but, viewed through a Brooklyn-centric lens, it offers offers some unencouraging hints: Gehry comes off as artist, not urban planner, is shown to possess a monumental ego, and appears to have been more concerned about being a "good neighbor" in Los Angeles than in Brooklyn. (At right, the director and his subject, old friends.)

[Architect Jonathan Cohn has some more reflections today on the role of the architect and the scale of the project, concluding it should be drastically reduced, beyond even that proposed by Assemblyman Jim Brennan.]

Art, not planning

Gehry is far more rooted in the world of art than urban planning; many of the enthusiasts quoted are artists. “If I have a big envy in my life, it’s about painters. I wish I was a painter,” Gehry declares at one point. Client (and former superagent/Disney president) Michael Ovitz declares the architect “a contemporary cubist and sculptor." In the early 1960s, “he was completely aligned with artists," said artist Ed Ruscha, citing Gehry’s presence at exhibits and parties. Gehry said he felt his profession hidebound and unsupportive, while the artists “were treating me like I was part of the team.”

“There are sort of rules about architectural expression, you have to fit into a certain channel," Gehry declares. "Screw that—it doesn’t mean anything. I’m going to do what I do the best. If it’s not good, the marketplace will deny it.”

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner describes Gehry’s design for Disney Ice (now Anaheim Ice), a practice rink for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. “You give Frank the functionality… and he delivers the picture.”

Gehry can deliver functional buildings, but a functional building does not mean functional urban planning, not with 16 towers and an arena. (Update 5/29: Indeed, according to eyewitness reports posted by the Project for Public Spaces, the Guggenheim Bilbao makes for an awkward public space.) The picture of Miss Brooklyn (right) does not mean that the neighborhood would be functional.

The work of an architect

Not only is there nothing in the film about urban planning, there's little about the complicated work of an architect. The film focuses exclusively on the art of conjuring up shapes. As Eva Hagberg wrote 5/8/06 in a critique on HuffingtonPost, "You hope there might be a couple shots of Gehry thinking about a budget, or playing with circulation, or discussing the program, or even--heaven forbid--talking to a client. Instead, there are only slyly self-aware nods to the consistent difficulty of the profession, small critical moments where it seems almost plausible that Pollack might rip open the slickly schlumpfy image Gehry so comfortably projects."

So maybe Gehry really doesn't care about meeting with the Brooklyn community so concerned about the arena and 16 towers of the Atlantic Yards project. (Pollack, who admits in the film that he knows nothing about either architecture or documentaries, told Hagberg that "people would fall asleep" if he showed the pesky reality of architectural practice.)

The Gehry style

Gehry's self-deprecating style masks a fierce competitiveness. Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, observes, “Somebody asked me once about Frank’s ego. I said: You shouldn’t be put off by the kind of Columbo-like exterior. Y’know, the crumpled raincoat and the sort of shuffling, self-effacing manner. Frank’s got the biggest ego in the business.” Krens, with respect, adds that Gehry does his revisions "from a higher plane."

Gehry tells Pollack that, when faced with criticism, “I act like nothing’s happening, aw shucks... I’m competitive as hell, but I cover it up... I want to be a nice guy…yet I am ambitious. I think it’s the same with the work.”

Ok, does mean that "nice guy" Gehry wants to meet with the community, but "ambitious" Gehry won't cross his client, who has given him the opportunity to design his first sports arena--and, as Gehry said, "build a neighborhood from scratch in an urban setting"?

Indeed, Gehry's combativeness has recently surfaced; at the Atlantic Yards press conference 5/11/06, Gehry cracked that his critics "should've been picketing Henry Ford," and “People aren't riding around on horseback anymore.” (Tidbit: Design work in Gehry’s office has been revolutionized by digital technology, but “Frank still doesn’t know how to use a computer,” declares Krens, "except to throw it at somebody." So who's mired in horseback days? At right, Gehry and landscape architect Laurie Olin in a New York Times video interview.)

The role of the client

“I don’t go after the job anyway,” Gehry says. “I wait til the jobs hit me on the head. I don’t like rejection… I accept the projects based on whether I like them—the people.” Note that Gehry has already said of his patron for Atlantic Yards: "Bruce Ratner is politically my kind of guy, he's a do-gooder, liberal, we can talk, he likes classical music, and he collects art. So he's a guy I can play with."

Mildred Friedman, a curator and critic who edited a book about Gehry, suggests “Frank has figured out that the most important influence on the design is the client. And if there’s a terrific client to work with, you get a terrific building. If there isn’t, you don’t.”

So is Bruce Ratner (right, image from FCR site) a terrific client? Gehry has said that "this developer’s is interested in doing something special. Their history is, they haven’t, but now they want to. I took them at their word, and they have been very fastidious in supporting the things that I think are important." Then again, Gehry also has acknowledged that he wanted to bring in other architects, and that's been denied.

Also, while Gehry predicted that the scale of the project is "coming way back," the recent five percent scaleback suggests that the client disagrees. Gehry now uses the term "paring back." And is it Gehry or Ratner who's responsible for the deceptive renderings that, had they portrayed the views from a few feet away, would show more massive towers? (Dean Street example at right)

Gehry learned a lesson from his old friend Pollack, he says in the film: "I was struggling with the world I was confronted with, the commercial world, they weren’t interested in what I was doing… you said you made peace with it by finding this small percentage of space in that commercial world where you could make a difference."

How big is that space, and are there compromises you don't make? In January, Gehry said, "If I think it got out of whack with my own principles, I’d walk away." For now, though, he's promoting the Atlantic Yards plan in visits to editorial boards, such as this 5/14/06 interview with the Daily News editorial board. (Note that the Daily News claims three acres of green space over the arena roof, while the Final Scope promises (p. 3) one acre of private open space; the newspaper neglected to clarify that, as it has reported previously, the arena roof was originally promised as publicly-accessible park space.)

Some glimpses of Frank

Fiddling with some sketches, Gehry at one point says delightedly, “That’s so stupid-looking, it’s great,” and lets out a wordless cry of glee. (The folks at the Gutter should have a field day with that one.)

Gehry also evinces an impressive capacity to turn on a dime, with little apparent regret about the collateral damage. (He wouldn't be the only artist with this pattern.) After he designed the Santa Monica Place, mall for the Rouse Company, he invited the company president to his home (right), a multitudinous product of his creativity, a new structure built around an existing house.

Why’d he work on the mall, so different from his house, Gehry was asked. “Because I had to make a living,” the architect replied. “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. 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 Pollack didn't ask.

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. (His second wife appears in the film, but not his children.)

The European tour

Rocker Sir Bob Geldof describes the wonder of seeing Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Geldof declares architecture “shite” 99 percent of the time, and says he usually adheres to Auberon Waugh’s dictum that “should you meet an architect at a party, the best thing one can do is hit them.” (Would some Brooklynites share those sentiments? Or are they too busy cleaning their stables?)

As for Bilbao (right), it sure looks good. But Princeton critic Hal Foster, who appears in the film as the obligatory naysayer, writes that it serves as a logo: "Bilbao uses its Gehry museum this way: it appears on the first sign for the city you see on the road, and it has put Bilbao on the world-tourist map."

In the film, a Bilbao journalist enthuses, “Community self-esteem has increased so much.” Then again, as James Russell writes, "A program of public investment in airports, a subway, and other cultural facilities reinforced the job the museum did of putting the city on the map."

So, does Brooklyn need Gehry for self-esteem? For sports? What about the public investment in infrastructure and cultural facilities? Or an actual policy on affordable housing?

The critics speak

Princeton critic Hal Foster (right) is the only critic on camera (though there is a shot of an article disparaging Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle). Gehry’s buildings are more spectacle than functional, Foster suggests; “There are moments when he has delivered the goods too quickly….A sublime space that overwhelms the viewer and a spectacular image that can circulate through the media and around the world as brand.”

In rebuttal appears former Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp (right), damning the pressures on architects to be “appropriate.” He continues: “And it still is the big word, which means blend in, nobody notices, camouflage. Put up a new 70-story office building but make it look like a little Art Deco thing next door. Who gets anything about that? You have to not only talk about the freedom but you also have to talk about the courage of an architect who has convictions to say, ‘Well, that’s not what architecture should be doing, and that’s not what cities should be doing.’”

Does any critic hit the spot? “When I see something negative, I try it on… for size," Gehry responds. "I wear it and think, ‘maybe there’s something there,’ I look at it. I must get something out of it… but I don’t digest it intellectually." Ultimately, Gehry says, “I just keep going, I don’t pay attention. I mean, what am I going to do?”

Foster appears again, saying, "As a critic, it’s incumbent upon me to take an emphatic stand, to hold a line of disagreement, so that other people are not simply caught up in the culture of affirmation… that has surrounded Gehry."

Immediately following him, Muschamp raises the stakes: “This is the only history that we’re going to be living in, ok, this is the one. You can read about the ones that came before, this is the one that’s happening now. And fortunately, there are a few people who understand how to respond to these challenges, and Frank Gehry is one of them. There’s only so much that architecture can do, but what he’s serving is the 'so much,' and trying to realize it.”

Artist Julian Schnabel, in his bathrobe, shades, and a drink in his hand, opines, “I wouldn’t criticize him, 'cause I think it’s like flies flying around on the neck of a lion. It’s like watching a movie like Apocalypse Now and saying you think that Robert Duvall is over the top.”

Good neighbor in LA

Gehry allows, “Because buildings take so long to realize, by the time I get to the finished building, I don’t like it…” The film ends at Walt Disney Concert Hall, (above right) which opened in 2003, where Gehry was faced with interacting with the 1960s-era Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (right). He tells Pollack: “The only thing an architect can do is be optimistic about how it interacts with the surrounding buildings. It can be a passive player, it can be a stoic player, it can be a passionate player.”

"My feeling is, I don’t like the Chandler, it’s not great architecture, but it’s here and people have a lot of feelings about it, it’s part of the community, so you have to respect that, whether you like it or not. That’s like being a good neighbor. And so I tried to make a building that would preserve the iconic importance of the Chandler. To defer to that, I decided to bring down the scale of the Disney Hall into smaller pieces, so it’s not the same language.” (At right, the Chandler is visible slightly in the far right of the frame.)

Good neighbor in Brooklyn?

It makes you wonder: how does Gehry feel about the fact that Miss Brooklyn--his self-described "ego trip"--also obscures the views of the iconic Williamsburgh Savings Bank? Is that being a good neighbor? (Image below right from DDDB.)

As noted in my letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Papers 3/27/04 issue (p. 8 of PDF), at a public meeting on the Atlantic Yards plan sponsored by the Park Slope Civic Council, architect Tensho Takemori, of Frank Gehry Partners, was asked why one of the planned office towers must be taller than the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building and why, as a gesture of respect, couldn’t the latter remain the borough’s tallest building.

His answer was hardly convincing: “We want them all to be speaking together. By having one taller, it serves to integrate the existing buildings into the landscape.”

Rather, it trumps the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower and--as the current design shows--even "blocks the clock." After all, it is an "ego trip," as Gehry acknowledges. No one from his firm has appeared at a public forum since then.

Gehry's anxieties

Asked if he ever gets depressed, Gehry responds: "A little bit… you know that better than I do. You can’t let go. When I let go is a year later, after test of time, didn’t leak, people like it." Miss Brooklyn might take three years, but Atlantic Yards wouldn't be done until 2016. Gehry was born in 1929; the odds are lower that he'd see the whole thing through.

Is there anything you haven’t done that you want to do, Pollack asks. Gehry shrugs it off: "I’m superstitious, so I never say that. When you’re a younger architect, starting out, you’re seeking some kind of impossible perfection. You can spend your life thinking about this ephermal building that would be great to do, it would be the capstone of my career. And you realize as you mature that there’s no there.”

Maybe Gehry gave his answer before the day in 2003 when he began talking to Ratner about the Atlantic Yards project (first arena! new neighborhood!). But his comments in recent interviews have shown him both anxiety-ridden and defensive about the Atlantic Yards project. Had they been included, they would have offered some more shadings on the challenges Gehry faces.

Changing the world

The film closes with the shrink Wexler, who declares, “A great many people come to me, hoping they can that they can change themselves and settle their anxieties, their problems in their marriage, or whatever. They want to know how to handle life better. When an artist comes to me, he wants to know how to change the world.”

And, in this case, apparently, Brooklyn.

For those who'd rather not pay to see the film in a theater, it will air on PBS on 9/20/06--just before construction begins for the Atlantic Yards project, according to FCR's projected timetable or, quite possibly, in the midst of continued community challenge, flies on the neck of a lion.

The Times Magazine on architecture, Columbia, and (erroneously) AY

The New York Times Magazine today offers The Architecture Issue, under the cover line Building to a Fight: Why Architecture Is the Only Art Form We Still Battle Over. It's understandable that the Atlantic Yards project isn't a focus; Frank Gehry's revised designs were unveiled only ten days ago. The main article set in New York, headlined The Manhattanville Project, concerns tensions over Columbia University's plans to expand into West Harlem.

It seems like a well-reported article, with a thoughtful exposition of Columbia's challenges and also the community's concerns. Then again, a brief mention of the Atlantic Yards plan contains three errors:
Still, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come out in strong support of eminent domain--which also figures in the developer Bruce Ratner's controversial efforts to construct a basketball stadium and condos in the Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn.

First, it's an arena (indoor facility, with a floor or rink), not a stadium (usually outdoor, with a field). The Times Magazine made the same mistake on 6/26/05, when it published a Q&A with Ratner headlined, Stadium, Anyone?

Second, the plan currently would include 4500 rental units and 2360 condos. It would have been more precise to use the word "housing" (or "mostly housing," since there will be some office/retail/hotel space) rather than "condos."

Finally, there's no such thing as "the Atlantic Yards area." The name Atlantic Yards is Forest City Ratner's marketing term to describe a project that would include the railyards along Atlantic Avenue and nearly 14 additional acres.

The Columbia CBA

There's also a reference to an incipient Community Benefits Agreement:
Columbia has agreed to negotiate with a development corporation and the community board over providing a broad range of benefits. Across the country, such agreements are increasingly encouraging private designs to encompass the concerns of public planning. If successful, the Manhattanville project could become a model for responsible urban development--balancing the university's global ambitions with some of its neighbors' more immediate concerns.

Interestingly, there's no reference to what Forest City Ratner has been calling the "historic" CBA regarding Atlantic Yards, which bypassed the more representative community boards in Brooklyn to negotiate with eight entities, only two of which were incorporated at the time. (Remember, the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate 8/15/05 quoted Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, the chairman of Community Board 9:
"We are avoiding the Brooklyn model," he said. "We are wanting to do something else. We are wanting to develop a wide coalition of organizations and people that will be properly represented....

Finding Frank

Gehry does appear in the magazine, after all. Beginning on page 11, occupying prime space between the first and second Contents pages, there's a seven-page advertising spread from Tiffany, featuring The Frank Gehry Collection. The tag line: Beauty Without Rules.

Could that also be a tag line (well, some would dispute the "beauty" part) for the zoning override regarding the Atlantic Yards project?

Simon Liu's art supply business to move after deal with Ratner

Simon Liu Inc., a highly-regarded art supply business with 25 employees on Dean Street within the proposed Atlantic Yards project footprint, has long been mentioned as a business threatened by eminent domain. Liu last year told the Daily News that he was seeking a new building but that all options were too expensive. (The 6/24/05 article, headlined Unfair & un-American, biz cries, came after the Supreme Court's Kelo eminent domain decision, and focused on another business outside Brooklyn.)

Now, however, Liu plans to move; the Brooklyn Papers reported, in an article this week headlined For gallery's last show, look up in the sky (p. 4), that Liu sold his building to Ratner several months ago. (The terms have not been disclosed; will Liu be allowed to discuss the deal with the press?)

"It's a real tragedy," gallery manager Leon Kalas told the newspaper. "Simon's gallery had become an important gathering palce for artists, and now it's all being destroyed."

A notice on Liu's web site states:
Simon Liu Inc. is moving the whole facilities to a new location. There will be no exhibition after June 02, 2006.
New gallery location and hours will be announced.

Two Urban Land Institute awards go to Forest City projects

Two subsidiaries of Forest City Enterprises, the parent company of Forest City Ratner, are among the ten winners of the Urban Land Institute's (ULI) Awards for Excellence: The Americas competition, which is the land use industry’s most prestigious award.

According to ULI's press release, those honored include:
Stapleton District 1, Denver, Colorado (Forest City Stapleton, Inc.) The first phase (489 acres) of this 4,700-acre master-planned community contains four schools, 2,100 residential units, 100 acres of parks and open space and 320,000 square feet of commercial space. Upon buildout, the former airport will include 12,000 homes.
Victoria Gardens, Rancho Cucamonga, California (Forest City Commercial Development; Lewis Group of Companies) This 175-acre project provides a new downtown district for a community that had grown up without one, and is notable for its large-scale introduction of an authentic urban center by a private-sector developer.

Looking at the broader picture

The awards recognize "the full development process of a project, not just its architecture or design." The criteria: financial viability, the resourceful use of land, design, relevance to contemporary issues, and sensitivity to the community and environment.

Indeed, one member of the jury was planner and architect Barbara Faga, of the consultancy EDAW, who at a conference last month emphasized the importance of a public process throughout the life cycle of the project.

Clearly, Forest City Enterprises knows how to do the right thing. But will Forest City Ratner ever get an award praising its sensitivity to the community in Brooklyn?

From Forest City Enterprises' annual report: optimism and caveats

In the front narrative of Forest City Enterprises' 2005 annual report, there's an optimistic take on the Atlantic Yards project, with hints that it could stimulate further development. This document, like the 10-K document referenced below, refers to the year ending 1/31/06, though the latter was signed 3/28/06:
In Brooklyn, we acquired much of the land for the development of our Atlantic Yards mixed-use community, which is expected to include a new arena for the Nets basketball team, in which we are an investor. As expected, the team operated at a loss, but our long-term objectives are to build a great franchise, move it to Brooklyn (a city of 2 million people), and develop a large-scale, mixed-use project with the Nets and a Frank Gehry-designed arena as catalysts for the project and the further revitalization of downtown Brooklyn.

In the attached 10-K filing, where the company must disclose risks, the language is, as is typical in such disclosures, far more sober:
Brooklyn Atlantic Yards. We are in the process of developing Brooklyn Atlantic Yards, a $3.5 billion mixed-use project in downtown Brooklyn expected to feature an 800,000 square foot sports and entertainment arena for the Nets. The acquisition and development of Brooklyn Atlantic Yards is subject to the completion of negotiations with local and state governmental authorities, including negotiation of the applicable development rights, the satisfactory completion of due diligence, the receipt of governmental and non-governmental approvals and the possible condemnation of the land needed for the development. The negotiations relating to the acquisition and development rights for Brooklyn Atlantic Yards may not be successfully completed, the acquisition and development rights may not be obtained or completed on the terms described above and the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards may not be developed with the features we anticipate. The development of Brooklyn Atlantic Yards is being done in connection with the proposed move of the Nets to the planned arena. While we are part of an ownership group that acquired the Nets on August 16, 2004, any movement of the team is subject to approval by the NBA commissioner and the owners of the other NBA franchises. If we do not receive this approval, we may not be able to develop Brooklyn Atlantic Yards to the same extent or at all.
Even if we are able to continue with the development, we would likely not be able to do so as quickly as originally planned.

Caveats about the Nets

The disclosure continues:
We Have Limited Experience Participating in the Operation and Management of a Professional Basketball Team, and Future Losses Are Expected for the Nets
On August 16, 2004, we purchased a legal ownership interest in the Nets. This interest is reported on the equity method of accounting as a separate segment. The purchase of the interest in the Nets is the first step in our efforts to pursue development projects at Brooklyn Atlantic Yards, which include a new entertainment arena complex and adjacent developments combining housing, offices, shops and public open space. The relocation of the Nets is, among other items, subject to approval by the NBA commissioner and the owners of the other franchises, and we cannot assure you we will receive these approvals on a timely basis or at all. If we are unable to relocate the Nets to Brooklyn, we may be unable to achieve our projected returns on the related development projects, which could result in a delay, termination or losses on our investment. The Nets are currently operating at a loss and are projected to continue to operate at a loss as long as they remain in New Jersey. Even if we are able to relocate the Nets to Brooklyn, there can be no assurance that the Nets will be profitable in the future. Losses are allocated to each member based on an analysis of the respective member’s claim on the net book equity assuming a liquidation at book value at the end of each accounting period without regard to unrealized appreciation (if any) in the fair value of the Nets. Therefore, losses allocated to us may exceed our legal ownership interest.

