DDDB attorney cites failure to plan, evasion of law, misrepresentation of Coney option

The criticisms of the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) keep piling on, as some of the harshest responses were filed just before the deadline yesterday set by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) lawyer Jeffrey Baker, a veteran of state land use tussles, wrote that government entities failed to plan for the site. Also, he charged, the agency misdescribed the project under the law, ignored key evidence about the potential for an arena in Coney Island, conducted a flimsy blight study, and proceeded in a biased manner.

Failure to plan

Baker's charges set the stage for a challenge to the exercise of eminent domain, since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last year in the Kelo case suggests that eminent domain to support redevelopment can pass muster only if derives from a democratically arrived at plan.

The state cites the longstanding presence of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA), but Baker says that doesn't wash, especially since there was no request for proposals to develop the site with competing bids:
Most fundamentally, this project did not originate from any government or ESDC inspired exercise to identify an area that is blighted, or that needed an arena for professional sports. While Vanderbilt Yards has been included in ATURA, there have not been any proposals or initiatives by any governmental entity to develop the area for at least 30 years. This proposal germinated as a goal of FCR who envisioned the massive mixed-use development with an arena. FCR knew the plan far exceeded what would otherwise be permitted or even conceived of by New York City under existing laws and thus sought out the State to use its powers to override local wishes, procedures and laws to effectuate its goals.

FCR also sought the power of ESDC to use eminent domain to assure control of properties from those unwilling to sell. This is a classic instance of using the constitutional power of a taking for a public purpose as a subterfuge for one private party taking another’s property for its own gain. There was no existing public planning that lead to this project, no request for proposals and no indication whatsoever that this is anything but to assist the vision of a private developer with preferred access to politicians who can assist his goal.

Project misdescribed

The Urban Development Corporation (UDC) Act, which established the ESDC--the successor name to the UDC--is something that few people following Atlantic Yards have read (including me), but Baker has.

He argues that the state is shoehorning a private project with some civic benefits as a Civic Project, even though it will not be managed by a public entity:
ESDC has characterized this project as both a Civic Project and a Land Use Improvement Project as defined in the UDC Act. It is neither. A Civic Project is defined as one that provides facilities for educational, cultural, recreational, community, municipal, public service or other civic purposes. A civic project must be owned or leased by a public entity. This project will be leased to a private entity. The lease to a subsidiary of ESDC and then a sub-lease to a FCR entity is not permitted. An arena dedicated for for-profit enterprises does not qualify. It will be used for the Nets, concerts and other paying activities. While the DEIS discusses the availability of the arena to local colleges and schools, there is no provision for how it will be available and at what price. The intent of the Legislature to limit ESDC’s authority to fund sports arenas is evident by the various acts the Legislature has passed where specific authorization for such facilities was enacted. None of those acts apply to this project.

He also argues that Land Use Improvement Projects require the building of low-income housing, not a mixed-use project with a fraction of low-income housing. In other words, despite the praise for this project from some housing advocates, the affordable housing would be far too little to qualify under the state definition. Baker writes:
The project also does not qualify for a Land Use Improvement Project. That is defined as a project to inter alia rehabilitate a substandard and insanitary area as provided under Article 18 of the State Constitution. Article 18 ties such activities to the provision of low-income rental housing. It does not permit the funding, approval or facilitation of other types of housing. In fact in 1989 and 1991 there was a proposed constitutional amendment to expand the powers under Article 18 to cover all types of housing. That amendment failed. ESDC cannot use its authority to fund and facilitate what is primarily a market rate based, private-ownership residential and commercial project.

Blight study errors

I've pointed out that, based on one ESDC definition in the blight study conducted as part of the General Project Plan, much of New York City could be considered blighted, because properties are not built to 60% or more of their development potential.

Baker writes:
Another glaring error is the mischaracterization in the blight study of what constitutes a blighting characteristic. ESDC includes underutilization of lots as a factor. However there is no legal support for applying that standard to lots such as gas stations that are in active use. There is no legal or planning requirement that a lot be fully built out to the maximum permitted under zoning to avoid being considered blighted.

What about Coney Island?

As I've written, the DEIS dismisses the option of an arena in Coney Island because a site identified in 1974 is no longer available, even though as late as 2003, less than a year before Atlantic Yards was announced, Borough President Marty Markowitz was calling for a Coney Island site.

Project opponents have found two studies that the state apparently ignored. Baker says that only a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) can address the issue properly:
As noted, if this is a State project, and if it can qualify as a Civic Project, ESDC can undertake the project anywhere in Brooklyn, where the stated goal is to provide a means for an arena. During the scoping period, DDDB commented that ESDC must consider Coney Island as an alternative location for the arena. The DEIS failed to consider an alternative with the arena at other locations, let alone on Coney Island. Instead, the sole mention of Coney Island is at p. 1-11 of the DEIS where it identifies it as one of the locations identified in a 1974 study but then claims it is not available due to the construction of Keyspan Park, the minor league baseball stadium.