The Operation of a Professional Sports Franchise Involves Certain Risks
Our investment in the Nets is subject to a number of operational risks, including risks associated with operating conditions, competitive factors, economic conditions and industry conditions. If we are not able to successfully manage the following operational risks, we may incur additional operating losses, which are allocated to each member based on an analysis of the respective members’ claim on net book equity assuming a liquidation at book value at the end of the accounting period without regard to unrealized appreciation (if any) in the fair value of the Nets:
--Competition with other major league sports, college athletics and other sports-related entertainment;
--Dependence on competitive success of the Nets;
--Fluctuations in the amount of revenues from advertising, sponsorships, concessions, merchandise and parking, which are tied to the popularity and success of the Nets;
--Uncertainties of increases in players’ salaries;
--Dependence on talented players;
--Risk of injuries to key players; and
--Dependence on television and cable network, radio and other media contracts.

Cautions about the Times Tower

There's been a recent report about leasing Forest City Ratner's 40% share in the new Times Tower, but the 10-K document, finished before that report, states:
Our New York Times building in Manhattan is expected to open in the second quarter of fiscal 2007 with 734,000 square feet of office space. To date, we have not been able to secure any tenants to lease space in this property. If we are not able to lease space in this building or if we lease space at rates below expected levels, the profitability of this property will be adversely affected.

Thousands of million-dollar condos, the AY scale, and FCR's bottom line

Forest City Ratner executive Jim Stuckey, in a radio interview Monday, defended the size of the Atlantic Yards project, saying "Unfortunately, if you want to build on this site, the infrastructure costs and the land costs are so significant that it does require that you build to a certain scale."

His unverifiable statement raises several questions about costs and revenues, statistics that Forest City Ratner won't discuss publicly. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that just the housing revenues could go far toward recouping the costs of the project.

First, the most expensive arena ever obviously drives up the project cost. Second, the cost of acquiring and operating the Nets. Third, the cost of land acquisition includes a relatively inexpensive price for the 8.3-acre railyard ($100 million), and some relatively expensive deals for specific buildings occupying smaller plots on the 22-acre site, such as $44 million for two properties. Note that the longer the project is delayed, the more construction costs increase.

Beyond the infrastructure and land costs, Stuckey left out the discretionary costs for public relations, professional talent (Frank Gehry must cost a bit more), and even support for community groups, among other things.

The switch from "jobs" to condos

When the project was announced, it was to contain some 2 million square feet of office space, enough to accommodate 10,000 jobs, according to FCR's calculations, using 200 square feet per worker. (Calculations using the more standard figure for office space, 250 square feet per worker, would suggest a cap of 8000 jobs.)

However, last year, Forest City Ratner increased the size of the project and also traded some two-thirds of that planned office space for luxury condos. As the New York Times reported:
Officials of Forest City Ratner said they eventually realized that they would have to reduce the amount of commercial space, to accommodate condominium units that would help pay for the project, including the below-market rental housing

Given that condos are apparently a better economic bet for the developer, theoretically Forest City Ratner could elimininate all the office space, now projected to accommodate 2500 office jobs, and trade it for condos. It could even shrink the project somewhat, given the higher rate of return for condos. But that would be lousy politics, especially since politicians and editorialists endorsed the project early on because of the promise of jobs.

Million-dollar condos

The fact is, until and unless Forest City Ratner releases its pro forma economic projections, as rival bidder Extell did, we're in the dark about Stuckey's claim. And the infrastructure costs and land costs cited by Stuckey certainly deserve more scrutiny.

But it is clear that FCR could create some very valuable condos. Waterfront condos in Williamsburg at Schaefer Landing, according to the Village Voice, are bringing "owners $1000 per square foot for top-floor apartments with views of the river and the Manhattan skyline—far more than anyone, developers and investors included, originally anticipated." Indeed, last September, The Real Deal quoted developer Elon Padeh as saying that the $1000 per square foot level would be reached in five years.

Similar prices would be likely at Atlantic Yards, where condos, under the best scenario, wouldn't be occupied for three years. Should present trends continue, it's reasonable to assume that condos at the Atlantic Yards project could easily be sold for $1000 a square foot, thanks to the upper floor views as well as the Frank Gehry imprimatur. So a 1000-foot condo could sell for $1 million. Or larger condos on lower floors might fetch a slightly smaller price per foot but still reach $1 million.

(Extell estimated an average size of 1500 square feet, and a price of $700 per square feet.)

$440 million off the table

Still, $1 million is a nice round figure to work with. Forest City Ratner had planned 2800 market-rate condos. At $1 million each, that's $2.8 billion in revenue. In scaling back the plan at the end of March, FCR eliminated 440 condos; 2360 condos would equal $2.36 billion.

In other words, Forest City Ratner just took $440 million in revenue--gross, not net (since they'd save something on construction)--off the table. So the configuration of the project is obviously flexible. If it would cost $3.5 billion to build--though FCR wouldn't be putting up that total, given various subsidies--then $2.36 billion in condos would constitute two-thirds of the cost.

New rental income

Beyond that, there would be significant revenue from the rentals, even the subsidized affordable rentals. Each of the 2250 renters in the affordable space would pay 30 percent of their income in rent. If those renters have an average income of about $55,000 (a rough estimate), that's $16,500 a year, or a total of $37.1 million.

The revenue would be much greater from the 2250 market-rate rentals; at a guesstimate of $3000 a month, the rentals would reap $36,000 a year per unit, or $81 million a year.

So, rental income from the 4500 units would represent about $118 million a year, or nearly $1.2 billion over just ten years. Add that to the condos and the sum approaches $3.5 billion fairly easily, without even counting revenue from the arena, hotel, retail, and office space.

Assumptions--and disclosure

Of course these numbers include assumptions and speculations and omissions, and I've left out the cost of borrowing and operations, as well as the value of subsidies.

But the bottom line is this: Forest City Ratner stands to reap a lot of revenue. If Stuckey says the current scale is dictated by the costs, the developer must back it up with some disclosure about its costs and its plans.

Raising hell? Allan Temko and the "foxes" critiquing architecture today

So, are architecture critics raising hell the way Allan Temko used to? Not quite, according to those gathered two weeks ago for the 2006 Temko Critics Panel in honor of the recently-deceased San Francisco Chronicle critic, who felt that architecture criticism should not be reactive but proactive, to “get in and fight before the damn thing is built,” as Daniel Rose, chair of the Forum for Urban Design, said in his introduction.

In Temko’s 1/26/06 obituary in the Chronicle, former Chronicle Executive Editor Matthew F. Wilson said, "Allan had a dramatic effect on the skyline of San Francisco and beyond. Architects, city planners and politicians took his criticism very seriously. Often when there was (an official) plan and he espoused a different approach, things got changed."

The panel included Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, John King of the Chronicle, Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times, and Paul Goldberger of the New Yorker. Robert Ivy of Architectural Record moderated the session, sponsored by the Forum For Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. But the panel—despite prediction of a “smackdown” on the architectural blog The Gutter—was mostly a cordial affair. Some differences (and some chuckles) emerged, but the panelists were more united in a weariness toward the coarse collective culture than frustrated with architects or, dare we say, developers. (And, no, the issue of Atlantic Yards didn't come up--until I raised it after the fact with the moderator. Scroll down.)

Back to the 60s

When Temko, who Ivy (right) described as “a humanist and also a firebrand,” joined the Chronicle in 1961, it was the year of the protests against the planned Madison Square Garden as well as the publication of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The world is a very different place--is there a role for a proactive critic? Responded Campbell, “I don’t think it’s a very meaningful distinction. A reactive story… is an opportunity to make a proactive case.” He reminded listeners that, unlike with a film, nobody buys a ticket to see a building. “You’re doing it to generate a conversation.”

Goldberger agreed, saying the critic has an important role responding to proposals and plans. He doesn’t do it as much as when he wrote for the New York Times, given the format of his magazine column, “but I deeply believe a critic has a social responsibility to respond to what’s been proposed.” He noted that he did such writing about the plans related to Ground Zero, collected in his book Up From Zero.

Ouroussoff observed, “You really don’t have to look at a painting you don’t like,” but architecture is unavoidable.

Critical intervention?

Do critics try to affect the outcome? “Not just of that situation but the program in general,” said Campbell (right). Part of the critic’s role, added King, “is fighting for the cause of good urban design.”

“I have killed buildings,” Campbell said, citing a proposal that was “so outrageous”—a 1000-foot tower in the wrong place. “You want to evaluate the process as well as the product. You want a fair and just process.”

Others were more measured. Said Ouroussoff (right), “I do feel uncomfortable as a critic with the idea of killing things. What we want to do is get the dialogue going… We don’t know where creativity is going to come from. If we are advocates, we’re advocating for architecture, not for architects or architectural firms.”

Goldberger agreed with Ouroussoff. “I’m not that interested in killing buildings so much as raising the level of dialogue.”

The absent critic from Chicago

Ivy observed that Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune sees his role, in part, as to keep “ugly buildings from getting built.” Later, King cited Kamin as the contemporary critic most in Temko’s spirit, but noted that architecture is more central to Chicago’s identity than in other cities. Kamin, added Goldberger, “has the clearest social slant.” (Scroll down for King's coda on Kamin.)

Kamin’s collection, titled Why Architecture Matters, was reviewed in the April 2002 issue of the New Criterion by Brooklyn-based critic Francis Morrone (who just happens to be a member of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's new advisory board).

Morrone quoted Kamin: Activist criticism is based on the idea that architecture affects everyone and therefore should be understandable to everyone. It analyzes architecture as a fine art and as a social art, placing buildings in the context of the politics, the economics, and the cultural forces that shape them. Activist criticism invites readers to be more than consumers who passively accept the buildings that are handed to them. It bids them, instead, to become citizens who take a leading role in shaping their surroundings. Its fundamental purposes are these: to stop hideous buildings and urban spaces from disfiguring the landscape, and to introduce constructive alternatives into the public debate.

He further quoted Kamin (right):
When you are an activist critic, you do not wait for mistakes to happen and then bemoan the results after the fact. You whack at the offending party with the journalistic equivalent of a two-by-four. In addition to hammering away at bad plans, however, an activist critic is obliged to point the way to good ones. Besides the two-by-four, in other words, the tools of the trade include a searchlight.

And Morrone took a swipe at some Times architecture critics, including then-critic Herbert Muschamp, a controversial figure (about more later): And unlike [first-ever Times critic Ada Louise] Huxtable or Goldberger or the man presently installed at The New York Times, [Kamin] ventures about his city, to its neighborhoods and ghettoes, and writes with as much seriousness of those places’ humble streets and houses as he does of the big, brand-name buildings downtown.

Who’s the audience?

For whom do critics write? “The intelligent lay public,” said Goldberger (right), noting that architecture has become more central to the public discourse. Later that was modified to “the moderately intelligent lay public.”

Ouroussoff pointed out that tastes can change: “Part of what we do is defend the right of certain kind of ugly buildings to exist.” He recounted an anecdote in which Frank Gehry reminded an audience that, at one time, everyone thought his work was ugly.

King (right) said he’d be happy to write about architects like Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and Gehry. “You go out to the suburbs….the basic build quality is horrifying,” he said, noting that his column on the passing of Jane Jacobs focused on a series of big boxes. “How do we get the moderately intelligent lay public to say, ‘You’ve got to think about what’s happening on a large scale.’”

[Here's Geoff Manaugh's response to the panel, arguing for a broader role for critics, on Bldgblog:
If a critic can get people to realize that the everyday architectural world of garages and malls and bad haunted house novels is worthy of architectural analysis – and that architecture is even exciting to discuss – then maybe the trade journals can get some of their subscribers back. At the very least, it's worth a try.
Even if that means saying: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks.]

Buildings in context

How does architecture criticism relate to the urban situation as opposed to individual buildings? “You don’t review a building the way you review a play,” said Campbell, noting that there are numerous possible buildings to write about. “What you’re trying to do is use that building to fly some issue that you think is important,” Campbell said.

Goldberger picked it up, “You write about a building inevitably both as a physical object, as a social object, and as an object in an urban context.” He added that critics would not want their individual pieces to stand for the sum total of their work.

Ouroussoff added, “There are thousands of buildings you can write about. Part of the job is to decide what’s important, what’s not, and why…. You’re looking for ideas. For me, the thing that I find I’m most uncomfortable with is that formulas become static very quickly for what cities should become. You’re always looking for ideas, and you want to give those ideas traction."

He continued: "And that’s about opening up the debate and the discussion, and seeing if there’s a different way to make cities. That Jane Jacobs model of a city, or a part of a city, is just part of the equation. In L.A., you know, [Reyner] Banham’s idea of a city was radically different. And they can all coexist. And it’s about putting those ideas out there… and then, sometimes, some things are just beautiful and you want to write about it.”

Indeed, Banham once said he learned to drive so he could "read" Los Angeles in the original. Ouroussoff's words sounded like a defense of his contrarian column on Jacobs.

Has the role of criticism changed?

Campbell hearkened back to Huxtable (right), the Times’s first architecture critic, who began work in 1963. “What was so good was not her understanding of the esthetics of architecture but her understanding of architecture as part of a larger social, political, and economic world that she understood very well.”

He contrasted her work with that of Lewis Mumford of the New Yorker, “who never talked to the owner or the user or the architect.” Goldberger countered that Mumford’s work still stood up well, even if he disagreed with it.

Campbell observed that Huxtable was a “hundred percent proponent of modernism.” These days, he said, it’s very hard to be so certain of a movement.

The infamous Muschamp

Former Times critic (1992-2004) Muschamp, an over-the-top presence, generated the most gossipy moments, after Ivy observed that the critic once stated that “his role was to have a sexual experience about architecture.” The crowd--maybe 25 people--tittered.

Campbell took the bait. “Herbert believed architecture was practiced by 40 or 50 people around the world for an audience of 5000,” he said, adding that, by ignoring “the experience most people have,” Muschamp “helped created the world of starchitects.”

“He didn’t create it on his own,” countered Ouroussoff, noting that all critics are a product of their times. “No one else was looking at that work in that way. In a lot of ways, he had a very narrow perspective. He turned everything into a subjective experience… But I think he was trying to open up… architecture and a way of engaging it that he felt had been lost.”

Goldberger said of Muschamp, “He certainly rode the trend and pushed it forward.”

An aside: the Times succession

Muschamp's focus on starchitects didn't go unnoticed. According to one analysis, the critic mentioned Rem Koolhaas and Gehry in more than one-third of his articles. After Muschamp's departure was announced, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) sent an open letter to the Times encouraging the hiring of a more wide-ranging successor:
Many critics today, however, take just the opposite tack--clinging to the heroic ideal of the architect as the master, and holding on for dear life to the traditional view of the architectural masterpiece as a triumph of abstract ideas and ideals. We urge the Times to name a new architecture critic willing to engage with these new currents in design. America's most influential architecture writer should be ready to critique this emerging movement, criticize it, prod it.

I suspect PPS is disappointed, as at least one critic calls Ouroussoff "Herb Jr." Ouroussoff doesn't strain for pop culture metaphors and he doesn't flaunt his personal connections to architects as blatantly as Muschamp--who was widely accused of playing favorites. Then again, Ouroussoff has been chided for encouraging starchitects as well, and was quite chummy with Gehry at their Times Talk appearance in January; he even defended Gehry by denying that the Atlantic Yards plan would contain a superblock.

Exerting authority

At the panel, Ouroussoff acknowledged that the advent of blogs and other voices made the critics’ traditional platform less stable: “The authority has to come from… the understanding of the work, the depths of the arguments that you bring to it.”

Campbell, “I think the most valuable thing we do is help create the careers of young architects.”

The Times now has its first reporter covering architecture, Robin Pogrebin. “I think that was an important step for the Times,” said Ouroussoff, noting that other cultural pursuits, such as film, have long been treated as news.

“I think editors sometimes have a hard time understanding what an architecture critic does,” he added. “You know what an art critic does, you know what a film critic does…. It’s not as clear what an architecture critic is doing and why it’s necessary. Because architecture in the mindset of a lot of people belongs in the real estate section. It’s not that it’s not being covered; it’s not being covered critically. It’s about economics, about business…but to say it’s also about something else, social issues, esthetic issues, that’s a big shift.”

Does the boom in real estate lead to more discussion about architecture? Not quite. “There’s this outpouring of interest,” Goldberger said, “but it’s at a lower plane.” Both he and other panelists grumbled about the “dumbing down” of discourse.

Goldberger observed, “The risk of engaging too much in, say, the world of real estate writing is it’s really about consumer culture, and then, architecture criticism becomes, in a very pernicious, way, forced back into…. a ‘consumer guide’…And I don’t know if that’s what we want architectural criticism to be.”

Finding the subject

Choosing his subjects, Ouroussoff said, is “a question of scale and balance.” When he took the jobs, he said, “I wanted to travel all the time,” to look at what’s going on here in relationship to what’s being built in Europe and Asia and elsewhere. “At the same time, you have a responsibility to cover the city you’re living in.”

Do critics seek buildings to amplify their ideas and thoughts? “I think you have it backwards,” said Campbell. “You start with an object, then begin to figure out what kind of ideas may be embedded in them.”

At newspapers, said Ouroussoff, critics “are driven by the news—what’s in front of your nose.” He said he did seek a shift in scale, from writing about an individual project “versus how do you rebuild a city like New Orleans.” One privilege of the job, he said, is “you’re paid to educate yourself… to fly around the world and look at buildings.”

“You can’t go into this with this sense that you already know what you’re going to see when you walk into the building,” he added. “You go in hoping to be surprised, to see something you’ve never seen before. In a lot of ways, we just feed off what the architects are doing.”

Foxes, not hedgehogs

One audience member observed said that all the panel members were foxes (who view things in an eclectic manner), in Isaiah Berlin’s famous formulation, unlike Temko and theater critic John Simon, who were hedgehogs (who see things via one organizing principle): “You read them not to know how they would react… but why they reacted that way.”

In conclusion, Ivy said he was surprised at the unanimity expressed. “I think we do see things in more subtle shades” than Temko, he said. His summation: “Having said that, as you travel about, from city to city, not only nationally but internationally, we are struck by advances that we see, in waterfronts and urban transit and multimodal living, and we’re still stuck with a preponderance of very ugly buildings, and mistakes, egregious individual and collective decision making. That calls for someone to call it down… as well as an opportunity for admiration, and”—in a nod to Muschamp—“for having a sexual experience with a building.”

Paging Ada Louise

The Q&A moved too swiftly for me to raise a question, so I checked afterward with Ivy by e-mail, asking what the responsibility would be for critics to evaluate not just the architecture but the process for getting it built, such as the use of eminent domain or a developer’s mailing of a deceptive flier (right), two issues that are part of the Atlantic Yards dispute. He wrote:
My response is that critics are people: their responses differ with the times and the people they are writing for. Allan Temko was a product of the 1960s and saw many issues as clear battles, much as Jane Jacobs confronted Robert Moses on the future of Houston Street or others on the diminution of the quality of life in the Village. Ada Louise Huxtable has come as close as any critic we still have who confronts the reality of New York, including the specific motivation and machinations of the development community, including issues like the use of eminent domain to achieve private profit.

Huxtable, now 84, writes only about six pieces a year for the Wall Street Journal. Still, a profile in the 12/19/05 New York Observer stated:
That patrician-populist perspective leads her to upbraid the star-chitects who have invaded New York recently, concentrating on expensive condos rather than on civic projects or affordable housing.

A 12/19/05 profile in Metropolis, headlined Ada Louise Huxtable: History, quoted her extensively:
Here she is on the West Side stadium debacle, pulling no punches: "...there is something profoundly wrong with the city's planning policies. To put it plainly: There are none; there are no land-use principles, no guiding priorities, no design guidelines where they are needed. Construction projects, often of enormous size and impact, are developer generated and initiated, within a narrow spectrum of private interest, and the bigger they are the better the city seems to like them."
While other architecture critics are inclined to fetishize the breakthrough building-object, and only reluctantly and timidly permit themselves to be drawn into broader issues of city and regional planning, Huxtable has no fear of taking on these matters.


Criticism and Atlantic Yards

Needless to say, no critic has written anything about the absence of planning and public insput regarding the Atlantic Yards project. In fact, two days ago, Sun critic James Gardner waded into Gehry's new designs but was unable to coherently describe the basic political battle or even the site itself. So how could he be expected to write about the developer's p.r. strategy or use of deceptive renderings?

Muschamp and Ouroussoff have issued raves (see Chapter 14 of my report), even as they each made a basic factual error. Muschamp ("Courtside Seats to an Urban Garden," 12/11/03) called the site "an open railyard." Ouroussoff ("Seeking First to Reinvent the Sports Arena, and Then Brooklyn," 7/5/05) wrote that "the development would be built on top of the Atlantic Avenue railyards," thus taking Forest City Ratner's suggestion that the 22-acre project would be limited to the 8.3-acre railyard.

Will future coverage not only get the basics right but engage the broader issues?

A coda from King

After I wrote the above report, I found John King's 5/9/06 reflections on the forum, headlined What we miss when we look to the Big Stars, in the Chronicle. King allowed that the sober discussion missed something:
And the single word that defines this is one that didn't come to my mind until too late: responsibility.