As noted in the report prepared by Simon Bertrang of Barnacle Planning Studio for DDDB, entitled “Report on Three Decades of Locational Analysis for a Brooklyn Arena” ESDC has seriously misrepresented the facts. First, ESDC audaciously ignores reports prepared in 1984 and 1994, both of which it had access to, which further identified Coney Island as the preferred location for an arena. Second and even more glaring is the mischaracterization about the ability of Coney Island to accommodate the arena. As, Mr. Bertrang demonstrates there are at least two locations on Coney Island that could accommodate the arena. Mr. Bertrang also demonstrates that those locations are in many ways preferable to the Prospect Heights location and are consistent with adopted land use and planning documents.... The bald-faced misrepresentation in the DEIS cannot be cured by trying to address the alternative in the FEIS. This is a significant alternative that can only be addressed in a SEIS.

Should ESDC have managed this?

The ESDC is responsible for both promoting business and, in this case, conducting the environmental review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).

Baker argues that this was not necessary:
We also object to ESDC’s serving in the role of Lead Agency under SEQRA. To the best of our knowledge ESDC never prepared an Environmental Assessment Form under SEQRA and never circulated a request to other involved agencies seeking their input on which agency should serve as lead for the environmental review. ESDC’s pre-disposition toward the project sponsor, Forest City Ratner (FCR) precludes its ability to undertake an objective review of the environmental impacts of the project, particularly the proper consideration of alternatives.
ESDC also violated the mandate of SEQRA that an agency begin the SEQRA process as early as possible in its consideration of the action to evaluate the environmental impacts before it is so far into the review that meaningful consideration is precluded. FCR, the State and the City announced the project in December 2003. Clearly there had been significant discussions between the parties for some time earlier. In February 2005, FCR, ESDC and MTA entered into a series of Memorandums of Understanding concerning the project. In May 2005, MTA released an RFP for the disposition of the Vanderbilt Yards and in July 2005, MTA accepted the proposal from FCR. It was not until September 16, 2005 that ESDC stated its intent to be Lead Agency (without circulating notice to other Involved Agencies), issued the Positive Declaration and initiated Scoping. By that time the project had been under active consideration by ESDC for at least 20 months. Moreover, MTA had already committed to going the FCR proposal and was proceeding to contract. Rather than putting SEQRA at the front of the process to assure environmental integrity, ESDC has placed it at the end of the process, violating both the letter and the spirit of SEQRA.

Is the 8% AY scaleback a "concession"?

Again, we see evidence that reporters new to the Atlantic Yards story get key details wrong. Yesterday's Times "Public Lives" profile of the Municipal Art Society's Kent Barwick stated:
Now, with the planning commission publicly on board for Atlantic Yards, based on the developer’s acceptance of the commission’s suggestion to reduce its 8.7 million square foot project by 8 percent, a concession Mr. Barwick dismisses as a nonconcession, the society has aligned itself with several community groups and declared Atlantic Yards an unfit addition to the borough.

Why does the Times characterize it as a concession rather than a tactic? After all, the Times hadn't used the term before. Also, Brooklyn beat reporter Nicholas Confessore had reported the day before--in the voice of the newspaper, rather than attributing it to a critic, the new reduction only brings the project back to the original size proposed in 2003.

Brownstoner commented (typos and all):
Regardles of whether you're for, againt or somewhere in the middle on the Atlantic Yards project, it's hard not to be disgusted by the transparent dog-and-pony show that's gone on in recent days culminating in FRC "accepting" the city planning commission's recommendation of a 8% cut in the scale of the project

Brooklyn wants an arena?

The Times profile stated:
Mr. Barwick applauds the project’s ambitions (he says the site is right for high-density development and, if Brooklyn wants it, a sports arena)...

But the issue of "if" went unexplored. As I reported in June, Barwick acknowledged that we can't assess what Brooklyn wants: “That’s the trouble with having no public process."

Is ESDC violating open government laws? State official is suspicious

Can the Empire State Development Corporation get away with not releasing its fiscal impact study regarding the Atlantic Yards project? A state official tells the Village Voice: probably not.

Neil de Mause writes:
ESDC's disdain for public disclosure is nothing new—others who've tried to file FOIL requests for agency documents say it can often take months just to get a reply. (The law requires a response within five business days.) But it's especially troublesome in this case, where the only evidence for the project's estimated public costs ($545 million) and benefits ($1.945 billion) is the state agency's assertion that, well, we know what we're talking about, and you'll just have to trust us.

In this case, says Robert Freedman of the state Committee on Open Government, which oversees the Freedom of Information Law, the ESDC's reasoning "is a partial response, and in my opinion in all likelihood it is at least partially wrong." While the law does exempt "intra-agency materials," he says, certain categories of material explicitly cannot be withheld—one of which is "statistical or factual tabulations or data," which presumably would include economic impact number-crunching.
(Emphasis added)

I was interviewed:
"This has been presented as something that's going to be a fiscal boon to the public," says Oder, who notes that other agencies such as the Independent Budget Office and even Ratner's own consultant, Andrew Zimbalist, came up with more significant projected costs. "It shouldn't just be me getting excited about this—it should be our local elected officials. How can they get away with claiming this number?"

CBN says AY environmental review so flawed it shouldn't be approved

At 1 pm today, just a half day before the close of the comment period regarding the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN) plans to deliver a detailed and harsh set of criticisms to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

Said CBN co-chair Therese Urban in a statement, "It is CBN’s hope that the comments of our consultants and community members will be carefully studied by the ESDC and government officials in considering the many, glaring shortcomings of the DEIS. Due to the number and profound nature of the errors and shortcomings of the DEIS, CBN does not believe the current DEIS can be approved.”
(Emphasis in original)

CBN, a coalition of some 40 community groups active in Community Boards 2, 3, 6, and 8, gained $230,000 in discretionary appropriations from city and state officials to hire experts to respond to the massive DEIS, which was issued July 18. CBN is officially neutral on the Atlantic Yards plan, but several of its constituent organizations have opposed it or been strongly critical.

The full response, which runs to hundreds of pages, will be posted on the CBN site Saturday, but preliminary versions released Thursday paint a disturbing picture. One example: while the DEIS portrays the planned open space as green and unsullied by shadows (first graphic above), a shadow analysis (second graphic) suggests that in spring it would be hard to get much sun in that space.

In other examples, shown below, the Environmental Simulation Center points out that the graphics of the potential impact of the project downplay the size and scale of the buildings. (Click on graphics to enlarge)

Overview critique

According to an overview by Hunter College urban planning professor Tom Angotti, while the DEIS is supposed to disclose significant adverse impacts, the document in fact misses several of them:
• Land Use and Public Policy. The project sharply breaks with the City’s land use, zoning and redevelopment policies.
• Socioeconomic Conditions. The DEIS fails to disclose public costs and understates secondary displacement.
• Community Facilities. The project could have adverse impacts on community facilities, but due to faulty methodology, (incorrect calculations) no analysis was performed.
• Open Space. The DEIS underestimates the open space deficit and inappropriately identifies private space as public.
• Cultural Resources. The impact of the project on historic districts is not accurately assessed.
• Infrastructure. The DEIS fails to demonstrate that there will be no significant impact on Combined Sewer Overflows despite proposed mitigations.
• Traffic and Parking. Cumulative traffic impacts beyond the effect on intersections are not addressed.
• Transit, pedestrians and bicycles. Crowding on transit and risks to pedestrians and bicyclists are underestimated.
• Public Health. Significant air quality, noise, shadow, and displacement impacts will have adverse effects on public health.

Because those impacts are not disclosed, there's no mention in the document of appropriate mitigations.

Further problems

Angotti outlined other problems with the analysis, including study area boundaries that were changed and wound up biasing the results, inadequate dates for analysis, and a failure to address several areas of community concern:
• Environmental Justice
• Security and Terrorism
• Mental Health
• Wind
• Heat Island Effect

The DEIS, he wrote, failed to seriously evaluate alternative plans and failed to provide adequate mitigations for the impacts disclosed. Moreover, while ESDC was "partially responsive" to requests for backup data, it did not fully respond. Thus, he argued, the state should issue a Supplemental DEIS before the ESDC board decides to approve the project.

The ESDC must respond to the comments from CBN and others with a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). "The report will be taken into consideration along with all the comments we receive on this project,” Deborah Wetzel, a spokeswoman for agency, told the Times. After the FEIS, the ESDC board is expected to approve the project. However, a lawsuit over eminent domain is expected, which could stall the approval process.

Subsidies ignored

I and others have pointed out the flaws in the ESDC's fiscal impact analysis, and the chapter on Socioeconomic conditions notes several subsidies ignored, all of which cut away at the claimed $1.4 billion in net new revenue.
1) Property tax exemption.
2) Sales tax exemption.
3) Tax-exempt financing.
4) Non-competitive bid for the railyard rights.
5) “Extraordinary infrastructure costs.”
6) Public utility relocation.
7) Affordable housing subsidies.
8) Mortgage recording tax exemption.

Also, the project would increase public costs, such as for schools, but the DEIS does not estimate such costs, the response notes. Moreover, while the DEIS considers "externality-type issues," including shadows, noise, and congestion, it makes no attempt to evaluate the cost of such issues, though Brian Ketcham of Community Consulting Services estimated that additional traffic would cost millions in congestion, traffic accidents, air pollution, and other problems.