King continued, pointing out a misinterpretation of Kamin's goals:
Those stakes are immense: You can make a forceful, articulate case for a high quality environment where you and your readers live. The flip side is, it's possible to become detached, so dazzled by stylistic innovation that you come to see buildings as artworks rather than as pieces in an ever-shifting puzzle.
That detachment was most obvious when panel moderator Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, mentioned how the Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin once wrote that part of his job was to try to stop "ugly" buildings. Panelists emphatically disagreed, saying the last thing a critic should be is a fashion cop. After all, Frank Gehry's buildings were considered ugly once; so was Rockefeller Center when the plans were unveiled.
But I'll wager that Blair wasn't talking about "ugly" buildings that are authentic examples of architecture reacting to today's world. He means the host of buildings erected without a shed of ambition except to make a quick buck: venal, calculated, amoral impositions on the landscape.
They go up in every city. They're unavoidable. And when they rise on prominent sites or take on mammoth size, they scar our civic landscape for years to come.

A flashback: Ouroussoff on elite architecture

In a 12/1/02 commentary for the Los Angeles Times, headlined "At the elite's altar; Why have U.S. architects largely left behind the idea of work with a social impact?" Ouroussoff wrote thoughtfully about the broader challenges:
Today, architects working in America are confined to serving a relatively small and entrenched elite -- the corporate kingpins and aging philanthropists who typically make up the boards of the country's major cultural institutions. The success of the conservative political agenda has meant that the kind of visionary public works projects that remain possible in Europe are no longer part of the public dialogue here. The nation's faltering economy, meanwhile, has resulted in cuts in philanthropic spending.
The result is that architecture risks being reduced to a purely aesthetic game -- one that offers the veneer of progress without its substance. At best, the high end of the profession is able to produce the occasional transcendent masterpiece. At worst, it functions as a mere plaything for the rich and their institutions.

His piece was cited in an interesting essay by James Russell in the March 2003 issue of Architectural Record. In the piece, headlined Where Are We Now? Architecture’s Place in an Era of Evolving Values, Russell makes an important point about Gehry's iconic museum in Bilbao:
(For all the attention the Bilbao Guggenheim has garnered, it did not on its own transform the city. A program of public investment in airports, a subway, and other cultural facilities reinforced the job the museum did of putting the city on the map.)

High-rise vs. low-rise; the Times resists corrections, maintains false dichotomy

When Atlantic Yards architect Frank Gehry said last Thursday that Brooklynites wary of the Atlantic Yards plan would have picketed Henry Ford, and when landscape architect Laurie Olin said they were "frightened" of change, the two designers set up a simplistic dichotomy between progress and Luddism.

The misrepresentation was compounded by some shorthand in the Times's 5/12/06 report:
"They [opponents] have backed alternative plans for the site, including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings and would not require eminent domain."

That continued the false dichotomy. Opponents have helped formulate the UNITY (Understanding, Imagining, & Transforming the Yards) plan, which serves as a set of principles for development, not a funded alternative. UNITY plan principles were adapted by the Extell Development Corp., the sole developer that responded to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's RFP for the Vanderbilt Yard. The coalition behind the UNITY plan is not a developer. So there were not "rival developers," just one developer.

As for "mostly low-rise buildings," the UNITY plan would be mid-rise, not low-rise (like the Dean Street buildings at right recently demolished by Forest City Ratner for a planned 322-foot tower). The Extell plan would be high-rise, but not so tall and dense as Forest City Ratner's plan, as explained below.

However, my request for a correction was resisted with some of the obfuscation and unwillingness to check facts that the Times too frequently employs.

A letter to the Times

I wrote to the Times on 5/12/06:
Developer Defends Atlantic Yards, Saying Towers Won't Corrupt the Feel of Brooklyn states:
"They [opponents] have backed alternative plans for the site, including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings and would not require eminent domain."
Actually, there's only been *one* proposal from a developer on the table, from Extell Development Corp. The Times, in a 7/7/05 article headlined Brooklyn Plan Draws a Rival, And It's Smaller, described the plan as "11 buildings ranging from 4 to 28 stories."

However, Real Estate Weekly, in a 7/13/05 article headlined Ratner's Brooklyn dream being hijacked by Extell stated:
Extell's plan calls for 10 high-rise apartment buildings and one four-story building marked for community use...


So the phrase "mostly low-rise buildings" deserves correction, as does the term "proposals."

The article also states:
"But in an hourlong presentation, Frank Gehry, the project's architect, and Laurie Olin, its landscape designer, emphasized details that they said would harmonize the project's scale with the neighborhoods it would border. They described shorter and thinner buildings on Dean Street, where the project abuts a mostly low-rise neighborhood..."

This was imprecise: the thinner buildings would be the four on the eastern end of Dean Street. Of the three on the western end of Dean Street, none would be thinner, and one would be shorter and the other taller (than the previous iteration). The Forest City Ratner project fact sheet focused on the height and density of the buildings on Dean between Carlton and Vanderbilt.

It would have been more precise to say: They described shorter and thinner buildings on part of the Dean Street segment of the site.
Even if one building on the western end of Dean Street has been reduced to 322 feet doesn't mean it would harmonize with the bordering neighborhood.

The Times responds

I got a response Tuesday from the Times's Karin Roberts:
I am the corrections editor for the Metro department of The Times. Your e-mail was forwarded to me for review. After consulting Nicholas Confessore, the reporter for this article, I have determined that no correction is warranted. There were in fact two rival proposals for the Atlantic Yards project: Extell's and the UNITY plan, which called for mostly low-rise buildings. (Although the backers of the UNITY plan are not developers in the strict sense of the word, it is broadly accurate to refer to them that way, in the interest of shorthand.) The phrase "including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings" is therefore accurate.

The reference to the buildings on Dean Street was likewise accurate; it is needlessly wordy to say they were on "part of the Dean Street segment of the site."

In an article on any topic as complicated as this, we aim to be concise and try not to overwhelm readers with extraneous information. To do that, we use shorthand language when it will not impede clarity or accuracy. In this case, the language chosen met both requirements.

Laying it out

I wrote back yesterday, focusing on the "low-rise" issue:
Thanks for your response. While I recognize that newspapers must use shorthand, I think some of the shorthand here is inaccurate. Even accepting the strained characterization of the UNITY plan backers as "developers"--shouldn't developers have a source of capital?--the UNITY plan does not consitute a low-rise plan (though it certainly is a lower-rise plan). The Art & Architecture Thesaurus defines low-rise as up to five stories.

The community-derived UNITY plan proposed buildings five to 10 stories, or five to 12 stories, as noted in the articles on p. 13 here. Architect Marshall Brown, in one of those articles, uses the term "mid-rise," which the Thesaurus defines as five to nine or 10 stories.
[An example: the Atlantic Terrace development planned by the Fifth Avenue Committee for Atlantic Avenue just east of the Atlantic Center mall, right.]

As for the Extell plan, it would encompass 2.7 million square feet on 8.3 acres. See the third PDF page here. Forest City Ratner's plan would be 8.6 million square feet on 22 acres. You can see that the plans are roughly equivalent in terms of density, though Extell's would be less dense. Even Forest City Ratner's Jim Stuckey acknowledged in a radio interview Monday that the Extell plan represents another high-rise proposal. Scroll down to the heading marked "The Extell bid."

Even if one believed that the UNITY plan was "mostly low-rise," rather than the more accurate mid-rise, the Times employed plurals in the phrasing at issue: "including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings." The syntax misleadingly suggests that more than one developer (including Extell) proposed mostly low-rise buildings.

Here's the sentence at issue:
They have backed alternative plans for the site, including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings and would not require eminent domain.

Here's a crack at more precise phrasing:
They have backed a community plan for mid-rise construction, as well as a rival developer's proposal for high-rise buildings, and neither plan would require eminent domain.

Or, alternatively:
They have backed a community plan for mid-rise construction, as well as a rival developer's proposal for high-rise--but not as tall--buildings, and neither plan would require eminent domain.

The Times stonewalls

Roberts responded later in the day:
Thanks for writing. As I said, we've determined that no correction is warranted, and I understand that you disagree with that decision. But I have to handle many duties here, so I am not able to engage in an extended debate about this particular matter. We do appreciate the feedback.

But this is no disagreement over opinions, but rather one over easily verifiable facts.
1) There's one developer, not two.
2) There's a mid-rise community plan and one developer's proposal for high-rise buildings.
3) To avoid the false dichotomy between low-rise and high-rise plans, the need for concision could have been accommodated with a rephrased sentence one word longer.

Whatever happened to the "journalism of verification"?

ESDC's Gargano: "We didn't really have to use eminent domain" for Atlantic Yards (?!)

In a Q&A today with the tabloid Metro, headlined Letting a thousand projects bloom, Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) Chairman Charles Gargano, was asked:
What do you say to Brooklynites concerned about the Atlantic Yards?

His response:
The facts are that we didn’t really have to use eminent domain because there were friendly condemnations done. The amount of condemnation that we had to do was very small. I grew up in Park Slope, and another big blunder by the city was we lost the Brooklyn Dodgers. They wanted to build a new Ebbets Field at the Atlantic Yards. And because of that blunder in the ’50s, we have had a blighted look in the Atlantic Yards for nearly 50 years. There will always be people who object because everybody has different personal interests, and that’s OK. But I think what you have to do is do it for the majority.

Friendly condemnations? There have been some friendly buyouts or property owners, but no condemnations as of yet (unless he's conflating the demolition of Forest City Ratner-controlled properties with condemnation). Some owners haven't sold, and likely will hold out, forcing a battle over eminent domain.

The amount of condemnation we had to do? It sounds like he is practicing time travel; the ESDC hasn't condemned anything.

They wanted to build a new Ebbets Field at the Atlantic Yards? Actually, as Michael Shapiro writes in The Last Good Season (p. 42), the site offered was the deteriorating Fort Greene meat market, north of Atlantic Avenue (and the railyards) and just east of the Long Island Rail Road's Brooklyn terminal--in other words, part of what later became the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA).

And because of that blunder...we have had a blighted look? How about the slow progress in urban renewal and the failure to issue an RFP for the railyard site?

I think what you have to do is do it for the majority.? Is that why there's been no RFP and no City Council oversight? How exactly do we know this is either desired by the majority or would benefit the majority?

Gargano seems to be even more gung-ho for the project than Forest City Ratner itself. Even before the recent paring back of the Atlantic Yards project by the developer, Gargano declared, "There is no need to scale down the project."

Oh, and it's not "the Atlantic Yards." That's Forest City Ratner's marketing term.

More on the Atlantic Center mall towers: hints but no details

During the Brian Lehrer Show Monday, the host asked Forest City Ratner executive Jim Stuckey about the company's plans to build new towers above the Atlantic Center mall, which were hinted at by models displayed at the press conference last Thursday. (Photo of 2005 model from Courier-Life chain.)

Stuckey replied that, when the Atlantic Yards Memorandum of Understanding was signed in February, 2005, "we signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build over the Atlantic Center mall as well." What he didn't say was that the first MOU was announced publicly, and the second--which transfers some rights to build at Site 5 across Flatbush Avenue (currently home to P.C. Richard/ Modell's)--was not announced until Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn discovered it through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Downtown Brooklyn EIS

Stuckey told Lehrer, "The fact is that this was studied in the downtown plan’s EIS." Well, the proposed construction was incorporated into the baseline condition for future downtown development, but the Environmental Impact Statement provides few details on how closely it was studied.

In Chapter 1, the Project Description of the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Final EIS, dated 4/30/04, includes only a brief mention (p. 27) of the Atlantic Center mall and Site 5:
The additions include the projected development of two sites within the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (noted in Table 1-7 as Atlantic Center and Shops at Atlantic Center, Site 5). Although these developments were proposed last year, discussions with the City did not reach the level that would require incorporating the potential projects into the No Build condition. A potential developer of these sites has since made a firmer proposal, and the sites are now included in the baseline condition in order to be as conservative as possible, while remaining focused on realistic development. The programs listed in Table 1-7 represent the maximum build-out possible under current zoning and the ATURP [Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area Plan]; there are no detailed design plans for the sites at this time.
(Emphasis added)

In Chapter 2 of the DEIS, concerning Land Use, Zoning, and Public Policy, there's a sentence (p. 15) about Atlantic Center and Site 5: While there are not yet any design plans, it is anticipated that Atlantic Center and the Shops at Atlantic Center will be developed to the maximum extent allowable under current zoning and the ATURP.

Indeed, when the city issued the DEIS, there was no timeline for development at Site 5, while new development was projected for 2008 at the Atlantic Center site. Notably, the 308 residential units then planned for Site 5 would occupy the already allowable 308,000 square feet; the second MOU has shifted 328,272 square feet from the 1.586 million square feet allowable at Atlantic Center, so the building at Site 5 (right) would be much bigger.

Why it's relevant

While there were "no detailed design plans for the sites" two years ago, given the presence of Atlantic Center towers in the Forest City models presented publicly, and Frank Gehry's statement that he was designing 20 buildings, it's reasonable to ask what the plans are now, so the additional development can be discussed publicly as well as evaluated for its environmental impact.

The Final Scope for an Environmental Impact Statement regarding Atlantic Yards indicates (p. 13) that the Atlantic Center development--now due in 2013--will be studied as part of the baseline conditions for traffic and other impacts. The project has been reduced from 1.586 million square feet to about 1.25 million square feet because of the shift of some development rights to Site 5.

In process for a while

According to Jim Vogel, Secretary of the Brooklyn Vision Foundation, while FCR hasn't discussed the Atlantic Center mall towers in public recently, as early as a neighborhood meeting concerning Atlantic Yards, held by the Park Slope Civic Council in March 2004, the mall towers and the Site 5 tower were in the models. (Photo of 2006 model from New York Times.)

"When I saw the models I asked one of the 12 FCRC people at that meeting what I was looking at," said Vogel, who was representing Brooklyn Vision, which monitors development and planning issues. "At that point they said there would be four towers: two 12-story ones over the 'uphill' section and two 16-story ones over the Atlantic Avenue section. That's how far back the planning for these buildings go: they were there from the very start."

Because there is no EIS that specifically addresses the new towers over Atlantic Center, Vogel--who now also serves as Secretary of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods--wonders how the Atlantic Yards EIS can accurately estimate their cumulative effect. "If they are serious about these towers they have to be declared and their effects in relation to the Atlantic Yards development properly evaluated."

If Atlantic Yards doesn't get built, he noted, the city has already agreed to modify zoning to allow for development at Site 5. "I don't understand how that works under ULURP [the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure], but the whole document refers to the governing laws as being part of ATURA, the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, which does allow for such things." Vogel pointed out that, while the ATURA enabling legislation was supposed to expire in 2005, the city in 2003 pushed for a 40-year extension, so it ATURA can still enable construction.

While I speculated that the mall might be razed for new construction, Vogel suggested that Forest City Ratner "seems to have been preparing the interior of Atlantic Center for tower construction for the past year." New reinforced security doors along the upper hallways of the second and third floors allow the various sections to be closed off from one another, he said, which means the mall might continue to do some business while towers are being built over another part.

Perhaps the developer will answer some questions about its plans and timetable for towers at the mall.

Sun critic dislikes Gehry, misreads opposition, misdescribes site

In a review today headlined In Favor of Building - Just Not These Buildings, New York Sun architecture critic James Gardner expresses his dislike for Frank Gehry's designs, but at the same time misreads the debate, and misdescribes the proposed site.

He writes:
The controversy surrounding the Atlantic Yards brings into clamorous opposition two constituencies that, in other circumstances, would fit together quite cozily. On the one hand, you have the semi-celebrity locals who are desperately opposed to the plan, among them Steve Buscemi, movie star; Peter Galassi, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and Jonathan Lethem, the literary novelist of the moment. They hew to Jane Jacobs's worldview, the less-is-more idea that it takes a village and that the massive intervention of the project would destroy the delicate fabric of the community.

But the debate, to repeat for the umpteenth time, isn't between development and no development. As Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's Daniel Goldstein said on the Brian Lehrer show yesterday, it's "a debate about sensible development versus destructive development." DDDB has recruited another bidder, who suggested a high-rise project of a 11 buildings up to 28 stories over the railyard--a smaller scale than the Atlantic Yards plan. Had the railyard been put out to bid earlier, other projects might have emerged.

Gardner continues:
But the project has many equally trendy defenders. Herbert Muschamp, the former New York Times architecture critic, declared that "Brooklyn Atlantic Yards is the most important piece of urban design New York has seen since the Battery Park City master plan was produced in 1979." Behind him are some of the most powerful voices in city and state government, from Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki to the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, who are all positively tipsy with visions of development and job creation.

It's not clear how Marty Markowitz, whose initial impetus for the development was to recruit a pro sports team to repair the loss of the Dodgers in 1957, counts as trendy. And the elected officials and Gardner should sober up about the claims of job creation.

Gardner continues:
Peripheral to both camps are extremists of one sort or another. On one side are the type of people - Andrea Peyser of the New York Post comes to mind - who are in favor of the development mainly because they dislike Steve Buscemi and the indie film scene; on the other are those who decry the development because they hate their parents and because Governor Pataki wears a tie. I exaggerate, of course, but you get my point.

Actually, his point is hard to get. Many of the people who "decry the development" are associated with DDDB, or groups that are generally aligned with DDDB. He's just pulling out the old NIMBY claim.

Misdescribing the site

Then Gardner sets up a false choice:
My sympathies incline slightly toward the builders, or at least, slightly away from their opponents, since I find it difficult to imagine that the already scarified fabric of Brooklyn will be further aggrieved by replacing the massive rail yards that now occupy the site to be developed. Furthermore, it is hard to buy the argument that this is or could ever be a small-town setting when it abuts the Atlantic Avenue Station; with the Long Island Rail Road and 10 subway lines running through it, this is the third busiest hub in New York City's mass transit system.

Of course there's a good argument for development over the rail yard site, but the 8.3-acre site is hardly equivalent to the 22-acre footprint proposed by Forest City Ratner.

FCR's Stuckey, DDDB's Goldstein in shadow debate on Brian Lehrer Show

A segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC radio yesterday, titled Can't See the Forest, wasn't a real debate about the newly released models of the Atlantic Yards project, just a chance for Jim Stuckey of Forest City Ratner and then Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn to make their points--and to be questioned by the host (right).

As might be expected, there was little agreement, though Lehrer at least established that the project would be in Prospect Heights, not Downtown Brooklyn (as the developer maintains) and that the debate is between very high-rise development and high-rise development, not high-rise vs. low-rise (as the New York Times suggested).

Stuckey repeatedly maintained--to a skeptical Lehrer--that the recent scaleback was significant, and that the project had to be as big as proposed because of the costs of development at the railyard site. Stuckey seemed resistant to the carrot offered by legislators, including project supporter Roger Green, to scale it down by one-third. He disparaged the proposal by rival developer Extell and--in a newly-emerging tactic for the developer--emphasized the affordable housing aspects of the plan. ("Jobs, Housing, & Hoops" has been downplayed since the number of jobs was slashed.) He claimed that the developer takes "risks," even though there was no RFP for the railyard for 18 months. He again compared the Atlantic Yards project to the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning, although there's been no rezoning for the former. And he used a statistic about Floor Area Ratio (FAR) that seems dubious.

Goldstein, who came after Stuckey, had the advantage in rebuttal, but it would have been interesting to hear them debate. Then again, as Goldstein observed, FCR and Gehry have resisted meeting community critics. Goldstein shrugged at the recent scaleback. He pointed out that FCR has kept its cost projections secret, thus making the Extell comparison murky. He cited the recent growth in public support for DDDB. Finally, he pulled a trump card, arguing that, given the developer's recent deceptive tower-free brochure--which has galvanized a lot of Brooklynites--FCR obviously has something to hide.

The transcript

Below is a complete transcript, except for the omission of some incidental words and greetings, with some analysis interpolated.

Brian Lehrer: Right now, the debate over the big new development plans for Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, which has entered another phase, with the release last week of a new version of the project by the Forest City Ratner Corporation and their architect, Frank Gehry. It is somewhat smaller, but still includes 16 high-rise buildings plus the arena for the Nets, so the question remains: Is this scale in harmony with the parts of Brownstone Brooklyn that are right nearby? Is it unacceptably out of harmony, or is it OK if the scale and definition of harmony simply change? We will get two views, later from a leading neighborhood opponent of the plan. Right now, from Jim Stuckey, who is with Forest City Ratner, he’s actually the president of the Atlantic Yards Development Group.

Note that Lehrer called the neighborhood Prospect Heights, not Downtown Brooklyn. (May 2006 plan above at right; July 2005 plan below at right.)

The scaleback--how significant?

First, what’s changed in the latest version of the plan and why should people like it better than the old one?