Adaptive reuse

While the Atlantic Yards plan would destroy rather than reuse two buildings of historic merit, the Long Island Railroad Stables and the Ward Bakery, the response points out that new developments can incorporate historic structures, as in the example at right from San Diego.

While there are some 20 chapters to the response, tracking the sections of the DEIS, I'll point at two particularly contentious ones.

Noise: just lock your doors?

The response on noise points out that the solution is not a neighborhood-friendly one, given that Forest City Ratner has proposed to buy air conditioners and double-glazed windos for those who want to avoid noise:
The consultants believe that by sealing people in their homes, the expected significant noise impacts will not impact upon them. This assumes that people will agree to be sealed into their homes. In cooler temperatures, people do open up windows and individuals have this right; even in warmer temperatures, individuals may wish to open their windows.... The proposed mitigation would undermine Brooklyn’s well-known “stoop culture,” condemning everyone who chose to meet with friends and neighbors on the block to adverse health risks. It would also undermine any benefits there might be to the network of “publicly accessible open space” planned for the project.

On the one hand the plan promises more than seven acres of public open space and then tells residents to stay in their apartments with their windows shut.

Public health: bad faith

The CBN response accuses the preparers of the DEIS of bad faith--on the level of the tobacco industry--in assessing the health effects of fine particulate matter, PM2.5, since the state seems to be contradicting itself.

The DEIS discussion, according to the response, appears to have been written by or copied from material written by Dr. Laura Green of Cambridge Environmental Inc., a consultant often hired by polluting industries to defend their practices. Dr. Green prepared testimony for power plant proponents NYPA and TransGas in connection with recent hearings regarding New York State Article X, which has to do with the siting of power plants. The DEIS material appears to have been taken in part from that testimony.

Dr. Green’s views regarding the health effects of PM2.5 and of EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for PM2.5 are considered extreme, and they run counter to the State of New York’s position. New York State has participated actively in the legal defense of EPA’s PM2.5 NAAQS against industry challenge.

Another FOI Law request ignored; call for comment period extension

Others apparently have been trying to figure out how the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) reached its $1.4 billion estimate for the Atlantic Yards project. And others, like me, have been stymied.

From a letter sent today by Jeff Baker, attorney for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn:
On August 31, 2006, I submitted a FOIL [Freedom of Information Law] request to ESDC requesting a copy of the independent economic impact analysis” referenced on page 29 of the General Project Plan. In a letter dated September 8, 2006, Antovk Pidedjian, the ESDC Records Access Officer, acknowledged my request and said he would respond as to whether it would be granted within ten business days of his letter. As of today, there has not been any response.

Ten business days after Sept. 8 would be Sept. 22.

The letter argues that if the ESDC had followed the law and left the public comment period open until Oct. 18 instead of Sept. 29, additional comments could be prepared, including those on the materials that have not been provided in response to FOIL requests with an extended comment period.

ESDC stonewalls FOI Law request, won't release fiscal impact study

So much for getting my hopes up about the Empire State Development Corporation's belated willingness to respond to my Freedom of Information Law request.

I refined my request and said my priority was a copy of the "independent economic impact analysis" in the General Project Plan (section G). This analysis states that there would be a $1.4 billion net gain in tax revenues from this project, but I've already pointed out that there seem to be enormous holes in it.

The response I got yesterday from the ESDC:
ESDC has reviewed your request for additional documentation with respect to the financial analysis performed by ESDC. At this time there are no additional documents that are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Law.
It is possible that additional information will be compiled and made available at a later date. If additional information is prepared for release to the public - ESDC will certainly make the same available to you.

Some of our elected representatives should take responsibility for this issue. The state can't simply make a claim like this without backing it up, can it?

The Times gets the scaleback right, but what about the housing commitment?

The New York Times, in an article today headlined Atlantic Yards Developer Accepts 8% Reduction in Project, reports:
The developer of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn said yesterday that the company would support changes proposed by the city planning commission earlier this week, including an 8 percent reduction in the project’s size, additional public space and changes to the designs of several buildings.

The headline could just as easily have said:
Atlantic Yards Cut Brings Project Back to Square One

Indeed, five paragraphs later, some context that the Times had left out of Tuesday's coverage:
The company’s agreement was to some extent preordained: yesterday’s formal recommendations followed months of discussion. Moreover, the new reduction only brings the project back to the original size proposed in 2003. Critics and supporters of the project have called for it to be shrunk between a third and a half.
(Emphasis added)

The Daily News reported:
Critics called the cuts meaningless and said the project will still be roughly the same size as it was originally proposed in 2003, before it grew.

Again, that's an example of attributing an established fact to "critics" rather than in the newspaper's own voice, which has more weight.

Defending density

According to the Times, Amanda Burden, chair of the City Planning Commission, yesterday defended the relatively modest reduction in scale, saying that the project, which would extend east from the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues near Downtown Brooklyn, would be in an ideal location for a high-density development. “It is a transit hub,” she added. “It is at the crossroads of two wide avenues in Brooklyn. It can accommodate density, and density brings excitement, foot traffic, jobs.”

That of course is developer Forest City Ratner's line. Of course the location would be good for high-density development, but the question is how high. Unmentioned is that the project would remain, by far, more dense than the densest census tract in the country.

Affordable housing

The Times reported:
Ms. Burden also said the developer would ensure that at least 30 percent of the apartments built during the project’s first phase will be below-market rental units. A total of 2,250 such rental units are planned for the project, which will have 8.7 million square feet. The developer, according to the letter, has also committed to building the remaining 70 percent during the second phase.

Unmentioned is that the 30 percent figure means 550 units. Has the developer committed to building the rest during Phase 2? The City Planning Commission's letter states:
The Commission is pleased to note that, following the Commission’s Review Session on September 25, the developers have reaffirmed their commitment that the entire project will generate at least 2,250 units of affordable housing on site, and have agreed that at least 30% of the units built in Phase 1 (approximately 550 units) will be affordable. Phase I is defined as the Arena Block. The developers have further committed that the balance of the affordable units will be built in Phase 2. The units are expected to be built as part of the Mayor's New Housing Marketplace Plan. The Commission understands that these commitments are not reflected in the current GPP, but will be embodied in the City’s Funding Agreement with the developers.

It's a little bit hard to parse this. On Sept. 25, Rafael Cestero, Deputy Commissioner for Development at the Department of Housing Preservation & Development was asked if there was a commitment for completing Phase 2 in a certain time. “There is no commitment on the time,” he replied.

So as long as the funding agreement says so, apparently Forest City Ratner will commit to the additional 1700 affordable units, according to the planning commission letter. But that still doesn't tell us when Phase 2 would be built, as it depends on factors beyond the city's contribution to the affordable housing, so there are no assurances that it would be built by 2016 as planned.

The city still hasn't told the public how much the affordable housing would cost.

AY Phase I down to 550 affordable units; more criticism from Tish James

According to a letter released today by the City Planning Commission summarizing the recommendations discussed at Monday's meeting, the number of affordable housing units in Phase 1 of Atlantic Yards, due by 2010, would be 550, not 600 as mentioned Monday.

My article in this week's Brooklyn Downtown Star about that meeting adds some new quotes from City Councilmember Letitia James. She was not pleased:
"I thought some of the comments from Regina [Myer, head of the Department of City Planning's Brooklyn office] were a little over the top. I think [DCP commissioner] Amanda Burden served as a spokesperson for Forest City Ratner, and judge and jury. The fact that they wanted to respect the Williamsburgh bank but did nothing to cut back on Miss Brooklyn is sort of a contradiction. There was no discussion of the overall policy issues, whether the city should be relinquishing its power to state, with a project of this size. They were just tinkering around the fringe."

Also of note

Lumi Rolley of No Land Grab amends today's New York Times article about the Hudson Yards:
Instead, under a new proposal worked out over the past week, the city and the authority would do what critics said they should have done in the first place: rezone the 13-acre railyard on the west side of 11th Avenue between 30th and 33rd Streets for high-rise development and sell it to a developer through a bidding process. In addition, the MTA will be applying the same process to the Vanderbilt Railyards in Brooklyn.

NoLandGrab: OK, we made up the last part. It does make sense though, doesn't it?

And Mary Campbell Gallagher, in Metro, portrays the ghost of Robert Moses visiting Mayor Bloomberg and advising him how to evade the city's strict, post-Moses land use review process.

At City Planning, 8% scaleback surfaces, Phase 2 not guaranteed, and challenges ignored

Here’s the news from yesterday’s first-ever Department of City Planning (DCP) public meeting on Atlantic Yards:
--the City Planning Commission (CPC) seeks an eight percent scaleback in the project, with reductions in the heights of three buildings and the width of another
--most cuts will be in market-rate units, but the number of affordable units might shrink
--the CPC would like open space to increase one acre
--city officials admit they have no assurances that Phase 2 (est. 2016) of the project would be built on time, if at all, thus jeopardizing planned open space and most of the affordable housing
--some 30% of the housing in Phase 1 (est. 2010) would be affordable, a somewhat larger amount than suggested in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)
--the commissioners have no interest in dicey planning issues like the creation of superblocks, inaccessible public space, and an enormous surface parking lot
--the commissioners have some interest in issues like affordable housing and jobs, which are out of their purview, but they don’t know very much about them, and staff didn't help too much.

It made for a major contrast with the launch of BrooklynSpeaks, which, despite some questionable aspects, still provides more informed criticism than did those trusted to serve the city.

The recommendations must first be ratified by the commission and memorialized in a letter that will be discussed at the commission’s meeting Wednesday. But it was hardly a contentious debate; after all, the plan for an eight percent scaleback was said to be under discussion by the developer earlier this month.