JS: Well, I think a number of things have changed. I think that Frank Gehry was intentional when he was sculptural in terms of how he reduced the plan. The overall plan has dropped about a half-million square feet. And where there were significant changes in both height and in terms of the density of some of the buildings was particularly where you spoke of, Brian, along the brownstone neighborhoods, or in proximity to them. So for example, one building was dropped 165 feet, that building bordered on the Park Slope neighborhood. Another building in close proximity was dropped 70 feet. Site 5 was dropped 54 feet. And the width of the towers were also made significantly smaller to bring those towers more into conformity with the residential neighborhood.

Still, as I wrote, would a 322 foot building be any more in context with a low-rise neighborhood than a 487-foot building?

BL: But are they still towers? You’re still talking about dropping something 50 feet? Is that 50 out of 2000, or what is it?

JS: It’s not 50 out of 2000. It was 50 from 400. In the case of 165, it was dropped from 487 feet. I think what’s important about this plan is that we’re putting density and the taller buildings, where density belongs, which is at the Atlantic Terminal railyard, where you already have tall buildings, where you have office buildings and where planning associations, for decades around the country, have said that, if you’re going to build any kind of density, you always want to do it where you have mass transportation. This is an old-age planning principle, it’s not something new that we’re doing here.

Stuckey undoubtedly meant "age-old" rather than "old-age" and he's right. The question is: how tall is tall? Miss Brooklyn is 620 feet--and much bigger than the Williamsburg Savings Bank, despite the deceptive rendering from Forest City Ratner at right, as Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab pointed out. Two tall towers--the bank and the Bank of New York--are north of Atlantic, as is one anomalous public housing tower a few blocks east. The planned tower at Site 5, which borders a rowhouse street, depends on a development bonus.

BL: The New York Times last week noted Frank Gehry, the architect, had previously said it would be scaled back significantly, but was more elusive in his presentation last week, saying only he was paring back the design. So how different is this really, and again, when you’re talking about 400 feet versus 350 feet high, it’s still adding towers to what was more of a low-rise neighborhood, isn’t it?

JS: It’s really putting tall buildings where tall buildings should be, which is adjacent to mass transportation. I don’t think Frank was elusive at all. Frank spent over an hour, going through, in excruciating detail, the planning principles that he and Laurie Olin, our landscape architect, have used in order to develop this plan. He talked about where the buildings meet the residential neighborhoods and how they were lower. He talked about how they were taller against the mass transportation. He talked about the need to create a skyline. But he also talked about the need of having buildings that create active street life along Atlantic Avenue where today you have nothing but a big gash in the road, where the Long Island Rail Road trains are. So basically, he talked about fitting and helping to bring neighborhoods together that, for over 100 years, have been separated by the railyards.

Well, not all the tall buildings are adjacent to mass transit, and any development over the railyard could serve to knit the neighborhoods. Ratner than creating a superblock by demapping Pacific Street, the community-derived UNITY plan, and the bid by rival developer Extell (based on, but not completely conforming to, UNITY Plan principles) would extend streets from Fort Greene and create more street life.

Scaling back the project by a third?

BL: I understand that a group of Brooklyn legislators said just yesterday that it would try to force your company to scale back the project by about a third. Assemblyman James Brennan, Democrat from Brooklyn, and five colleagues, including vocal arena supporter, Assemblyman Roger Green, are introducing a bill that would cut the size of the project to 6 million square feet from currently nearly 9 million and, in exchange, it would slash the amount that you’d have to pay to the MTA to buy and prepare the site. Can you confirm that you’ve received that proposal and give me a reaction to it?

JS: Y’know, we’ve seen the proposal and I’m gonna say that we’re studying it. I will tell you that the important thing to note here and I think this is true for all proposals that purport to have you do less density. I know there’s someone on who’s going to talk after me about the so-called community proposal that would have less density. In many ways, those proposals are a ruse. In order to develop on the site, one has to spend $600 million on infrastructure before you could put a shovel in the ground for a residential building or for the arena. You have to build railyards, you have to build subway connections, the platform, retaining walls, you have to relocate sewers. It’s $50 million alone just for the cost of cleaning up the environment. The site today is not a very clean site. You put all that together, as well as you look the cost to assemble land, you get close to $900 million. On top of that, we’ve committed and we’re holding to our commitment, that our rental apartments, we’re going to do 4500 rental apartments, half of which are going to be affordable and middle income rental apartments, where no one pays more than 30% of their annual household income to live, that’s a very, very significant commitment. And the problem, when you want to build that type of commitment, when you want to meet the needs of thousands of families who are living throughout Brooklyn in particular, but you have to start off with $600 million in infrastructure, it makes it a very, very complicated project, which also demands that there be a certain amount of density.

But without seeing FCR's pro forma financial projections, as Extell provided, it's hard to judge that claim. And noted that, while the quantity of affordable housing is significant, some affordable housing groups are also wary of the deal as a whole and wonder if it's the best way to provide such housing. The cost of the project is driven by other issues, including the most expensive arena ever, the fees of a marquee architect like Gehry, and FCR's expenditures in buying property as well as the silence of those property owners.

AY vs. Downtown Brooklyn rezoning

Lehrer kept pressing Stuckey, and Stuckey came back with his Floor Area Ratio argument, which deserved rebuttal.

BL: But again, on the scope and what it means. I’m just looking at some stats, from our news department and, if you’re trying to portray the announcement last week as some significant scaling back, I’ve got it as, you scale back from 9.2 million square feet total to 8.7 million square feet, which wouldn’t seem like a significant change or, put another way, from 550 total stories to 527 total stories. Are we supposed to think this is a big deal?

JS: I think that you have to look not in numbers but in the way that the project was scaled back. The Floor Area Ratio or the FAR, which is a common way of looking at zoning in New York City, for this project is a FAR of roughly 8. Whereas if you look at the plan that was just approved adjacent to it by the City Council, it was for an FAR of 10 in many instances and, in fact, they have buildings in that plan the City Council just approved last year, that were as tall--600 feet tall as well. So this plan, when you look at it overall, is actually smaller than that plan, because you must also look at the fact that this square footage is being built over 22 acres of land, which is a very significant amount of land. It would be one thing is you said, ‘Gee, we’re going to put 8 million square feet in five acres of land or six acres of land.” In our case, it’s 22 acres of land. And the perspective, especially along the residential neighborhood, has been brought way down. So it’s not just the 500,000 square feet, it’s the way that Frank Gehry has sculpted it, and the way that he’s shaped it so as to bring it in proximity to the residential neighborhoods around it.

Note that the rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn went through the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), which involved significant public input, while the Atlantic Yards plan proceeds under the auspices of the state Empire State Development Corporation, which can override zoning. Moreover, his calculations on FAR can be disputed, since, by taking city streets, the developer gets to calculate the density against a larger footprint.

Architect Jonathan Cohn did some recalculations yesterday, and observed that, even using the developer's own numbers, the FAR would be 9--and that by adjusting for the taking of streets, the FAR would be even higher, perhaps 10.5 Cohn also pointed out that the much-ballyhooed open space--a topic that didn't come up--actually provides much less than city guidelines suggest for the population that would live at the project.

Back to the politics

BL: And what do you make politically of Assemblyman Roger Green, who has been a vocal supporter, and I should say this was first reported by the Daily News on Saturday, now calling for the project to be scaled down by a third?

JS: I think that Roger, as well as many other elected officials, have always seen the benefits of the plan, and have always looked for ways of trying to bring all of the parties together. But I also think that most elected officials understand that there’s a huge cost to build a railyard, it comes out to be about $183 million, on top of the land that we’re buying from the MTA, on top of the platform, on top of cleaning up the site for $50 million. Unfortunately, if you want to build on this site, the infrastructure costs and the land costs are so significant that it does require that you build to a certain scale.

Again, that requires more public scrutiny.

Building over the Atlantic Center mall

BL: There’s something else that I want to ask you about, that it’s not specifically this, but opponents are circulating a new charge that the company plans to build new towers above the Atlantic Center mall, another of your properties. So are you planning to include towers over the Atlantic mall, it’s not included in this proposal that I know of.

It wasn't a charge; I merely pointed out that, not only does Forest City Ratner have the right to develop at the mall site, the plans appear to be in process. If so, then the cumulative development should be considered along with the Atlantic Yards plan. But Stuckey scoffed.

JS: It’s an interesting thing, because those who oppose the project sort of bring things out and recreate them every six months or so. We’ve had the rights to build over the Atlantic Center mall going back for years. In fact, when we signed the Atlantic Yards Memorandum of Understanding, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build over the Atlantic Center mall as well. And in fact, if you were to go on some of their web sites, you would see that six months or eight months or a year ago, this was a new discovery that they made six months or eight months or a year ago. I guess what they’re doing, because there’s really not a lot we can talk about. They really don’t want to confront the issue of affordable housing, and the fact that we desperately need housing and creating jobs here, and creating housing here. So what they do is they dust off the year-old press release and they recirculate it again. The fact is that this was studied in the Downtown Brooklyn plan’s EIS. When the City Council voted for it, that Environmental Impact Statement with the overbuild for Atlantic Center was in that EIS, there was an MOU that was signed, it was signed in February of ‘05, so well over a year ago, that discussed what we were doing over the Atlantic Center as well, or what we could do.

Actually, as Stuckey's final phrase acknowledged, the MOU discussed "what we could do," not what what the developer was doing. Also note how Stuckey stumbled somewhat over the issue of "creating jobs." Because the job figures have shrunk significantly--the developer once promised 10,000 office jobs, but now promises 2500--the project is being pitched more for its provision of affordable housing.

BL: So is that additional square footage and additional stories in addition to what we were talking about before?

JS: It’s basically as of right square footage. It’s the air rights that have existed there for probably the last 40 years that’s being discussed. And in order to do a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement that doesn’t deceive anyone but shows everyone that we’re looking at it all in a transparent way, it will be studied in this EIS.

Even though Stuckey didn't directly answer, it is additional square footage in the area, though not directly part of the Atlantic Yards plan.

Bottom line

BL: We have about two minutes left before the spokesman for the opponents comes on. The bottom line seems to be, a lot of people support your plan because of the jobs it will create, and because of the affordable housing that you’ve agreed to be part of the plan. But opponents still object on the level of density: do we have to have this much density, they ask, in a traditionally low-rise neighborhood, to have jobs and affordable housing? And so let me ask you: Does it need to be this dense? Or that just your company trying to maximize profit when you could do it smaller and still make plenty of money?

While Lehrer suggested that people support the plan because of jobs, the actual numbers aren't clear. The construction unions, and some specific groups in Brooklyn cite jobs, but that's logical--some of the groups will directly benefit. The project is not nearly the job-creation engine that was claimed at the outset. Provisions for training of local residents were part of the UNITY plan as well.

FCR's 'risks'

JS: I think when we responded to the RFP with the MTA, there was only one other proposal, and that proposal fell short in many, many different ways. So there weren’t lots of developers out there who take the risks that we take in terms of infrastructure, in terms of affordable housing.

Take the risks? Forest City Ratner only responded to the RFP after negotiating exclusively with the agency for 18 months, and then gave a lowball bid of $50 million, while Extell bid $150 million. The MTA then agreed to negotiate exclusively with FCR, which doubled its bid--which was still less than the appraised value of $214 million. Note that Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute observed that Ratner's risks in previous projects have been hedged: "The sad truth is that Forest City Ratner's previous Brooklyn real estate projects have not been economically viable without substantial government subsidies."

The Extell bid

BL: Let me jump in. Because the opponents of the project say there is this alternative plan from the developer Extell, which they say is much more respectful of the scale of the neighborhood. It’s still 11 buildings ranging up to 28 stories, but they say they see the debate between Extell’s high rise and your very high rise, not between high rise and nothing.

That's not to say opponents should treat Extell like the Holy Grail--it was the only plan to emerge during a small window of opportunity, after Forest City Ratner clearly had the inside track. (DDDB sent the information to a host of developers.) Had there been an RFP at the beginning, surely more plans would've emerged.

JS: Yes, but Extell plan didn’t work. It shows returns of about 2 percent. It has open space up in the air. It basically would not have met the MTA’s needs for replacing the railyards, the 72 cars that would’ve been there, it would’ve only replaced 30 cars. It didn’t meet the parking requirements of the plan. So it was really--it wasn’t really a plan. It was something that was put in, where they admittedly said themselves they had spent about two weeks looking at this. It was not in my judgment a serious propsal. And I think that when one does a serious proposal, and looks at what it takes to develop the infrastructure and the kind of development that gets done here, you basically come to different conclusions. Just to go back to your question, I believe very simply that we’re going through a process now. The process has just about to begin. We have spent two years going out and meeting with the community. I myself have had probably 150 or so meetings with different community groups to get their input. And we’ve heard them, we’ve made a lot of changes to this plan, and now the process will begin. And we’re hoping that we’ll see this project come out the way we begin it.

Note that Stuckey agreed that it's a debate between two versions of high-rise development, not high-rise vs. low-rise. The ratio of parking spaces to apartments is similar to that in the Atlantic Yards plan. As for Stuckey's other criticisms, who's to say that Extell--or another bidder--couldn't have refined their bid after negotiations with the MTA, just as Forest City Ratner doubled its railyard offer from $50 million to $100 million after the MTA agreed to exclusive negotiations with the developer. Stuckey's numbers concerning Extell deserve further discusson. Goldstein (below) takes on the issue of Forest City Ratner's meetings with the community.

Goldstein of DDDB

BL: We just heard from Jim Stuckey of Forest City Ratner. Now I’ll hear what the opponents of Atlantic Yards development have to say. Daniel Goldstein is my guest for this, founder of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, or DDDB. [Goldstein is a founder, not the founder.] He is dogged in this campaign. Daniel has been on the show before; after we booked him on this, he sent four detailed emails over the weekend, with points he hoped I’d bring up with the Atlantic Yards guests. Comparative photos, including of the building he lives in, and lots of lots of links, to keep me reading for as many hours as I was willing. Win or lose, Daniel Goldstein is giving this fight his all, without the deep pockets of the developer’s company.

Your reaction to the newest Gehry designs?

DG: There’s not a lot to say about the new Gehry designs, because they’re basically the same as the old designs. The buildings look a little bit different, I’m holding up a picture here for you. You can see that the look and feel is different, but you can see the placements are the same, the heights are nearly the same. As Mr. Stuckey told you, there’s not a significant reduction.

BL: But let me use your own words. Because what Jim Stuckey was emphasizing that the look and feel are different, so the effect is to harmonize much more with the neighborhood.

DG: I just mean that the look and feel disharmonizes as the last plan did that was produced a year ago. The project, when announced, was 8 million square feet in December ‘03. Today’s it’s about 8.7. So that’s a scaling up, as I see it. What happened in the interim is there was a scaling up to 9.1, and it’s come down from there.

Goldstein could have acknowledged that there has been an attempt, at four buildings on Dean Street, to reduce the street walls to 50 to 90 feet, with setbacks to the north of at least 60 to 70 feet. Still, the four buildings would range from 184 to 287 feet, which aren't exactly low-rise. As the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate pointed out: [Gehry] does make a few token gestures to fit into the borough, however, but they definitely are tokens.

Back to Atlantic Center

DG: He glossed over the three towers over the Atlantic Center mall. No, that’s not new news, but what is new news is those three towers are shown on some of their models. But they don’t discuss that those three towers will bring the entire project area up to nearly 10 million square feet. Yet those three towers are not a serious part of the review that will take place.

BL: Explain that to me: is that somewhere else, or is that part of this project?

DG: It is not part of this project, but it’s directly across the street, so it should be part of the project. He’s right that they had those air rights already, but they’re hiding the fact that, in addition to their 8.6 million square foot project, they plan another 1.25 right across the street, which should be part of the same review process, but isn’t.

Gehry & the community

BL: Let me play a clip for you, of the architect Frank Gehry, this is from an interview on the New York Times web site. He talks about the process that he’s been involved with, regarding the community:
"I think there's been lot of give and take and learning, with Planning and us, and talking back and forth, meeting with them, working with them, responding to their criticisms and their ideas, and—-And developing relationships that they asked for, and which we respected and honored and agreed with."

You get the idea. Gehry, with his reputation, says he’s been involved in dealing with the community and trying to respect the wishes of much of the community in terms of his design.

DG: Well, that’s an easy one. Because Frank Gehry has never met with anyone from the community. As he said, he’s met with Forest City Ratner, and City Planning. But as far as meeting the community, I know that many people have sent letters to Mr. Gehry asking to meet with him. Some people have asked him in person at different events. He’s always said sure, but it’s never happened.

BL: So he’s referring, and I see it, technically in the wording, he’s referring to the company meeting with the community, not as an individual.

DG: I’m not sure what he’s referring to. As far as the company meeting with the community, they do that in controlled settings. For example, they’ve been invited to numerous panels where you have a variety of opinions, and they have always refused to do that. They only present when they control the situation. Mr. Gehry also said in a Daily News interview that came out yesterday, that the tallest building—there are 16 skyscrapers, or towers, from 20 to 60 stories, averaging 35 stories. The tallest is 620 feet, 100 feet higher than the Williamsburgh bank building. He said in that interview—and they branded that building Miss Brooklyn—he said he calls that his ego trip. Well, we call that a disaster. We should not in our community have to deal with somebody’s ego trip, whether it’s Frank Gehry or anybody else.

BL: He also, though, as you noted on your web site, refers to himself as a liberal and a do-gooder. So he’s somebody who at least claims to hold these values. Do you think that the history of Frank Gehry’s work does not support that contention and does not lend some credibility to this project?

DG: I don’t know what he’s talking about when he says he’s a liberal do-gooder. He may see himself that way, and apparently he does. Certainly getting involved in this project and being the starchitect that his client can use to sell the project, a project that is not democratic or accountable or transparent or honest, I don’t see how he can view himself that way on this project.

DDDB's advisory board

BL: Daniel, your group had a major announcement recently, too. You now have a celebrity-studded advisory board. Who are some of those boldface names who’ve signed on to your cause?

DG: Well, you’re right, I think this week, or the last two weeks, have been a turning point, in the debate that’s going on. Proponents of the project want to marginalize our organization, the 53 community groups that are opposed to or are concerned about this project, and say that it’s a bunch of NIMBYs complaining like they always do.

Well, we have 33 famous, prominent, influential, mainly Brooklynites, 26 are Brooklynites. Obviously, the media pays attention to the celebrity names, like Rosie Perez, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Jonathan Lethem, these are all people who actually live in the area, and certainly should have a voice to say what they think. We couldn’t be more proud and excited that these 33 people have joined us.

But it’s the lesser-known names to the world, that in my view are very important. And I’m talking about a woman like Evelyn Ortner, she and her husband, Everett Ortner, are responsible for saving Park Slope from destruction in the 60s and 70s. She also sits on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We have Francis Morrone, who is the architectural historian of Brooklyn, on our board. We have Susette Kelo, famous for the Kelo vs. New London case of eminent domain in the Supreme Court. We have Bob Law, who is a community activist and radio personality and business owner in the area. Major Owens, who is stopping down as Congressman for that district.

Race, class, & cost

BL: But a lot of elected officials are on the other side, including those who have come out of grassroots communities themselves, and there are those on the other side who say there’s a basic class issue here. A lot of black and Latino and working-class Brooklynites support this, despite maybe some reservations, because of the jobs and affordable housing, but the more privileged brownstone Brooklyn wants its pristine nature preserved. Are your new celebrity backers evidence of this?

While that may be the perception, the evidence is mixed. Organized groups from minority communities (ACORN, BUILD) support the project, but they may have the inside track to some specific benefits--or may already be funded by Forest City Ratner. That skews public perception, as does the significant support from some (mostly non-minority) labor unions.

DG: That’s a canard. The opposition to this project cuts across racial and class lines. We have on our side, the South Brooklyn Legal Services, who represent low-income tenants, we have the Fifth Avenue Committee, who represent that same low-income tenants and workers, we have the Pratt Area Community Council, who does the same. We have a group of black local ministers, who take the same view as we do. We have people living in the footprint who have lived there for generations and are rent-stabilized or rent-controlled tenants. The debate over Atlantic Yards is not a debate about race or class, it’s a debate about sensible development versus destructive development, which, by the way, this plan, something Mr. Stuckey didn’t talk about it, from our calculations, right now, would cost the public $1.9 billion. If you don’t believe our numbers, we stand by them, the developer himself says $1.1 billion.

Indeed, the public benefits from this or any other development should be measured against the direct subsidies and public costs.

Stuckey vs. Extell

BL: Let me ask you about what Mr. Stuckey said about the alternative plan, the Extell plan, he said profit margins would be only two percent, so it’s not a real plan, there’s no provision for the railyards, so it’s not a real plan, there’s no provision for parking, so it’s not a real plan. And they even acknowledge that this isn’t a real plan, it’s just an outline or a blueprint for something they might be able to flesh out, given the opportunity.

DG: It’s funny, because he’s talking about the financial plan of Extell, which outbid Ratner to the MTA $150 million to originally $50 million for those 8.4 acre railyards. What Mr. Stuckey didn’t say is that his company has never released publicly any financial projections for the project. So we have no idea about the question you asked: Well, is this about you making a little profit or a bigger profit. The Extell plan is and was a serious plan. He said they prepared it in two weeks, well of course they did, because the MTA issued an RFP with a 45-day turnaround period. Even though Forest City Ratner had been discussing the project for two years with the MTA, they brought in a lowball bid of $50 million. The Extell plan publicly produced 20 pages of pro forma financial projections. And I’m not sure about that two percent margin, but I don’t think Extell would have proposed the plan had it had that small a margin.

Security questions

Lehrer opened up the phones. Two of the three callers have long been involved in the debate.

Alan Rosner in Brooklyn: My concerns have to do with the fact that this is a big security issue and right now I’m concerned about—Stuckey talking about how his company takes risks. I’m concerned because I see risks as distributed throughout all the surrounding neighborhoods, because insurance companies will start looking at this oversize project next to the Atlantic railroad terminal and say, this is a security risk. They either won’t cover my small home, or they’ll raise my premiums, and that’s already happened to a small business on the Upper East Side, who had their workers’ compensation insurance renewal refused.

BL: So you think your homeowner’s insurance might go up, as a result of this project—

AR: Absolutely

BL: --because it would be target for terrorists?

AR: In 1997, the Atlantic [subway] terminal was already a target for terrorists. They’ve acknowledged this because they got rid of under-arena parking because of its security risk.

BL: Daniel, briefly on this.

DG: Alan’s right, there needs to be a full security slash terrorism review of this project before it comes to its final approval if it gets--

BL: Do you have evidence of homeowner's insurance going up in anticipation of this project?

DG: I don’t have evidence of this. I know Alan has researched this.

BL: Alan, if you can do it in a soundbite.

AR: I can do it in a soundbite, and I can do it indirectly. Allstate Insurance Co., because of Hurricane Katrina, is no longer accepting for new policies for homeowners insurance, because they want to reduce their overall risk, and therefore, why wouldn’t the same thing happen to other insurance companies, who want to reduce their overall risk in the borough of Brooklyn for properties adjacent to this property.

BL: Alan, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you very much. I take it you’ve worked together.

DG: I know Alan. Alan is talking about security and homeowners insurance as risks. This entire project is about private profit and public risk. And I’m talking about financial and environmental overall.

Transit issues

BL: Here’s another Alan in Brooklyn, who I think takes the opposite tack.

Alan: I guess my position is more about how this is approached than whether it’s done or not. There’s never been active public discussion about the idea of transit benefit zones to finance existing and new transit lines. Your prior advocate of the project admitted this project was desirable because of transit access. But who pays for that? It’s subsidized by the government, so by building this immense development there, they’re going to be creating a private windfall extending over many decades while the public will be continuing to subsidize the operation of the subways and Long Island Rail Road.

BL: Obviously, this is not what I thought you were going to say, but you make a point--

DG: He’s right, especially in that that subway hub, prior to this project being announced, went under a years-long renovation, without this project in mind. This project is addition to 40 million square feet of development proposed and rezoned for the downtown area.

Back to the politics

BL: What do you think, Daniel, of the Roger Green proposal, a longtime supporter of the proposal, as an assemblman representing part of the area, now he says no, they should scale it back, from about 9 million square to 6 million square feet and, in exchange for that, they wouldn’t have to pay the MTA so much.

DG: I think it shows two things. It shows that we’re not the only ones who say this project is too big. But that bill is based on some very false premises. One is that the Ratner bid to the MTA was $450 million. The MTA doesn’t say that. The MTA says it was $100 million. So that bill, although a slight step in the right direction, would actually throw 750 million more dollars to the developer through a discount on the MTA price, probably free, and $15 million per year for affordable housing over 30 years. That’s $750. That bill does show there is political movement to scale the project down, but they need to refine it, because it’s based on some false premises.

Beyond the scale

BL: Would that be a significant scaling back, one that satisfy you if it went down by a third, from 9 million to 6 million total square feet?

DG: Absolutely not. The problems with the project are not just the scale. At 6 million square feet, it would be too big. The problems are that that bill would implicitly support the use of eminent domain to build an arena and the 16 towers. It also would throw, as I said, more money at the developer. But it is significant in that there is now political movement to scale it down.

This sets up a potential wedge between politicians like Assemblywoman Joan Millman, who has opposed the project in its present form, and groups like DDDB, who seem much less willing to compromise.

A union rep on jobs

BL: Anthony in Brooklyn.

Anthony Pugliese: First of all, I’d like to knock down the terrorist idea, because the terrorists—it was not looking to go after Brooklyn, it’s New York City. And on that the same premise, if the idea was, well, if they build these buildings, we’re going to be under attack. Well, they’d be building the same buildings that Extell is going to build. So Daniel’s analogy of, well, if Ratner builds this, the terrorists are going to come in, the terrorists have an idea to bring fear into the hearts of all New Yorkers and all the freethinking people of the world.

Well, yes, Extell or any other developer would build tall buildings. But the presence of an arena--a topic hardly discussed--would add another level of risk to be evaluated, which was Rosner's point, not Goldstein's.

This project is going to create tax revenue for New York City. For every schoolteacher that we need, for every police offer, for every fireman that we need to increase, we need jobs that create tax revenue. Right along where Daniel lives, in his community, there are developers right now, that are developing Brooklyn, market-rate housing, with no opportunity for the young people of the projects to grow and develop. No opportunity to get job training through state-certified apprenticeship programs. These people are undermining what’s really good about America, which means allowing people with a high school diploma or GED to better themselves. Forest City Ratner has that record, of dealing with contractors that have--

Note that Pugliese associated jobs with tax revenue, rather than... housing.

BL: Anthony, I have to ask you, since you invoke Forest City Ratner by name, do you work for them? Are you paid for them in any way?

AP: I do not work for them. I am not paid for them. I am a union rep. I represent people who have union jobs that pay taxes, and I see every day why the other people in the community of Brooklyn, the developers right along side that are developing Brooklyn, as we speak, where workers have no unemployment insurance, where workers have no medical coverage, when a worker gets hurt, Daniel, myself, and you, if you live in New York, foot the bill.

Pugliese makes an important point; there are lots of developments in Brooklyn that avoid union labor. But any developer at the railyard site could be pressured to use union labor.

Goldstein responds

DG: Let me get to one thing. Anthony’s wrong.

BL: He’s talking jobs, jobs, jobs, and affordable housing.

DG: Twelve percent of the housing, affordable housing, is for people who make the median income in Brooklyn or below. The rest of the so-called affordable housing is above that. There are 4610 luxury units in this project. Two weeks ago, Forest City Ratner mailed 100,000 of these 12-page, full color brochures, I don’t know if you got one, well you don’t live in Brooklyn. If you look at it--

Lehrer had apparently been prepped, and Goldstein brought a visual aid.

BL: No pictures of towers.

DG: Pictures of brownstones. No pictures of this plan, which they clearly had, this new plan, because they released it the next week. Now, what are they trying to hide? What they’re trying to hide is their project, because they know that it is a dud.

BL: Daniel Goldstein from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, we heard earlier from Jim Stuckey from the Forest City Ratner corporation. This debate goes on. Daniel, in five seconds, what’s the next step?

DG: Go to DevelopDon’tDestroy.org and come to the Dan Zanes concert on June 3 at the Hanson Place Methodist Church at 11 a.m. You can buy tickets at DevelopDon’tDestroy.org.

Hidden in plain sight: new towers over the Atlantic Center mall

Even as calls continue to downsize the Atlantic Yards plan, there are strong hints that Forest City Ratner plans additional towers--perhaps three of 30 stories each--across Atlantic Avenue, on the site of the Atlantic Center mall. That could represent a nearly 15% increase on top of the 8.659 million square feet of development in the Atlantic Yards plan.

The evidence: three Atlantic Center towers appear in at least one model of the plan shown at the press conference last Thursday, held, ironically enough, at Atlantic Center. The mall, shaped like a fattened and modified "L," is right above the arena, across Atlantic Avenue and just east of the Atlantic Terminal mall. No one apparently raised the issue, but maybe this was why the developer was so resistant to scrutiny. (The photo of last year's model is above, published this week by the Courier-Life chain, but both models were on display at the press conference.)

The current scale model, at right, also includes towers over the Atlantic Center mall. Only two are visible in the perspective of the photo (right) shot by the New York Times, but it's possible that another was obscured. (Note that the latest model lacks the ball at the top of the lead skyscraper, Miss Brooklyn, and also has a green covering on top of the arena.)

The close-up, at right, shows one Atlantic Center tower to the right of Miss Brooklyn, while another, with setbacks, is to its left. The boxy tower in partial view at the left frame of the photo is apparently the Bank of New York tower over the Atlantic Terminal mall.

Why it matters

While the two developments would be technically separate, and FCR already has development rights for the Atlantic Center site (see below), the Atlantic Center plans deserve consideration in tandem with the Atlantic Yards project, because local elected officials are already saying Atlantic Yards would be too big and should be taken down a third.

Note that the Atlantic Center towers do not appear in Frank Gehry's rendering of the plan at right--the boxy tower between Miss Brooklyn at center and the new tower at Site 5 is the Bank of New York tower over the Atlantic Terminal mall. Nor did they appear in the rendering published last July on the front page of the New York Times.

However, a rendering of the Atlantic Yards Architectural Plan, on Forest City Ratner's AtlanticYards.com web site, may show towers--albeit smaller than in the models--over the Atlantic Center mall site, at far left in the cropped image at left. (The perspective is murky.) It's reasonable to speculate that the developer would tear down the mall for a new Frank Gehry design rather than build on top of it, given the construction demands; also, even Bruce Ratner has said the mall is "not up to snuff."

Back of the envelope

(The Atlantic Center mall is directly above the arena in the layout below.)

Given that no one's discussed this publicly, and Forest City Ratner doesn't answer my questions, I can't be sure, but here are some rough estimates on the maximum size of the towers. If you subtract the 850,000 square foot arena from the 8.659 million square foot Atlantic Yards plan, that leaves 7.809 million square feet for 16 towers (mostly residential, with office, retail, and hotel space).

Those 16 towers represent a total of 5623 feet in height, or 351 feet per building. From the total of 7.809 million square feet, each 351-foot building would yield about 488,000 square feet. That represents about 1390 square feet per foot of building height.

At Atlantic Center, Forest City Ratner retains 1.258 million square feet of development rights. Divide that figure by 1390 square feet (which represents one foot of building height), and that yields 905 feet of building height. That suggests that each of three buildings could be taller than 300 feet.

Gehry's hint: 20 buildings

In a public interview session in January, architect Gehry said, "There are some 20 buildings to be built, and the client insisted that I do them all."

Gehry's statement led listeners to wonder if he was just being vague--the announced total was 17--or whether he was revealing something inadvertently. Maybe it was the latter. The total would be 20 if three towers at Atlantic Center were added to the arena and 16 towers in the Atlantic Yards plan. And it certainly would be a selling point for Forest City Ratner if they could advertise additional Gehry buildings.

It's in the MOU

As noted, a second, unreleased Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed last year and unearthed by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, describes plans for the mall site and Site 5 across Flatbush Avenue, currently the home of P.C. Richard/Modell's.

The MOU indicates that FCR would develop up to 875,000 square feet of commercial space and up to 711,000 square feet of residential space at the Atlantic Center site (for a total of 1.586 million square feet), minus, if the Atlantic Yards project proceeds, 328,272 square feet that would be transferred to Site 5. That would leave 1.258 million square feet of new development rights at the Atlantic Center site, currently home to 393,713 square foot mall.

The transfer to Site 5 would more than double the size of the development rights there. The MOU also would allow the use of eminent domain on Site 5, where a 350-foot tower (at right in the rendering below) would be constructed. The Bank of New York tower is at left, over the Atlantic Terminal mall.

"Super... great," says the Daily News (no surprise)

The Daily News editorial page has staunchly supported the Atlantic Yards project, and yesterday's editorial, headlined A super design for a great project, was no surprise. It begins:
The latest designs for the Atlantic Yards development are in, and they are stunning. More than ever, this is a project that must be built - for the good of the city, for the good of Brooklyn and for the good of the thousands of working-class New Yorkers who will get affordable apartments in a spanking-new neighborhood.

There's a strong argument for density at the railyard site, and for affordable housing as part of new construction, but that doesn't equal cheerleading for the single-source Atlantic Yards plan. There's no mention, of course, of the public costs of the project, or Forest City Ratner's dubious economic projections.

About the roof

The editorial notes:
The new arena would blend into a new backdrop and be topped by 3 acres of vegetation, designed to become something of a sanctuary for migrating birds. Adding to enviro-friendliness, rainwater that falls on the 21 acres would be collected, filtered and reused, primarily in the aforementioned ponds.

First, the project would be 22 acres, not 21 acres. Second, however welcome the vegetation might be, it shouldn't be forgotten that the arena roof was originally pitched as a public park, and even Borough President Marty Markowitz was upset about the switch.

NIMBYs, right

The editorial takes on the opponents:
So what's the rub? A small number of property owners is holding out, potentially requiring the use of eminent domain if futher negotiations are fruitless. And some community activists, including chi-chi Hollywood types, think their lives in upscale abodes that are, say, a mile or so away will be crimped somehow. And in full, elitist sanctimony, they cry that the project will defile the character of Brooklyn.

The biggest concern in the community, according to a survey by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, is traffic. City Council Member David Yassky said in March that, "unless there’s a serious and concrete plan” regarding traffic, “I think the project has to be resisted on that ground alone.”

So it's hardly elitist to worry about the spillover effects from the largest development in the history of Brooklyn. After all, the Daily News was the first paper to report that several local politicians, including Atlantic Yards supporter Roger Green, want the project scaled down by a third.

And the newspaper's own Mike Lupica on the same day observed:
This remains, in broad daylight, one of the great shell games in the history of real estate in New York City.
Only the people in the neighborhood look at this thing honestly

If the project were really so super, then why did Forest City Ratner issue such a misleading brochure?

It's about the housing

The editorial makes the pitch for affordable housing:
What Brooklyn? The Brooklyn where they sip lattes, or the Brooklyn that would gain 1,800 apartments for families of four with incomes of $56,720 or less - none paying more than 30% of their income in rent. Another 450 apartments would be reserved for families with slightly higher incomes, and none of them would pay more than 30% of their incomes for rent.
That's not ruining Brooklyn, that's building a Brooklyn where real people can afford to live in decent surroundings.

But the characterization lacks perspective. There would be 2250 affordable rental units, and 2250 market-rate rentals. On top of that, there would be 2360 market-rate condos on site, plus 600 to 1000 affordable for-sale units on or offsite (likely offsite). This is, more than anything else, a luxury housing project.

And the numbers are imprecise. The income limit for those 1800 apartments would be $62,800, not $56,720. And the "slightly higher incomes" go up to six figures.

[Updated: 10/10/07: Now it would be about 1100 apartments, not 1800.)

Yes, a significant percentage of affordable housing is a good thing. However, as noted, the affordable housing represents a zoning bonus privately negotiated between Ratner and ACORN, unlike, say, in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, where the rules were set by City Council. Who decided the project should be the current size?

It was once about jobs

Finally, it's curious that the Daily News doesn't acknowledge how job projections have shrunk. On 1/25/04, an editorial stated, "Having a pro sports team relocate to Brooklyn would become the vivid emblem of the borough's renaissance while producing that most elusive treasure, jobs." Forest City Ratner likes that out-of-date quote enough to reproduce it on its web site. But that "most elusive treasure" is more elusive now.

Arena signage in a residential district: only during games?

The "party" has a curfew. While last year the proposed Brooklyn Arena was portrayed (left) with gaudy signage around it, the latest plans (right) show no such signage, and architect Frank Gehry is backpedaling in an effort to say the project would fit into the surrounding neighborhood--at least when there aren't basketball games.

A Daily News article published yesterday, headlined No neon for Nets arena, but foes still turned off, stated:
Don't expect flashy neon signs at the proposed Nets arena in Brooklyn.
Instead, developer Bruce Ratner plans to project images directly onto the glass building during games - but turn them off at other times to help it blend in with the surrounding area.
"This is more of a residential district. This would not be Times Square," architect Frank Gehry told the Daily News Editorial Board yesterday. "The question was how do you create activity at game time and have it disappear."
Ratner officials also are considering embedding light-emitting diode images into the glass that also could be turned off.

How firm is Ratner's pledge? Would they not turn signs on for the circus? The Ice Capades? A concert? Note that this was a lobbying visit to the editorial board.

Talking to Ouroussoff

On the 4/10/06 Charlie Rose show on PBS, Gehry explained it more expansively to New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff

NO: Let's be more specific--you're talking about a kind of layering--is it OK to talk about the models that I saw? We're talking about a layering around the exterior, this is around the arena in Brooklyn, it starts to peel apart, where the advertising and the facades of the buildings start to blur.

FG: So it's not there sometimes and it's there sometimes. There's a little bit of it, and there's more of it. And it can be used for community issues, as well as advertising. It has a social function, if it's played right, it can be used for art... How do you make that--everybody's getting it, whether they like it or not, it's all over us.

NO: Meaning people will have to live with this, so the question is: what can you turn it into.

FG: If I look at what Peter Arnell and I are doing right now, they're baby steps. I really think we've got to get into the technology and see where really the root of it. Y'know, LED is little tiny things, they sit on black background--it's not pretty yet. How do you turn it into something--that's the trick. And maybe there's something other than LED.

Light pollution?

Would the signage cause enough glare to be considered light pollution? At a hearing at Borough Hall in February, Borough President Marty Markowitz pointed out that the arena would bring new large-scale signage with "advertising lighting," and asked how the upcoming Draft Environmental Impact Statement would analyze it.

Panelist Michael Kwartler, an architect and planner, said the lighting might bring glare, perhaps so bright it would obscure the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. "You can either think of it as a positive or as light pollution," he added, noting that it might be helpful to pedestrians but a traffic hazard for vehicles.

Sometimes, a "party"

Interviewed at Columbia University on 10/31/05, Gehry discussed his dilemma:
[H]ow do you make buildings that fit, how do you make a new skyline, how do you develop a scale at the ground level, how do you create the opportunities, how do you fit an arena that at night brings a lot of people in, and is bright and sparky and a party, and the during the day what does that mean.
Those are all the issues, and they’re similar to the issues of my house, just at a bigger scale. I have a sense of responsibility to deliver something that’s a good neighbor. So I’m caught in this thing. And it’s a wonderful, scary place to be, I tell you. I have sleepless nights about it.

As we learn more about the proposed signage, some neighbors might worry that it too might cause sleepless nights.

Comparing AY 2005 vs. 2006--and why did the Times downplay the latest?

So what's the real change in Frank Gehry's design from July 2005 (left) to May 2006 (right)?

The New York Times, like other media outlets, reported the scaledown storyline: But in an hourlong presentation, Frank Gehry, the project's architect, and Laurie Olin, its landscape designer, emphasized details that they said would harmonize the project's scale with the neighborhoods it would border.

The Times did lead off by saying that the current model looks a lot like its predecessor. But you really need to see the two juxtaposed, which is what some others realized first--Matthew Schuerman in the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate had them front and center, then concluded of the overall plan: He does make a few token gestures to fit into the borough, however, but they definitely are tokens.

And blogger Dope on the Slope observed, Wow!!! The difference is so... so... Negligible.



2005 vs. 2006

Will people be stirred to concern, as they were when the Times 7/5/05 published a front page story (Instant Skyline Added to Brooklyn Arena Plan) about the project, complete with the arresting image of those tilted buildings? A day later, on 7/6/05, a followup article containing more than 1000 words (Brooklynites Take In a Big Development Plan, and Speak Up) summarized the response: "The new designs set off a range of emotions, from fury and disbelief to skepticism to a few notes of cautious support.

(In my report, I criticized the 7/5/05 article for naively suggesting that a skyline had been added, since a significant skyline had been there all along. In retrospect, however, the most important element of the article was the front-page image.)

Page B5 this time

Why wasn't this front-page news in the Times on Friday, rather than being placed on page B5? Maybe because it wasn't an exclusive, like the design revealed last year. Still, the one photo included in the print edition--of FCR's Jim Stuckey, architect Frank Gehry, and landscape architect Laurie Olin (right)--doesn't fully show the scale. Given that the Times article was headlined Developer Defends Atlantic Yards, shouldn't we see more precisely what was being defended?

There's been no followup, but news outlets owe the public a direct comparison of the two plans. As the recently-deceased A.M. Rosenthal, longtime Times executive editor, liked to say, "When something important is going on, silence is a lie."

Perhaps we'll see the two when Times architectural critical Nicolai Ouroussoff writes his appraisal. In an essay 7/5/05 (Seeking First to Reinvent the Sports Arena, and Then Brooklyn), he called the "Miss Brooklyn" tower "a delirious pileup of forms, which become a visual counterpoint to the horizontal thrust of the avenue."