(Coverage in the Times, the Daily News, and the Post failed to point out that the scaleback would bring the project back to its original size. The Times at least quoted City Council Member Letita James as calling the cuts "inadequate" and Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn Daniel Goldstein deeming them "insignificant.")

A reduction of 700,000 square feet could mean the reduction of as many as 700 market-rate units, bringing the number of condos down from 2360 to 1660. Then again, there also could be a reduction in the number of rental units, currently planned at 4500, with half of them designated as affordable.

Why’s DCP involved in the first place? A Memorandum of Understanding requires the ESDC to consult with DCP concerning the override of zoning and other local regulations, though it's unclear what power the city agency actually has.

Brooklyn's representative on the CPC, Dolly Williams, didn't participate. She's recused herself because she's an investor in the Nets.

Staff presentation

The review session got off to an inauspicious start as Regina Myer, director of the DCP’s Brooklyn office, described the project as “incredibly transit-oriented,” on “primarily state-owned land,” and located “in Downtown Brooklyn,” all highly debatable assertions that got some in the crowd muttering, including James—who represents the Prospect Heights project location.

Myer led commissioners through a slideshow about the project, offering periodic kudos, citing “this incredible skyline” and suggesting that the Urban Room, the combination ticket window/team store/hotel lobby/office lobby billed as publicly-accessible open space, contained a “soaring glass space… reminiscent of Bilbao,” Atlantic Yards architect Frank Gehry’s landmark Guggenheim museum in Spain. (Note: That’s the first I’d heard of the team store.)

Reflecting commission chair Amanda Burden’s concern that there be storefronts along Atlantic Avenue near the planned arena, Myer described a “b-market,” a narrow strip of retail to accommodate smaller shops.

While buildings along Atlantic Avenue would be tallest, there would be “a dramatic stepdown to Dean Street, which is the northern edge of Prospect Heights,” she said. (Many would say that Pacific Street, one block north and bordering the MTA’s Vanderbilt Yard, is the northern edge.) Such an adjustment had already been announced in May.

Myer described the use of curvilinear, fragmented, and traditional forms, which, she suggested, would “start to break down the bulk” of the project.

And she suggested that DCP had produced specific design guidelines for each building, capping the size (but allowing variety, rather than being shackled by zoning), designating architectural features, and prescribing open space. [Update 1/09: Those actually came out of Gehry's office.]

Changes and cuts

So, what about Miss Brooklyn, the 620-foot (650-foot, with mechanicals) flagship tower that even Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz thinks is too big, dwarfing the iconic 512-foot Williamsburgh Savings Bank? “We really do believe the height it’s proposed at is really appropriate,” Myer said. (Really? Or does that leave Miss Brooklyn for a negotiated trim at a later date?)

However, she declared that the building has “too wide a shoulder base,” which, sounding like a term out of couture, means its middle-section—240 feet across Atlantic Avenue—needs to become slinkier.

Three other buildings, two of them in Phase 1, would be reduced significantly. Building 3, at the northwest corner of Dean Street and Sixth Avenue (currently home to Freddy's bar), would be cut from 428 feet to 240 feet. (It still would dwarf the row houses it would replace, or that would remain on the south side of Dean Street.)

The building at Site 5 (below), in the block bounded by Fourth and Flatbush Avenues and Pacific Street, would be cut from 350 feet to 250 feet “to provide a better transition.” (This was And Building 6, the middle of three buildings over the railyard between 6th and Carlton avenues (and built in Phase 2), would be reduced from 334 to 220 feet, thus making “a tremendous difference in terms of variety,” according to Myer.

DCP also recommended that open space be increased from seven acres to eight acres by reconfiguring it. That still doesn’t address the significant deficit in the open space ratio, given an enormous incoming population.

Commissioners curious

When the commissioners got a chance to ask questions, they were curious, if not always well informed. Commissioner Angela Battaglia asked about displacement caused by the project.

Myer turned the floor over to the ESDC’s Rachel Shatz, Director, Planning and Environmental Review, who gave a defensible but narrow reply. She said that the state Eminent Domain Procedure Law required a relocation plan for anyone who had to move. But she didn’t mention the contentious issue of displacement in the area around the project, a phenomenon the DEIS discounts.

Commissioner Irwin Cantor asked about the evolution of the project, saying that the original proposal was “significantly more modest” before it grew. Myer gave a technical answer focusing on the configuration of buildings: the number of towers around the arena had grown from three to four, and Site 5 was added at a later date.

She didn’t explain that the project was originally proposed at about 8 million square feet, was increased to 9.132 million square feet, and was cut to 8.659 million square feet. An 8 percent reduction would bring Atlantic Yards just below its starting point, to 7.959 million square feet.