ACORN's Lewis vs. three Community Boards: is one side lying?

In an article this week in the Courier-Life chain, headlined CBA Expert Casts Doubt On Atlantic Yards Deal With Local Groups, Bertha Lewis, head of the New York affiliate of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), defended the Community Benefits Agreement signed by eight groups that negotiated with developer Forest City Ratner. The article stated:
She also disputed that any group has been deliberately excluded from the process.
“People who say that groups were hand-picked are just dead wrong,” said Lewis. “People self selected in, and self selected out, as far as the Atlantic Yards is concerned.”

That's not what others say. The three Community Boards (2,6,8) in the area around the proposed project footprint on May 1 sent a letter to FCR President Bruce Ratner requesting that the developer stop claiming that the CBs participated in "crafting" the CBA. Their statement contradicts Lewis's claim of self-selection:
As you may or may not be aware, we were invited to play a limited role that ended months before the agreement was signed when some eventual signatories barred us from attending the working sessions.

Stuckey's stonewall re CBs: another detail

In an article headlined Community boards to Ratner: Stop your fibbin’, the Brooklyn Papers adds an important detail to the story on the complaint by three Community Boards that the developer has misrepresented their participation in "crafting" the Community Benefits Agreement.

The detail: The response by Forest City Ratner VP Jim Stuckey came in a statement, not an interview. In other words, Stuckey chose to dance around the question, with no opportunity to follow up.

The Brooklyn Papers reported:
While the community boards were legally prevented from being official parties [to] the CBA given their governmental responsibilities, they did play a role in the process,” he said in a statement.
“The question here is not a newsletter that talks about an important program, but rather the very real benefits, including jobs and housing, for nearby residents.”
Stuckey didn’t say whether future mailings will be amended to reflect the community boards’ concern.

Stuckey turned the issue to the benefits claimed. That's called Changing the Subject, Tactic #4 in the Joe DePlasco handbook.

And then he Stonewalled, Tactic #5.

Remember, last November Stuckey told the New York Times: "[W]e are opening ourselves up - tremendous transparency, for two years."

At least the Brooklyn Papers, unlike the Courier-Life chain in its previous report, let us know that Stuckey wouldn't commit to editing FCR's deceptive claim.

Pols would shrink AY by a third--with some big carrots for Ratner

So it's not just locals "frightened" of change (to quote landscape architect Laurie Olin) who think the proposed Atlantic Yards project is too big. At the same time Olin and architect Frank Gehry were presenting their new designs to the press (except for me), six Brooklyn Assembly members announced a bill that would reduce the project by about a third--but give Forest City Ratner new subsidies for affordable housing.

An article today in the Daily News, headlined Pols try cutting Ratner's Yard by third, reported:
Assemblyman James Brennan (D-Brooklyn) and five Brooklyn colleagues - including vocal arena-supporter Assemblyman Roger Green - are introducing a bill that would cut the size of the project to 6 million square feet from nearly 9 million square feet.
In exchange, the bill would slash the amount Ratner has to pay to the MTA to buy and prepare the site to $140 million, down from $450 million.
The state would also pick up the tab for subsidizing the roughly 2,000 affordable apartments proposed for the site, so Ratner wouldn't have to build so big to reap a profit, Brennan said.

A Rube Goldberg affordable housing strategy

It's not clear that the affordable housing--which would already come with its own subsidies--is what's driving up the cost of the project for Forest City Ratner. Among the other costs: the most expensive arena ever, high-priced talent in Gehry and Olin, the enormous public relations expense of brochures and lobbying; and the cost of not merely purchasing properties from owners in the proposed footprint but buying their silence.

The cost components of the project--and Ratner's projected profit--remain a black box. This bill should have some public hearings attached to it.

Let's recap. Forest City Ratner gained a certain amount of political and community support for promising 50% affordable housing at the start. Then--after the affordable housing agreement was signed in May 2005 with the community group ACORN--FCR increased the size of the project. In doing so, they converted some proposed office space--which was billed as "jobs," another carrot for the project--to market-rate condos. No longer would the project be 50/50 affordable housing; it was limited to the rentals.

Last September, they announced the new numbers: 2250 market-rate rentals, 2250 affordable rentals, and 2800 market-rate condos. They've now cut 440 of the latter.

But if the goal for building over the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard was affordable housing, there were other ways to do it, starting with an RFP open to all, rather than issued 18 months after the Atlantic Yards project was announced by FCR, with its political backers.

Some more details

Some more details emerged in a longer story in the Courier-Life chain, in one edition headlined Atlantic Yds. Shrink Ray? Bill Would Cap Height of Towers And Offers Ratner More Subsidies.
--Specifically, it would limit the project size to 5.85 million square feet, not quite three million less than the current 8.659 million square feet currently proposed. It would not cap the heights of specific buildings.
--Joan Millman, who has opposed the project in its current form, supports the bill. (I've heard that some other project opponents may sign on, as well.)
--The state would subsidize between $12 and $15 million per year for between 1,800 and 2,200 units in the project’s affordable housing component.
--The developer would only pay $140 million of the $450 million expense to buy and build a platform over the railyards.
--The bill would ensure that properties acquired through eminent domain would be purchased at 150 percent of the market rate value.

$450 million for the railyards?

Forest City Ratner's bid for the railyards was $100 million, but says the improvements total $350 million. But the rival bid from Extell Development Corp., for $150 million, was also going to include improvements. As noted, the $450 million (actually, $445 million) falsely
reframes the bid amount.

Does this mean that Ratner would essentially get the 8.3-acre railyard for free?

Again, the housing

The article stated:
Brennan sees his bill as the ultimate solution to his belief that the project is its current size so Ratner can recoup will the money he will lose in the affordable housing component.

According to Lentol:
“If you force the developer to scale down the project and give the developer nothing in return, then you force the developer to do nothing and then everything is gone,” he said, adding that “When you talk about a development that will benefit people who need affordable housing, then helping the developer is definitely a public service.”

Reaction from FCR/DDDB

Officials from Forest City Ratner said they couldn't comment. Opponent Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn was cautious: “It’s a step in the right direction, but far from sufficient.” As reported:
Brennan’s legislation, he said, does nothing to address the height of some of the buildings, as well as the abuse of city streets and the fact that ultimately, the project will be reviewed through a “non-inclusive un-democratic process.”

The AY Monologues: Gehry invokes the Brooklyn Bridge, Olin laments those "frightened" of change

The newly-posted Times video titled New Design for Atlantic Yards verges on an infomercial--even though the new 'video' section of the Times web site is supposed to feature "more original Times video reporting," the Times Company said last month. (Here's a letter to the editor.)

Narrator: With the unveiling of the latest model for the proposed Atlantic Yards project for Downtown Brooklyn, architects Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin emphasize details they said would harmonize the project’s scale with the neighborhood it borders. In contrast to the last proposal, the new one portrays shorter and thinner buildings where the project abuts a mostly low-rise neighborhood.

Downtown Brooklyn? Apparently the video department of the Times didn't get the correction memo.

Shorter and thinner? Compared to what? The scaleback was five percent from the previous iteration--which leaves this version larger than the originally announced plan--and four buildings have new setbacks.

But opponents of the project criticize Mr. Gehry’s latest designs. They say the 16 skyscrapers still planned for the 22-acre site are too big for the neighborhood, and it will permanently alter the borough’s otherwise sparse skyline.

Is that simply a voice of knee-jerk opposition or is there a legitimate debate about the scale of the project, and the attendant effects on traffic and transportation, among other issues?

We had a chance to talk with Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin about the challenges this project represents and to hear where the inspiration for the design originated.

But it wasn't an actual interview, since it lacked give and take or any interpolation of context.

FG: There is something special about Brooklyn, if you compare it to Manhattan. And so I tried to find out—I know, I felt it there, but I didn’t know how to characterize it visually and to make a building that related to it. And I studied its history, its architectural history, its street history. A lot of the major images for me, of course, in the end turned out to be the bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, with the net, and the cables, and the structure as the gateway to the community as being so powerful. It’s just a beautiful, powerful image.

This is getting confusing. Was "Miss Brooklyn" inspired by the bridge, or a bride, or both? (Bridge photo from Anders.com.)

LO: Yes, Brooklyn has an infrastructure and streets and buildings and people and a history and a culture, but underneath that there is a geology and a topography and a history of land that I found to be kind of inspirational in an odd way. And that is, because of the Wisconsin glacier dumping all those piles of stuff that are the hills of Brooklyn as they began to retreat at the end of the Pleistocene, and then leaving all those marshes, the Gowanus marsh, and all the wetlands, those two things actually have fed back into the project.

So the landscape has--we’re now pulling water into the project, saving water, building a piece of the little marsh, having a pond, we realize that, although there’s a cut in the hill, it’s really a hill, and we need to put the hill back together. So there’s an odd inspiration that most people walking around that part of Brooklyn wouldn’t realize, that it’s the real underneath of Brooklyn.

Note that blocks 1120 (north center) and 1129 (southeast) would be interim surface parking for several years. The open space isn't due until 2016 at the earliest.

FG: If you walk around the community there are lots of ugly buildings, and what I get excited about are the spaces between them, which are—I find beautiful, it’s like the space between us, it creates an energy: Most people don’t look at that, but that is the city, I mean, you’re never looking at the building at dead-on elevation, and see it the way architects draw it, you’re looking at the oblique, you see the relationship to the building next door, it’s usually awkward, there’s an incomplete piece, there’s a fence, there’s a whatever. So I think that is really what you’re seeing, and that is really the character of the community, and I think that’s interesting.

While the structures in the footprint run the gamut, there are some very nice buildings, like the Spalding factory (above) that was turned into high-end housing.

LO: One of the issues is how to manage change, so that it’s a positive thing, not a negative thing, and that’s part of the challenge of a project like this.

(Photo of Forest City Ratner's Jim Stuckey, Gehry, and Olin from the New York Times.)

FG: This has been a real collaboration, in the spirit of making it better and better and better.

LO: I can’t think of a major project that either of us have ever worked on, that at the beginning there isn’t opposition of some sort, because change is threatening to people. Because we’re optimists who believe that we might be able to, through our work, make the world better. But that means you believe in change. And if you believe in change there are people who are frightened of it or resistant. So there’s always going to be some opposition to our work. And the more ambitious the scale, the more daring the project, the more upset some people will always be.

Since when does Olin get to define change? He's not working for the public here; he's working for a developer. (And getting paid quite well, no doubt.) How many opponents and critics of the project did he get to meet? Wouldn't it be nice if Olin had a chat with architect Jonathan Cohn, who has critiqued the open space plan?

FG: I think there's been lot of give and take and learning, with Planning and us, and talking back and forth, meeting with them, working with them, responding to their criticisms and their ideas, and--

Gehry certainly hasn't met with the community, but Amanda Burden, director of the Department of City Planning, has been pushing for more storefronts and other Jacobsian ideas, according to the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate . As noted, four on the eastern end of Dean Street would have setbacks. (I couldn't find images of the eastern end of Dean Street, so the three larger buildings are in the foreground at right. One seems to have something of a setback, but the dimensions aren't clear.)

LO: --It just got better--

FG: --And developing relationships that they asked for, and which we respected and honored and agreed with. So I think all of that’s been just great, and just been a process that’s led to a better and better project. That’s continuing, still. That’s still continuing. There will be community involvement, we expect. We’ll be tweaking to relate to those things in the future.

Community involvement. At the end.

Gehry: starchitect, "liberal do-gooder," misreader of community concerns

So here's what I missed when I was blocked from attending the press conference yesterday: architect Frank Gehry, a self-described "do-gooder, liberal," accusing critics in Brooklyn of being, basically, Luddites. “There is progress. There's constant change,” said Gehry, according to NY1. “People aren't riding around on horseback anymore.”

"They should've been picketing Henry Ford," he cracked, according to several news reports.

But Gehry, perhaps because he has been prevented from meeting with local residents concerned about the project, remains fundamentally wrong in his analysis. (Remember, in January, he called the proposed footprint "an empty site.")

And the New York Times (and some other press outlets) let him get away with it. A Times article initially headlined "New Design for Atlantic Yards Presented" and later tweaked online Developer Defends Atlantic Yards Plan for Brooklyn (and in print as "Developer Defends Atlantic Yards, Saying Towers Won't Corrupt the Feel of Brooklyn"), described Gehry as "dismissing critics who oppose high-density development in the borough." (FCR's Jim Stuckey, Gehry, and landscape architect Laurie Olin look rather grim in the Times photo above. That was the only photo that appeared in print, and the article was placed on the bottom half of B5--a distinct, and debatable, contrast to the front-page placement for the unveiling of Gehry's plans 7/5/05.)

But the choice has not been between high-density development and low-density development, as shown by the bid last July for the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard by the Extell Development Corp. (At right is Gehry's latest.)

The Times article said of opponents:
They have backed alternative plans for the site, including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings and would not require eminent domain.

Actually, there's only been one proposal on the table, from Extell; the Times, in a 7/7/05 article headlined Brooklyn Plan Draws a Rival, And It's Smaller, described the plan as "11 buildings ranging from 4 to 28 stories." However, Real Estate Weekly, in a 7/13/05 article headlined Ratner's Brooklyn dream being hijacked by Extell, more precisely described it as "10 high-rise apartment buildings and one four-story building marked for community use." (You couldn't build 1940 apartments in low-rise buildings; plan is at right.)

In other words, the debate is (very) high-rise vs. high-rise, not high-rise vs. low-rise. Perhaps if some concerned community members or a journalist like me had been in the room yesterday, the misreading wouldn't have emerged. Guess that's Forest City Ratner's strategy.

As Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab noted, the AP coverage quoted Gehry as saying "It's not an arena in a parking lot, like in the Meadowlands," which is true, but the article neglected to mention Ratner's quietly-unveiled plans to use the eastern portion of the site as surface parking. And the article described the present project footprint as including "ugly industrial buildings," not mentioning two high-end residential conversions and a former bakery that was once slated to be a hotel.

Why now? Was it the movie?

Why did Forest City Ratner hold the press conference yesterday rather than weeks earlier--when the slightly downscaled plan was released--or sometime later? No press outlet offered an explanation, but it might simply have been keyed to the new documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sydney Pollack, opening today.

Downscaling Dean Street?

The project would be less garish than Gehry proposed last year. "We tried to understand the body language of Brooklyn. ... We tried to respect the scale of the neighborhood," Gehry told reporters, according to Reuters, referring to how his team reduced the height, width, and depth of some of the buildings.

The Times reported:
But in an hourlong presentation, Frank Gehry, the project's architect, and Laurie Olin, its landscape designer, emphasized details that they said would harmonize the project's scale with the neighborhoods it would border. They described shorter and thinner buildings on Dean Street, where the project abuts a mostly low-rise neighborhood...

That's not quite true. The four residential buildings on Dean Street at the project's eastern segement, between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues, would be thinner, as I noted--but not the three buildings on Dean Street at the west end of the project.

Would the buildings on Dean Street be shorter, if not thinner? Well, the three buildings at the west end would be 322 feet, 428 feet, and 272 feet. The building that would be 272 feet actually grew by 69 feet from the previous iteration. The building that would be 322 feet would indeed be shorter than the previously-proposed 487 feet. But a 322-foot building at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street hardly harmonizes with the neighborhood it would border.

Open space?

The Times reported:
Mr. Olin dismissed criticism from some community leaders and outside architects that the project's roughly seven acres of open space were too isolated from surrounding streets to be welcoming to residents.
"I don't think one has to worry about trying to draw people into open space in New York City," he said. "If there's open space that isn't closed or fenced in, people find it."

Well, not quite. The photo of Forest City Ratner's MetroTech on a Saturday afternoon, by Brian Carreira for the Brooklyn Rail, shows open space ignored. Yes, it is an office park, not a residential community, but there are residences nearby. Outside architects?

In the New York Observer's blog The Real Estate, the open space issue was treated more skeptically:
The complex will have seven acres of publicly accessible open space, but it will be inside the interior courtyards formed by Gehry's buildings and dwarfed by their height.
Then came the Olin quote.

Coming way back?

The Times described "the developer's decision last month to pare back the project's size by about 5 percent." Actually, the project has grown since originally announced; the cut would be from the previous iteration of the project.

Gehry in January said the project was too big and was "coming way back." In October, he called it "out of scale with the existing area." But the project has been reduced by only five percent.

The Times, to its credit, was the only paper to bring up the issue:
Though Mr. Gehry had previously suggested the project would be scaled back significantly, he was more elusive yesterday, saying that he had been "paring back" the design. "It is a process," he added.

The Times didn't speculate why, but maybe it's just that Gehry isn't in the driver's seat, Stuckey is. Or that another scaleback is planned for a strategic moment.

Better sightlines?

The Times story concluded:
On the Dean Street side of the project, spaces between buildings have also been widened significantly from some early renderings to create better lines of sight from one side of the project to the other."We didn't take this lightly," Mr. Gehry said. "We spent an enormous amount of time studying Brooklyn."

Yes, but spaces between buildings do not a street make; the UNITY Plan proposed (p. 9) "new street extensions to link Fort Greene to Prospect Heights and Park Slope."

Adding context

The Times, last among the dailies, finally acknowledged the new Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn advisory board announced earlier in the week--was it the demise of the Boldface Names column just last month that delayed it? The Times was the first daily to report that the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods had hired a consultant to coordinate the review of pending Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

Still missing from the Times, and print coverage in the rest of the dailies: Forest City Ratner's tower-free brochure, issued just last week, and the complaints by the three Community Boards that FCR has improperly claimed that the boards helped "craft" the Community Benefits Agreement.

The Observer's take

The most incisve piece came from the Observer, in a piece headlined Gehry, Gehry Everywhere... captured a bit of Gehry nuttiness. The 620-foot tower, Miss Brooklyn (oops, maybe the apparent change to Ms. Brooklyn was just a typo, or the work of some p.r. who came to feminism ahead of Gehry) is, the the architect, a woman on the verge:
He likens the tower to an actual Brooklyn bride he saw walking around one day. "She's a bride," he said of the tower, "with her flowing bridal veil--I really overdid it. If you had seen the bride you would--I fell in love with her." The tower to the right is her husband, and the second shiny one to the left is the man she will have an affair with, according to Gehry. Developer Bruce Ratner must really love having an architect who designs unfaithful buildings and tells the press about it!

Reporter Matthew Schuerman was unafraid to come to conclusions:
That different sense of scale, of course, is a lot smaller than the type of bulding he has been commissioned to design here. He does make a few token gestures to fit into the borough, however, but they definitely are tokens. The main one is the "largest stoop in Brooklyn" at the point of Atlantic and Flatbush, in front of the arena.

The dreaded superblock

At a January panel with Gehry, interviewed by Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, there was deep denial that the project would contain a superblock. The Observer snuck the superblock mention into a caption. I didn't see the word used in any other coverage.

FCR's deceptive renderings

Schuerman wrote:
Whether the complex will fit into the surrounding neighborhood of three- and four-story brownstones is very much in the eye of the beholder--and the angel of the camera. Here is Forest City's take on the view north from Carlton and Park Place, with trees in full bloom. (This is a better view of building No. 7, the paramour.)

And then he did a little research:
Here is a similar view, just one block closer, imagined by onNYTurf, a website critical of the project. (It's based on specs from the project that have since been slimmed down a bit.)

The Observer was the only publication to mention the deceptiveness of Forest City Ratner's renderings.

Ratner vs. Ratner: what a difference a week makes

Last week, we got brochures (right) with no towers. This week (below), we finally saw the towers. Is Forest City Ratner afraid Brooklynites can't handle the towers? What should we expect next week?

Fantasyland views from Dean Street and Sixth Avenue

There would be two buildings flanking Dean Street and Sixth Avenue, and another two at Sixth and Atlantic avenues. Walk a few steps east, however, and according to Forest City Ratner's graphics (above), they disappear.

Below is another view looking north, from Flatbush and Sixth Avenue, a few blocks below Dean, based on a slightly different version of the plan, courtesy of OnNYTurf.

The view from Park Slope: huge (and where's the clock?)

Here's a shot from the center of Flatbush Avenue at St. Marks Avenue--but wait, it's not St. Marks, it's actually Prospect Place, a block further away. A view from a block or two south, or even the south side of Flatbush, would show a lot more buildings to the north. And a view from the real St. Marks would be even bigger. And whatever happened to Letitia James's "Don't block the clock" of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank?

Oh, and turn about 90 degrees to the north, according to OnNYTurf (below), and you see a lot more.

Street walls would be modest on Dean Street--well, part of Dean Street

There's not much news in the project fact sheet handed out by Forest City Ratner, so we'll have to wait for news reports to see what questions Frank Gehry answered.

One interesting detail concerns the size of the residential building street walls that border low-rise Prospect Heights. Those street walls on Dean Street between Vanderbilt and Carlton Avenues--the southeastern segment of the project--would range between 50 and 90 feet (or five to nine stories), with setbacks to the north of at least 60 to 70 feet. (These four buildings would range from 184 to 287 feet.) That shows some respect for the scale of the community, at least compared to a street wall equivalent to the heights of the beginning. But was this what Gehry meant when he said "it's coming way back"?

The only problem: there's a Dean Street segment of the project at and west of Sixth Avenue as well, and the street walls--at least according to a New York Times photo of a model (right)--don't have similar setbacks. The three buildings there would be 322 feet, 428 feet, and 272 feet. The heights of the buildings in the project overall would range from 190 feet to 620 feet, with 11 of 16 buildings over 300 feet.

Ms. Brooklyn at night (sans traffic)

A first look at the revised Ms. Brooklyn (and where's the traffic?)

FCR bans journalist from Gehry press conference, invites "community"

Does Forest City Ratner want scrutiny of its Atlantic Yards project? Apparently not, since the developer barred me from the press conference this morning featuring architect Frank Gehry and landscape architect Laurie Olin.

The FCR press release hinted that a journalist who writes a blog wouldn't be welcome:
Please note that this press conference is open to reporters with valid press credentials. If you do not have press credentials, we require a request from the publication that you will be representing. The request on letterhead should be faxed to 212.981.5449.

What's a valid credential? And what's a letterhead? I faxed a request on my own letterhead, but that wasn't enough for Ratner. Jeffrey Lerner, a Dan Klores Communications Senior Account Executive, politely but firmly told me "the decision is final."

And is a blogger a journalist? Well, not everyone, but journalists who write blogs are still journalists. And, as Matt Welch wrote in 2003 in the Columbia Journalism Review, bloggers contribute "personality, eyewitness testimony, editorial filtering, and uncounted gigabytes of new knowledge."

The latter is why I wanted to attend the press conference. I'll get the press kit sooner or later. [Update: within hours. See other posts dated today and look for previous posts.]

I wanted to see what Gehry would say about his interaction with the community and how his designs have evolved. (The iTeam blog of the Daily News recently called my blog "a regular must-read for both opponents and supporters of Bruce Ratner’s proposed project.")

Meanwhile, some selected members of the community were invited: signatories to the much-criticized Community Benefits Agreement.

Some heft for the community: CBN retains consultant to run DEIS review

On Monday, members of Community Board 6 seemed daunted by the challenge of finding the money and expertise to respond to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) being prepared on behalf of the Empire State Development Agency. Expected to be issued in the next weeks or months, the document likely will be thousands of pages long.

But The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN) has stepped forward and announced it has retained Phillips Preiss Shapiro Associates (PPSA) to act as the lead consultant for a review of the DEIS. Last December, CBN issued a Request For Proposals to top environmental planning firms to help review the DEIS.

The response to the RFP brought forward dozens of firms and organizations, CBN said in a press release, and PPSA--the city’s largest independent planning firm--will coordinate those efforts. It's not clear whether the Community Boards will participate. While CBN has no official position on the Atlantic Yards project, given the job of responding to the environmental review, many of its member groups oppose the project, and the Community Boards may be wary of the association.

Then again, the CBs don't have the money to hire experts. Nor does the CBN--at least, not yet. "Our budget overall is somewhat in excess of $500,000," CBN's Jim Vogel told me. "We have positive indications for funding from both the City Council and the State Legislature, but we continue to hold our breath. Our consultants are aware of our budget and the somewhat tenuous funding position and are being very cooperative."

What they'll do

John Shapiro of PPSA said: "This job is about making a complex project understood by the people most affected by it, and thus allowing them to be the best advocates for their own interests and concerns -- whether that is in support, opposition or simply expressions of concern. I have worked on a number of large-scale projects, but I can't think of any that has a larger impact on my home borough than this."

The Environmental Simulation Center will provide visual representations, including photomontages, of what building impacts may occur. Last year, for example, responding to the DEIS regarding Brooklyn Bridge Park, the firm commented that it lacked "verifiable visual simulations that illustrate the impact of the action on visual and historic resources." So they produced such simulations, with before and after images of the same location (examples at right).

Several groups affiliated with academic institutions will participate. The Pratt Center for Community Development has a history of working with neighborhood groups; it previously worked on a survey for the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, a member of CBN, and also issued its own preliminary analysis of the Atlantic Yards project in March 2005.

The recently-created Hunter Center for Urban Studies will involve Urban Studies faculty and students in affiliation with CUNY's Center for Urban Research. Tom Angotti, who has criticized the planning for the Atlantic Yards project, will coordinate the effort.

Also involved will be the Project for Public Spaces, whose head, Fred Kent, recently declared, “There are no great public spaces in Downtown Brooklyn."

Covering Ratner's brochure: why not treat it like campaign advertising?

The New York Times--and most of the rest of the press--is apparently flummoxed at the thought of analyzing the content of Forest City Ratner's recent reality-bending brochure. On May 3, this blog, NoLandGrab, and Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn broke the story of FCR's tower-free mailer. The story was picked up by The New York Observer's blog The Real Estate and the real estate blog Curbed, but the only mention it got in the dailies was a piece in the Daily News's Sports iTeam blog, which focused on the fact that a smiling model actually considers Ratner "public enemy number one" (though she did sign away her rights when she was paid).

The reporters and editors might be saying: why should we cover this, it's just Brooklyn. Or: it's kind of a business story. Or maybe: it's inside baseball.

No. More than anything else, it's a political campaign, produced by KnickerbockerSKD, which has worked on political campaigns and strategic communciations for major players, including Mayor Bloomberg. After all, why would the third page of the flier (right) offer a distorted fisheye photo, implying that the 8.3 acres of railyards constitute the majority of the 22-acre site.

And just as newspapers like the Times regularly evaluate political commercials (including those by this firm) for accuracy, they should do the same here, as I'll describe below.

Spectacular spin

Most people who've seen the glossy brochure have scoffed that it somehow omitted the 16 enormous towers planned for the site. In Brooklyn, the Courier-Life chain followed up with an article dutifully quoting critics, and Brooklyn Papers' editor Gersh Kunzman penned a harsh column headlined Ratner’s glossy fantasyland. Kuntzman described the mailer as a little bit of "a glossy catalogue, a piece of political literature, some junk mail."

The only previous acknowledgement of the consultant's role was a 10/14/05 article by the New York Times, headlined To Build Arena, Developer First Builds Bridges, which stated:
Forest City Ratner also contracted with Knickerbocker SKD, a media consultant, to produce two promotional mailings, each going to more than 300,000 households in Brooklyn.

There was no attempt by the Times to evaluate the content of those mailings, though the first one, especially, was deeply deceptive. For example, the flier (right) quoted gushing praise for the plan attributed to the New York Times, as if it were the newspaper's editorial voice, rather than identifying it as a statement from then-architectural critic Herbert Muschamp. (The critic's 12/11/03 piece in the Times, headlined "Courtside Seats to an Urban Garden," just happened to omit disclosure that the parent Times Company and Forest City Ratner are business partners in building the Times Tower, and that Muschamp served with FCR executives on a committee that chose an architect for the tower.)

Who is KnickerbockerSKD?

The KnickerbockerSKD web site boasts an endorsement from Sen. Chuck Schumer, and the principals have some heavyweight political credentials. Josh Isay, Micah Lasher, Robert Randall, and Stefan Friedman (a former New York Post reporter) have experience on campaigns for Bloomberg, Schumer, Manhattan DA Robert Morganthau, and Council Speaker Christine Quinn, among many others, plus work for unions, ballot measures, and an increasing list of corporations.

In a 1/7/02 New York Observer article headlined "Cuomo Gets Young Turks For 2002," WNYC's Andrea Bernstein reported that Isay had formed a firm with Dan Klores--whose Dan Klores Communications firm now handles p.r. for Forest City Ratner.

KnickerbockerSKD emerged later, and is a subsidiary of Squier Knapp Dunn, a Washington, DC-based communications firm. Still, there's undoubtedly some cross-pollination with the Klores firm. While the KnickerbockerSKD principals have an impressive track record, that doesn't mean they're always convincing. "Mr. Isay also can't stop spinning," Bernstein wrote.

Pride of authorship

In a 12/15/03 New York Observer profile of Lasher, headlined "Power Punk," the subject claimed that honest work meant good results:
"One should not overstate the links between magic and politics," he said. "I try to stay away from sleight of hand in the campaigns I work on, which is made easier by good candidates that you can believe in."

At the KnickerbockerSKD web site, that first Atlantic Yards mailer appears (above) in a grid highlighting 30 print campaigns, flanked by ads for Bloomberg, Morganthau, and the Transportation Bond Act. The firm is apparently proud of it, even though the flier used "Atlantic Yards" as a return address, thus obscuring the fact that it was sent by Forest City Ratner.

Press analysis

In political campaigns, however, newspapers have learned they must evaluate political advertising--to not rely on critics or political opponents but to use basic journalistic practices and check claims against the record. Other press outlets do it too and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania offers the Annenberg Political Fact Check for regular nonpartisan analysis.

Last summer, for example, the Times twice analyzed ads produced by KnickerbockerSKD for Morganthau's campaign.

An 8/17/05 article headlined Morgenthau Runs on His Record, received the standard treatment: an introduction of the ad (which is featured at the consultant's web site), a description of the action, the text of the script, an evaluation of accuracy, and a "scorecard" that assesses the ad's impact. Wrote Leslie Eaton:
The entire ad appears to have been shot within blocks of his office downtown, and his physical activity is limited to the occasional nod or hand gesture. So the ad may not help him with the little-discussed but major issue in this race, his age. But the list of his office's accomplishments may help refute Ms. Snyder's charge that he has not been innovative in recent years, and the ad reminds the liberal Democrats most likely to turn out for the Sept. 13 primary of his strong stance against the death penalty.

An 8/31/05 article, headlined A Morgenthau Attack, for Liberal Voters, did the same.

Forest City Ratner's campaign deserves no less scrutiny. Outside the blogosphere, the Brooklyn Papers' Kuntzman has been the only journalist to take a look.

What they do for Ratner

KnickerbockerSKD promises clients (under Our Services):
We apply a basic approach to each new project: identify the specific communications challenges of the campaign; distill the complicated issues at hand into a clear, persuasive message; and disseminate that message to win over key audiences.

In the case of this mailer, the message seems to be: the project is in Downtown Brooklyn (though it's not); the Community Benefits Agreement is terrific (though it's been harshly criticized) and the towers don't exist.

Clear? Maybe.

Persuasive? Not to anybody I've talked to, including several agnostic about the project.

Worthy of scrutiny in the press? Certainly.

Jobs at Atlantic Yards: from "created" to "provided" to [blank]

Forest City Ratner's new web site, which debuted in mid-April, initially promised "18,000 jobs created." I pointed out that no such number would be created, since at least some would move from elsewhere (not to mention that the 15,000 promised construction jobs means 1500 jobs a year over ten years).

In a follow-up brochure, FCR claimed "18,000 jobs provided." Now FCR has edited the relevant web page to say, simply, "18,000 jobs." Still, another page claims that the project would be "creating over 15,000 union construction jobs, over 3,800 permanent jobs..."

Rhetoric check: the use and misuse of "Atlantic Yards"

Rhetoric matters when discussing the Atlantic Yards project. After all, Forest City Ratner keeps claiming that the project would be built in Downtown Brooklyn. Critics like me have pressed the New York Times on the importance of describing the location more precisely, and the Times recently printed a correction.

Another rhetorical tussle concerns the term Atlantic Yards, which entered the public lexicon as Forest City Ratner's name for the 22-acre development project, but also has become attached to the 8.5-acre railyard owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the chief undeveloped portion of the site. Thus local officials and reporters, encouraged by the developer, have used terms like "at the Atlantic Yards" or "on the Atlantic Yards," without explaining that it's a proposed development site.

These seemingly minor errors serve Forest City Ratner's interest. They falsely conflate the developer's commercial branding--a project called Atlantic Yards--with a much smaller piece of publicly-owned land.

Marty's mistakes

At the 5/26/05 City Council hearing on the Atlantic Yards project, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, questioned by Council Member Charles Barron, commented:
The Atlantic Yards area has been available for any developer in America for over 100 years...It represents a whole new possibility of a formerly abandoned area, which is I'm talking about the Atlantic Yards themselves.

Markowitz invoked the name Atlantic Yards twice, and both times he was misleading. Atlantic Yards is the name of a project, not an existing entity, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) calls the railyard in question the Vanderbilt Yard. And the Atlantic Yards area could not have been available for any developer, since the project would include city streets, homes, businesses, industrial buildings, and vacant lots--many of which have been well-used in the last century. Atlantic Yards did not exist until Forest City Ratner proposed it at a press conference on 12/10/03.

Vanderbilt Yard, Atlantic railyards

The MTA's Vanderbilt Yard name was so obscure--in a Lexis-Nexis search, I couldn't find a single reference before the Ratner plan was announced--that the invented term Atlantic Yards was quickly used by the press even when referring solely to the railyard.

The developer has fostered that misleading impression. A flier issued in late 2004 stated: Built over the 19th Century train yard at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, Atlantic Yards will rise as a symbol of Brooklyn's world-class status and her 21st Century potential. (Emphasis added)

For example, the Daily News reported, in a 3/11/04 article quoting Borough President Marty Markowitz and headlined He's down with plan: The downtown Brooklyn plan... makes no mention of the arena and housing/office tower development proposed by developer Bruce Ratner at Atlantic Yards.

If the term Vanderbilt Yard doesn't trip off the tongue, perhaps the more neutral term Atlantic railyards--used by Park Slope Neighbors, a group critical of the project, better distinguishes the railyards from the larger development site.

Atlantic everything

For Forest City Ratner, the name Atlantic Yards may have seemed like a easy call. After all, the developer has built malls nearby called Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center--at the northwest portion of the map at right. But the name is also an inspired--and misleading--piece of marketing. (Map from Empire State Development Corporation's Final Scope.)

The name "Atlantic" is understandable, as Atlantic Avenue forms the northern border of the project, but it also might offer some useful associations. Many Brooklynites may remember the empty land cleared to develop those malls, not the structures that preceded them.

Also, the name associates the project with Atlantic Avenue, one of the widest streets in Brooklyn, a virtual highway, rather than the lower-scale blocks to its south. The project might just as easily be called "Pacific Yards," as the railyard is located between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street. (Map from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.)

However, Pacific Street is much narrower, and the name "Pacific Yards" might remind people that the project would encroach on a residential and business district. Indeed, part of Pacific Street would be demapped; this would create a controversial superblock and also allow the developer to claim a lower density than without the street.

The "Atlantic" strategy presents some risk: the Atlantic Center mall has been derided as "the ugliest building in Brooklyn," by architectural critic Francis Morrone in the New York Sun (ABROAD IN NEW YORK, 2/23/04), and the Atlantic Terminal mall has gotten mixed, but sometimes harsh reviews. That's why Forest City Ratner has hired much more impressive talent--architect Frank Gehry and landscape designer Laurie Olin--for the Atlantic Yards project.

Yards vs. Yard: echoes of Baltimore?

Why did the developer choose the name Atlantic Yards rather than Atlantic Yard? Perhaps the plural sounds more organic, as if growing and spreading, rather than a static entity guarded by a fence.

Also, "Atlantic Yards" contains echoes of "Camden Yards," the highly-successful 85-acre parcel in downtown Baltimore that houses Oriole Park, a baseball stadium aimed to evoke early 20th-century structures like Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and Boston's Fenway Park. It should be noted, however, that Camden Yards is not exactly part of a low-rise neighborhood.

The Atlantic Yards?

The term Atlantic Yards has regularly been used as if it were an existing entity. As noted, a 1/2/06 New York Times article, headlined "A Mayor With Lofty Goals, and Better Than Average Odds of Reaching Them," incorrectly stated: the fruits of his huge rezoning initiatives along the Brooklyn waterfront and at the Atlantic Yards will not all be realized within four years.

The Times hasn't yet printed a correction.

A New York Post story (FOUR MORE DEMS NOW LIKE MIKE, 10/17/05) stated: "He shares my lifelong dream to restore Brooklyn as the center of major-league sports," Markowitz said of the mayor's plan to build a new arena for the NBA Nets at the Atlantic Yards.

A New York Times Metro Briefing (Developer Promises Benefits, 6/28/05) stated: The developer planning a project at the Atlantic Yards said yesterday that he would give local residents priority for jobs and would provide low- and middle-income housing for them.

Critics get it wrong

Even critics of the project, who may not have followed the rhetoric closely, have made the same error--a sign of how the Atlantic Yards meme has penetrated the discourse.

Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, in his 5/7/06 "Shooting from the Lip" column, observed:
Even the NBA commissioner, David Stern, sounds giddy at the prospect of RatnerWorld, a development that will forever alter the skyline of Brooklyn, like a little chunk of Manhattan going up over Atlantic Yards.

Community activist Mark Winston Griffith, in a February 2006 Gotham Gazette article headlined Redefining Economic Development, wrote:
The Fifth Avenue Committee is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to stop Bruce Ratner from demolishing six buildings en route to building the Nets stadium and hundreds of commercial and residential units over Atlantic Yards in downtown Brooklyn.

Even the 2004 charrette aimed at an alternative plan for the railyard--though not the surrounding streets--used the name Atlantic Yards Development Workshop. While the document refers to "the Atlantic Yards site," it also calls the railyard Atlantic Yards.

City Council Member Letitia James, an ardent foe of the project, made the error in her affidavit filed in the recent litigation over demolitions of buildings owned by Forest City Ratner:
While the MTA’s Atlantic Yards need to be developed, the surrounding community is anything but blighted.

"In the Atlantic Yards"

A letter to the Times's City Weekly both misdescribed the site and appeared under a headline that misstated the scope of the dispute, The headline misleadingly suggested that the dispute is limited to the railyards (Brooklyn's Railyards: The Fight Continues, 12/25/05). The letter said: It is indeed "a matter of scale" here in Brooklyn. Bruce Ratner is gambling that there is a bottomless market for 3,000 market-rate condos in the Atlantic Yards.

A Times City Weekly section devoted to The New Brooklyns, erred in the section's lead article (The Great Awakening, 6/19/05):
After decades of disinvestment in Brooklyn, major projects are in the works... the construction of an 800,000-square-foot sports complex for the Nets in the Atlantic Yards...
This article also ignored the much-larger portion of the Atlantic Yards project beyond the arena.

"Atlantic Yards area"

The New York Sun has used the terms Atlantic Yards area or Atlantic Yards section, as in the 7/12/05 Legislation in Congress Could Bar Forest City Ratner From Subsidies: Momentum is gathering in both the House and the Senate behind bills that could bar a development firm, Forest City Ratner, from receiving federal subsidies for its proposed high-rise hub in the Atlantic Yards area in downtown Brooklyn.
(Right: the cover of an FCR flier.)

The September 2005 Independent Budget Office Fiscal Brief, Atlantic Yards: A Net Fiscal Benefit for the City?, refers to "the proposed redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards area" and "the area called Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn," without acknowledging that the name is a commercial moniker.

"Over" and "on" Atlantic Yards

Three AP stories used the same locution, which implies that the arena would be built over the railyards, but didn't explain that the arena and the project as a whole would cross Pacific Street (Nader weighs in against Nets, Jets NYC stadium proposals 5/24/04):
In Brooklyn, developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a Frank Gehry-designed arena for the Nets over the Atlantic Yards rail depot.

The New York Sun (Ratner's Atlantic Yards Foes Delighted by Extell Bid Entry, 7/8/05) used the term to substitute for the Vanderbilt Yard:
Mr. Liff said his firm is stunned that other companies are not vying for the rights to build on the Atlantic Yards.

The power of branding

Such errors recur in the press and public discourse. Good branding plus sloppy journalism can lead to the assumption that Atlantic Yards already exists. But it's still important to distinguish the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard--or, more colloquially, the Atlantic railyards--from Forest City Ratner's proposed Atlantic Yards.

Viewing the AY site from above--and a Marty encounter

For some, the Fort Greene Association's house tour, held every two years, is an opportunity to peer inside someone's innovatively restored home and wonder just how they got the money or the creativity to accomplish that. The tour held Sunday, titled Transition Fort Greene, offered two bonuses: an opportunity to gaze over the surrounding neighborhoods from an observation deck at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, as well as an interesting exhibit on the traditional and modernist architecture of the neighborhood.

The bank is being turned into high-end condos, starting at more than $350K for a studio. They'll go up for sale in mid-June, with occupancy slated for the summer or fall of 2007. Note that the poster for the building (right) shows it alone in the skyline, without the nearby Bank of New York tower at the Atlantic Terminal Mall, with little of the Downtown Brooklyn skyline in the background, and (obviously) without any renderings of the nearby unbuilt Atlantic Yards plan.