Affordable housing & jobs

How long would the affordable housing last, asked Commissioner Kenneth Knuckles. Thirty years, the term of the bonds, said Rafael Cestero, Deputy Commissioner for Development at the Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD).

Knuckles asked how many jobs would be created. Myer responded that there would be 15,000 construction jobs, though actually there would be 1500 jobs a year over ten years.

Knuckles wanted to know about jobs directed to the local community. (He apparently hadn’t heard of the Community Benefits Agreement.) Shatz said that was an issue between Forest City Ratner and the CBA signatories, so she couldn’t speak to that. Her non-answer seemed to buttress the argument, as some politicians have made, for formally incorporating this side agreement into a governmental process.

And what about the permanent jobs? There are numbers in the DEIS, but Shatz passed and Cori Packard of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) was called to the podium. She cited a June 2005 document (p. 6) that projected 7100 office jobs. However, the amount of planned office space has since been cut by two-thirds, but no one saw fit to point that out.

Commissioner Richard Eaddy asked about the minimum number of affordable units. Cestero said that 30 percent of all the units in Phase 1—600 units—would be affordable. That suggests 600 affordable rentals, 600 market rate rentals, and 800 market-rate condos. That would be a distinct contrast from what’s suggested in the DEIS: 404 affordable rentals, 404 market-rate rentals, and 1542 market-rate condos. In essence, that’s a total reduction from 1946 market-rate units to 1400 market-rate units.

(Or did he mean that 30 percent of the planned affordable units would be in Phase 1, suggesting that only 2000 affordable units would be built?)

“We don’t know if it’ll be 4500 [rentals] or 4300,” he said, since the project reduction isn’t complete. He said that Phase 1 would include 1200 rentals, with half of them affordable. Projections in the DEIS said there would be only 808 rentals.

Enforceability

Is there a commitment for completing Phase 2 in a certain time, asked Commissioner Jane Gol. “There is no commitment on the time,” Cestero replied. In other words, depending on market forces and other factors, the majority of the affordable housing and the open space may not be completed by 2016 as currently billed.

How would the affordable housing commitment be enforced, asked Commissioner Lisa Gomez. “It will be memorialized in the funding agreement,” said Cestero, referring to the package of bonds and other subsidies not yet made public. That agreement, according to a representative of the city’s law department, is being developed now, with the first disbursement scheduled for after the project is approved. (That could be later this year.)

How do we get the 2250 affordable units, asked Commissioner Angela Cavaluzzi, pointing to a document that indicated “approximately 2250” units. Cestero gave a slightly different description of the funding agreement, saying that it would be memorialized in a document HPD would sign with the EDC regarding infrastructure.

“We have a commitment for 30% of the units in Phase 1, and will seek the balance in Phase 2,” Cestero said.

More questions

What kind of parking and transit improvements would there be? Shatz mentioned the reconfiguration of Fourth Avenue, the use of remote parking and shuttles, the potential to offer a 50% MetroCard discount, and the extension of rush hour schedules later into the night—mainly mitigations that the Tri-State Transportation Campaign has found wanting.

There was a question about the “intergenerational facility,” which Winston Von Engel, Deputy Director of DCP’s Brooklyn office, explained as a mixed senior center and day care center. He noted that it was a project that Forest City Ratner had agreed to in the CBA. There were lingering questions about the size of the facility, but nobody pointed out that 100 day care slots would make a tiny dent in a new population of more than 15,000.

Critics not pleased

Afterward, Stuart Pertz, a former planning commissioner and now an advisor to the Municipal Art Society on its Atlantic Yards project, observed, “It’s not very timely. It’s not very vociferous.” Given the failure to lock in the second phase, he noted, “They could be left with a hole in the ground and a lot of parking.”

DDDB's Goldstein observed, "Three years into it, it was clear that the planning commission didn't know much about this project. It's been Forest City Ratner's project, which violates Kelo." He was referring to the Supreme Court case which said that the exercise of eminent domain for economic development was justified only if it was derived from a municipally-approved plan. Whether Atlantic Yards does in fact violate Kelo will likely be tested in court.

BrooklynSpeaks principals say it's about strategy

Yesterday, the day after the BrooklynSpeaks web site finally launched, backers of the project spoke at a press conference in Brooklyn--less than an hour after the City Planning Commission, in its only review of the project, essentially ignored many of the flaws in Atlantic Yards pointed out by BrooklynSpeaks, including interim surface parking and open space that looks more like the backyards of buildings.

While the site developers, led by the Municipal Art Society (MAS) and eight other groups, aim to get concerned Brookynites to send letters to public officials, many questions yesterday regarded the groups and their goals. Recently the Boerum Hill Association (BHA) issued a tough set of principles regarding the project, including no use of eminent domain, but BrooklynSpeaks accepts the arena and mentions eminent domain only as a concern that some have expressed.

"Each of our groups has things we feel strongly about," said the BHA's Sue Wolfe, indicating that she didn't consider the two stands contradictory. "We felt that this was more powerful" as a way to get the message out.