From the 19th floor, which is actually more than 300 feet high (the floors don't start until after a 60-foot banking hall, which is slated to become a Borders bookstore), numerous photographers took advantage of the views. The photo at right shows Site 5, current home of P.C. Richard/Modell's and slated for a 350-foot tower--stretching higher than the observation deck where the photo was taken. Its neighbors behind it are two to six stories in height. The building was supposed to be even bigger, though the size is achievable only by trading development rights from the Atlantic Center mall

Architectural exhbit

At the Irondale Center for Theater, Education, and Outreach, inside Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, an exhibit titled Fort Greene Modern included designs by world-famous architects like Enrique Norten, Hugh Hardy, and Arquitectonica. Buildings included The Brooklyn Public Library's Visual and Performing Arts Library (slated to be built next to the bank), Theatre for a New Audience (behind the library), and the Wellness Center at Long Island University (off DeKalb Avenue). Both the library and theater are pictured above.

“The exhibition will pose the question: How do contemporary architects work within an historic and contextual framework as they create new works in Fort Greene?” according to curator Annie Coggan. One way is to build a house around a 60-foot maple tree, or to repurpose an office building like 80 Hanson Place into a center for arts groups and arts service groups, like MoCADA, opening later this month.

Observed curator Coggan in a caption, "The Ten Arquitectos Visual and Performing Arts Library will be the most enjoyed urban space since the Metropolitan Museum steps, as well as being an homage to the Olmstead stair in Fort Greene Park."

The exhibit suggests that modernism and traditionalism can coexist in Fort Greene. There was no mention of Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards project planned for the adjacent neighborhood of Prospect Heights, in the photo at right. Can that version of modernism can fit into brownstone neighborhoods or not? Or would the project's 16 towers, extending east (left) for three blocks (and over the railyards and then one block deep) be too big? Consider: the flagship Ms. Brooklyn would rise some 300 feet above the point where the photo was taken.

Marty, and affordable housing

The issue of scale came up when I got a chance to chat with Borough President Marty Markowitz, who was gladhanding tourgoers as they picked up their tickets. I asked about the controversial Forest City Ratner brochure that his spokesman seemed not-so-eager to endorse. "I'm totally for the project," Markowitz said several times, as if that sufficed.

When I asked him why he declared that the brochure was "another step in familiarizing Brooklynites with the details of the project," he said that only people concerned with policy like me would be upset with the omissions. (Well, the omissions were huge: not just the towers but the failure to acknowledge that the project has just begun the environmental review process.)

I asked him again if the project should shrink and his riposte was, "It has to be that big, for the affordable housing." (Would he have said that before FCR cut 440 of 7300 units? Obviously, it's all negotiable.) Yes, it's important to have a significant amount of affordable housing at the railyard site, and in new developments that receive tax breaks. But should Forest City Ratner be allowed to build out of scale because the borough and city haven't come up with appropriate policies for affordable housing--including new luxury residential towers Markowitz has endorsed?

Significant density and affordable housing is appropriate for the railyard site, especially since affordable housing was absent in plans for the Williamsburgh Bank condo conversion and the architectural models on display at the Irondale Center. But should Markowitz cede public debate about the appropriate scale to a developer?

CB6 confronts the ESDC's dis; how to respond to an inadequate scope?

The three affected Community Boards (2, 6, 8) are hardly the most radical entities involved in the Atlantic Yards debate, but the disrespect they've received during the environmental review might drive more forceful expression of their concern--if the sentiments expressed last night by CB6 Executive Committee members are a clue.

At the commitee meeting, held at the Cobble Hill Community Room, District Manager Craig Hammerman distributed a document showing how CB6's comments on the Draft Scope of Analysis were frequently disregarded in the Final Scope of Analysis issued 3/31/06 by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). There were 12 instances of "Fails to address this issue" and 11 instances of "Fails to address this issue directly."

The consensus: the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), expected from the ESDC within the next weeks or months, will inevitably be inadequate. "The area they chose to analyze is way too small," observed board member Louise Finney, who co-chairs the Transportation Committee. "You don't have to be a genius to know you should look at the BQE."

Traffic is likely the most important issue for this CB, and the Final Scope has already been criticized for ignoring the effect of traffic on the East River crossings. "They're not even looking at Grand Army Plaza as an intersection," Finney added.

Strategy

Board members discussed strategies, including holding public hearings and raising funds to hire an expert to respond to the DEIS. Information gathered could also support an eventual lawsuit over the inadequacy of the review process, suggested one board member. "Except we're supposed to stay neutral and act as a vehicle" for public input, commented Chairperson Jerry Armer.

Hiring an expert could cost half a million dollars--a daunting sum. The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods has already begun the process of seeking such expertise, but no funding has come through yet.

"The only real avenue is public opinion," one board member commented. "[FCR VP Jim] Stuckey is upset--too bad."

Steaming Stuckey

Indeed, Stuckey, the developer's point man on the Atlantic Yards project, was none too pleased with the letter cosigned by the chairpersons and district managers of the three CBs asking the developer to stop claiming the boards helped "craft" the Community Benefits Agreement.

Stuckey personally called each of the three chairpersons, expressing dismay that the letter was in the press last week before he saw it--though, apparently, CB staffers had already informed the developer of their concerns.

Committee members noted that the letter was diplomatically phrased and that they had agreed not to pursue an alternative strategy: holding a press conference on the steps of Borough Hall. "They should be more careful," said one member of FCR.

Meanwhile, will the developer excise the "crafting" claim from its web site and other printed material? "We didn't get a response," said Hammerman.

CB's position?

Along with the DEIS, a General Project Plan will be issued, setting forth the developer's outline of the project--which means it could still change in the next weeks or months. "When this does hit like a ton of bricks, we're going to have to come up with a position," Hammerman said. He noted that the board could support some elements and oppose some elements of the plan, or could support the entire project, "with conditions," or oppose the project, "with conditions."

ESDC advisory committee

Meanwhile, the three CBs have been invited by ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano to participate in a Community Advisory Committee that would act as a liaison between their community and the agency. Armer said the committee has not yet met, and that he did not know what other agencies were included.

DDDB's new advisory board, Jane Jacobs, & "angry blogs"

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn has assembled a new advisory board filled with activists, cultural figures, and celebrities, most of them from Brooklyn. It's a high-profile mix, and the board should help DDDB--which also relaunched its web site--raise money for the potential legal fights over the legitimacy of Environmental Impact Statement process and the use of eminent domain, among other initiatives.

Some two-and-a-half years after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, this should help amplify the voices of project opponents, who don't have the money to send slick brochures like the one Forest City Ratner recently produced. In the recent battle over the proposed West Side Stadium, community opponents of the plan were bolstered by the deep pockets of Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden, which had its own business reason to oppose the project. In the Atlantic Yards, fight, there have been few high-profile allies; as Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica observed yesterday:
The people who have fought Ratner and one of the truly inspired land grabs in the history of this city continue to fight, even as Ratner's shills, in the media and in politics, continue to act as if the whole thing is a done deal.

The 33-member board includes actress Rosie Perez, musician Dan Zanes, cultural critic Nelson George, academic Mindy Fullilove, sports critic Dave Zirin, local Congressional representative Major Owens, two activist ministers (the Rev. David Dyson and the Rev. Dennis Dillon), eminent domain plaintiff Susette Kelo, and several writers and actors, among others.

Celeb fever

New York Magazine, in an Intelligencer item headlined Can Heath Ledger Save Bklyn? Or can Buscemi?, focused on the celebrity angle:
Since angry blogs haven’t managed to derail Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards complex, maybe celebrities will. Last week, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn created an advisory board of boldfacers. New recruit Steve Buscemi got right on the phone and was right on message, declaring, “The lack of transparency, the absence of genuine community input, and the bypassing of political oversight is very troubling.”

Paging Jane Jacobs

The article continued:
DDDB activist Francis Morrone hopes celebs like Rosie Perez and Jonathan Safran Foer can affect the “significant segment of elite cultural opinion which thinks that this development is perfectly all right and that the people who are opposing it are a bunch of cranks who are stuck in the Jane Jacobs era.” Interestingly, the celebs sound positively Jacobean in their concerns. “The Atlantic Center Mall [right], which Ratner built, is such an aesthetic and functional horror,” declares David Salle. The new project is “out of scale and out of step with the neighborhood it’s going to overwhelm,” says Jonathan Lethem. Michelle Williams says she and husband Heath Ledger “moved here for light, space, and air. If Mr. Ratner lived here, he would understand what we love about it and why we want to preserve our open skies.”

First, pretty much everyone has absorbed the Jacobsean lesson that the Atlantic Center mall, or its Site 5 annex at the southeast corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues (right), should not turn blank walls to functioning city streets. Those are big box structures built at one of Brooklyn's busiest intersections, and at the borough's transit hub.

I asked Morrone, who has written the essential guidebook to Brooklyn architecture and is much more a public intellectual than a DDDB activist, to amplify his comments. He told me:
I am obviously not saying we're not Jacobsean--I, who am Jane Jacobs's biggest fan, would not say that. What I meant, and I'm sorry it came off the wrong way in the context of the piece, is that the elite culture to which I refer equates "Jacobsean" with "cranky." I know lots of people involved in this fight who are Jacobsean; I know none who are cranky.
(At right, Forest City Ratner's MetroTech, an inward-facing corporate office park but no retail along Brooklyn's busy Flatbush Avenue and near some low-income projects.)

To what extent can Forest City Ratner be tagged with the architectural mistakes of its past? Well, they shouldn't be forgotten. The developer likely has learned some lessons from the savage criticism it has received and the plans for the Atlantic Yards project will contain much more street-level retail.

The scale, however, is driven by the need to include enough market-rate housing to generate revenues and enough affordable housing to maintain political support. (Essentially, the affordable housing represents a zoning bonus privately negotiated between Ratner and ACORN, unlike, say, in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, where the rules were set by City Council.)

It's hardly Jacobsean to wonder if a parade of towers 30, 40, and even 60 stories indicates too much density for a mostly low-rise area. Note that the towers would extend not just along the railyards and the triangle next to it (which are close to the anomalous, tapered 512-foot Williamsburgh Savings Bank) but along the block behind it--and, of course, for blocks to the east (left) in the photo above. The photo was taken yesterday from about 300 feet up at the Williamsburgh bank. Several towers likely would rise out of the frame of the photo.

About those blogs

Angry blogs? It sounds like a quote from the Joe DePlasco handbook; remember, the paid FCR flack disparaged us volunteer bloggers by saying that "a sense of self-importance and anger that often pops out."

But the appropriate word for the blogs, especially my blog and NoLandGrab, is watchdog. After all, my blog has driven news coverage of several issues, among them the privatization of formerly public parklike space, the number of jobs and amount of housing at the project, and the call by three Community Boards for Forest City Ratner to stop citing their role in "crafting" the Community Benefits Agreement.

Other coverage

The Daily News, in an article today headlined Celebs join Ratner foes, also focused on the celebrity angle, with this quote from an anonymous Ratner spokesman:
"We look forward to discussing the project in detail with these and other individuals. We're hopeful that once they learn more about the project, including Frank Gehry's design work, that they will have a better sense of what is going on at Atlantic Yards."

Hint: a new Gehry plan is expected soon.

In the commuter tabloid Metro, an article headlined Stars team up to stop Nets arena in Brooklyn, like the Daily News article, suggested some kind of celebrity battle, given that rapper Jay-Z is a part-owner of the Nets basketball team and a supporter of the Atlantic Yards project.

The article referred to DDDB advisory board member Jonathan Lethem:
Letham’s novel “Fortress of Solitude” prominently features the Underberg Building — one of the Ratner-owned properties in the footprint recently demolished by the developer to make way for the project.

The UNITY plan

One member of the DDDB advisory board is Marshall Brown, lead architect of the UNITY plan aimed at developing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard at a significant density, but much less than the level proposed by Forest City Ratner. The UNITY plan would not require the taking of adjacent streets, provide more street-level retail, and offer public park space, not privately-owned public space. (As planned, it would offer 75% affordable housing, though Extell Development Corporation's bid for the railyards, based on UNITY plan principles, proposed 30% affordable housing.)

And for those looking at the racial angle, Brown is black, like several of the new board members--not a majority, but a significant fraction (about one-quarter of the total). Will that help tamp down some of the rhetoric claiming that project opponents are white yuppies or, as Errol Louis put it, "well-off newcomers who... claim a sacred right to speak for the entire neighborhood"?

FCR's Stuckey stonewalls re CBs; brochure poster girl rips Ratner

So, what does Forest City Ratner have to say about the complaints made by the Community Boards that the developer has misrepresented their participation in "crafting" the Community Benefits Agreement? In the developer's favored Brooklyn weekly, the Courier-Life chain--which last year published a softball interview with CEO Bruce Ratner--VP Jim Stuckey obfuscated rather than apologized.

His response came in a roundup article headlined Critics Blast Latest Ratner Mailer As ‘Propaganda’:
Stuckey responded that while the community boards were legally prevented from being official parties involved in the CBA given their governmental responsibilities, they did play a role in the process.
A draft outline of the key points of the CBA document was in fact shared with them for discussion with key committees, he said.
“In addition to this process, we met with individual community boards on many occasions and also attended a joint community board meeting that was also open to the public,” Stuckey said.

However, did play a role does not mean crafted. Nor did Stuckey acknowledge that the CBs were barred from attending working sessions. As for that joint community board meeting in November, 2004, there was no crafting of anything, just a smooth-talking Stuckey and a very contentious audience.

Stuckey apparently wasn't asked to respond to the CBs' request that FCR "discontinue all mention, in any form, of our participation."

The Brooklyn Papers didn't have the story, which broke early Thursday afternoon in this blog, after their deadline. None of the dailies have followed up, though The New York Observer's blog The Real Estate took note.

Poster girl rips Ratner

Both the Courier-Life chain and the Brooklyn Papers added to the coverage of Forest City Ratner's deceptive mailer, a story broken Wednesday by this blog, NoLandGrab, and Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. While the story was picked up by The New York Observer's blog The Real Estate and the real estate blog Curbed, it hasn't yet been cited in the dailies.

Notably, as the Brooklyn Papers reported, actress T. Sahara Meer was deeply dismayed that the photographer who took her picture sold the photo to the developer: “That innocent day in the park [is] one of the most nightmarish experiences of my life: I have become Bruce Ratner’s poster girl,” said Meer, who has a “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse” sign in the window of her Prospect Heights home. “My only hope for redemption is to fight harder. So, thanks, Bruce, for fueling my fire, my anger, my ire, my hatred of you.”

Marty backpedals

The Courier-Life questioned Borough President Marty Markowitz about his open letter on the second page of the brochure:
A Markowitz spokesperson said the borough president’s office provided no funding for the flier and had little to do with the concept.
“There was no role whatsoever. We had nothing to do with the concept or the planning. They did ask if Marty would write a letter and he did,” the spokesperson said.

Unmentioned was the content of Markowitz's letter. Though he claimed that the "booklet is another step in familiarizing Brooklynites with the details of the project," he either denied reality or had not actually seen the brochure.

Those mysterious blogs & the CBA

The Courier-Life article continued:
Additionally, several blogs that have been highly critical of the FCRC proposal questioned the validity of the CBA.
These blogs pointed out that several of the signatories received money from FCRC, were not registered non-profit organizations prior to the CBA negotiations, and said that the document wasn’t inclusive of the entire community.

Which blogs? How mysterious to not name them--do the newspaper's editors and reporters fear that their readers might consult another source?

But a CBA defender was found:
...But Bertha Lewis, who heads the New York chapter of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and who signed the CBA on behalf of the organization, defended both the CBA and the housing component.
The signatories had several pro bono attorneys looking at the CBA and ACORN, as a national organization had its general counsel look at it, Lewis said.
Lewis further stated the CBA calls for an independent monitoring body that “does not have a dog in this fight” to oversee the CBA’s implementation.

The role of the lawyers and the independent monitoring body don't actually address the criticisms, but Lewis should be expected to defend the CBA--she's contractually obligated to support the project. But what would experts on CBAs say?

Errol Louis stays on course, careless with facts

Errol Louis is back on his Atlantic Yards hobbyhorse. The Daily News columnist and editorial writer, in his column in Brooklyn's black-oriented Our Time Press, takes aim at me and other unnamed Atlantic Yards critics, at the same time betraying his own tenuous grasp of facts.

Louis, under the headline "Atlantic Yards Watch," wrote:
A cottage industry of blogs has sprung up that obsessively detail – and often distort – every twist and turn in the battle over the proposed $3.5 billion Atlantic Yards Project. One antiproject blogger, Norm Oder, recently acknowledged to The New York Times that he spends 25 hours a week writing (and writing, and writing) about Atlantic Yards.

Not correct. The Times reported:
Mr. Oder said he spent up to 25 hours a week on atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com.

That's doesn't mean I spend 25 hours every week--and I certainly wouldn't spend all that time writing. I do the work of a journalist: read documents, go to public meetings, conduct interviews--and then write.

In any other city, a development this big and this controversial would draw much more press attention; my role has been to help fill a vacuum.

Louis vs. facts

I try to source my conclusions, but Louis too often plays fast and loose with the facts. Note his incorrect figure on jobs at a Forest City Ratner mall--a number he could've gotten right had he checked an article in his own newspaper, the Daily News, published two weeks previously.

Caustic attacks?

Louis's recent column continued:
Much of the blogging includes caustic attacks that are a trademark of the anti-arena crowd. These have grown more frequent and more bitter as the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, moves closer to acquiring the last remaining privately owned parcels near the rail yards along Atlantic Avenue.

First, the volume of coverage does not stem from a reaction to Forest City Ratner's process of land acquisition. Rather, it's generated most significantly by events, such as Forest City Ratner's issuance of a remarkably misleading public relations flyer.

Caustic? (Louis cites no examples.) I'll admit to some tough criticism, and I'll argue that scorn is sometimes in order. Does Forest City Ratner's disregard for the truth deserve nodding acceptance?

The buyout story

Louis then quoted some Forest City Ratner p.r.:
According to a company spokesman, Forest City now owns or controls 64 out of 69 of the condos and co-ops on the project site; 81 out of 102 rental apartments; and 27 out of 43 commercial properties. In other words, 93% of the condos and co-ops have now been purchased, along with 79% of the apartments and 63% of the business properties.
Forest City has also agreed to offer relocation assistance to renters who may be displaced, along with a comparably priced unit in the new development. The end is in sight.

Not quite. Had Louis actually read my blog, instead of dimissed it, he would've learned that the "increase in rent for transitional housing" currently being offered only lasts for three years. Renters leaving subsidized apartments, who are generally have low incomes, would be put in a tough spot if the project isn't built in three years.

Making out like bandits?

Louis wrote:
For a real look at "displacement" – a look you won't find on the antiproject blogs – consider the condo owners, many of them newcomers who made out like bandits when Forest City bought their homes. The New York Times interviewed a 32-year-old lawyer named Erin Coffer who'd bought a unit at 636 Pacific Street in 2003 for $419,000. The next year, they sold it to Forest City for $1.1 million and moved to Manhattan.
So eminent domain – the government's power to legally order people to sell their property at or above market value – may only be needed for a handful of holdouts. Some of the holdouts are well-off newcomers who arrived in the neighborhood only a few months ago but now claim a sacred right to speak for the entire neighborhood and block the project's construction of 7,300 units of housing for other people.

It's hardly clear that the price increase was a huge premium over the general rise in value over two years, and it should be expected that FCR would add something extra to ease the process--especially since the developer is also buying the silence of the sellers, and barring their participation in any organizations opposed to the project.

Forest City Ratner's willingness to pay to acquire land is undoubtedly factored into the developer's internal planning for the project. Last year FCR added 2800 market-rate condos; recently, the developer cut 440 of those units. How much profit per unit?

As for 7300 units of housing, Louis didn't notice that, in FCR's 3/31/06 announcement of project revisions, the cut of 440 housing units means that the project would include 6860 units. That doesn't exactly foster trust in Louis's analysis.

Gag order lifted once

Louis chastises bloggers for not reporting on the happy condo sellers, but doesn't acknowledge that his own newspaper, the Daily News, didn't have the story either. The story was impossible for anyone other than the Times reporter who wrote it--those relocated have been barred by Forest City Ratner's contract from speaking to the press. Were Louis truly in favor of open discourse, he might have mentioned that issue, and even called for the developer to lift the gag order for all members of the press.

Louis on eminent domain

My first run in with Louis came last November, when he objected to my account of his appearance at an 11/16/05 forum at Brooklyn Law School concerning the local impact of the Supreme Court's Kelo eminent domain decision. Louis had sent a link to the video of the session, saying that, rather than parsing my "highly misleading account," readers should view the event themselves.

I just watched it again, and now I realize that there were even more holes in Louis's argument.

Misreading eminent domain

Starting at about 16:00, Louis talked about visiting Fort Trumbull, the section of New London, CT, at issue in the Kelo case; the Supreme Court last year, by a 5-4 decision, had upheld the city's use of eminent domain for the purposes of economic development. The court based its ruling, in