The Park Slope Civic Council, said president Lydia Denworth, still might vote on eminent domain. "We don't think it precludes us from participating in this."

DDDB criticism

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, which leads the fight against the project, issued a critical welcome:
However, while the BrooklynSpeaks group takes a position on a few of the relevant issues, they have failed to hear the voice of the community on the issues of the arena, eminent domain abuse, city oversight of the proposal, the unknown public cost, the severe environmental impacts, and the lack of affordable housing guarantees.

Middle ground?

Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee, whose DeGraw Street headquarters in Gowanus hosted the press conference, lamented--as she had at the Sept. 12 Atlantic Yards community forum, a sense of polarization, in which people were listed only as for or against the project. "We hope to have a more civil discourse," she said.

Do the BrooklynSpeaks principles represent an acceptance of Forest City Ratner as the developer for this project, rather than a challenge to the project's legitimacy and the process by which the developer was allowed to proceed? It seems so. Then again, Denworth was asked if the BrooklynSpeaks members would support Atlantic Yards if the request for changes is met.

"Perhaps," she said. "But I feel that between here and there, there's a whole lot of distance to be covered." Without the relatively moderate position distinct from an all-or-nothing lawsuit expected from DDDB and allies, she suggested, "You might get stuck with what they're planning."

"This has not been a public process," Wolfe said. "If this is delayed, maybe there will be an opportunity for a public process." The MAS's Kent Barwick suggested that a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) might be created for ongoing review of the project.

Relations with DDDB

Asked about the role of DDDB, project principals spoke carefully. "DDDB's position is one that's valuable," said de la Uz, who noted that several organizations in BrooklynSpeaks had joined DDDB in a lawsuit challenging ESDC demolitions and the role of an ESDC lawyer who formerly represented Forest City Ratner.

But, she added, "When our agendas align, it's important that we form coalitions."

Denworth said that "work that DDDB has done is very valuable," but suggested the DDDB strategy is primarily legal. (Ultimately legal, perhaps, though the organization and mobilization goes beyond courtroom issues.)

Some of the groups are members of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), an umbrella organization formed to respond to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. "This is to complement the work of the CBN," said Deb Howard of the Pratt Area Community Council (PACC).

Affordable housing

Given that the BrooklynSpeaks principles call for increased affordable housing for poorer Brooklynites, would the two housing advocacy groups seek to play a role in AY affordable housing?

"I didn't place PACC in this position so we'd have a piece of the pie," Howard said. While de la Uz said she never ruled anything out, "I we're not going to compromise our other values."

Superblocks?

While the principles oppose superblocks, BrooklynSpeaks accepts the demapping of Pacific Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. "If Brooklyn wants an arena, and this is a pretty good place for one, that portion of Pacific Street has to be lost," Barwick said. Still, as he acknowledged in June, it's difficult to assess what exactly Brooklyn wants.

DDDB pointed out that, given the somewhat murky presentation of this issue on the BrooklynSpeaks site, the group "should be explicit in their support of the arena and their acceptance of the use of eminent domain for the “Atlantic Yards” proposal (which is required to construct an arena)."

Future strategy

At the end of the press conference, the representatives spent some time talking with each other, as it was one of the first few times they'd met as a group. As they work on outreach, they likely will work to harmonize their message.

Some people referred to the principles as "mitigation," as if to complement the role of the ESDC. Others said they represented "real change." Given that BrooklynSpeaks says that plan "must be changed substantially or rejected," it sounds like more than mitigation.

Dissent and agreement

ADDENDUM: I neglected to point out that the Prospect Place Block Association, a member of the BrooklynSpeaks constituent group Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, protested that it was not consulted on the development of BrooklynSpeaks. Given that the block association opposes the arena and eminent domain, the association's Atlantic Yards task force "feels the Brooklyn Speaks initiative does not go far enought."

I've also heard there's some dismay among members of the CBN because--as I pointed out last week--this announcement takes away from the significant critique of the DEIS that will be submitted on Friday.

Bob Guskind of the Gowanus Lounge suggests:
The truth is, we're depressed that you didn't try to work this out privately and didn't come up with a division of labor, at it were, on Atlantic Yards before this all went public. But, it's not too late. It would be for the best if everyone involved in trying to shape the outcome of this fight were to hash out their differences and divide up the work.
How? Well, BrooklynSpeaks ought to acknowledge that eminent domain is not an appropriate tool for developing Atlantic Yards, even if it's politically simpler to ignore the issue. Legal action to block Atlantic Yards on the basis of eminent domain and other issues is entirely appropriate and BrooklynSpeaks ought to support those efforts. That turf, however, is best left to Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and its supporters.
We do think it's valuable to push for signficant changes in the project, including a redesign with significant public input, as a fallback. This is necessary for the public good, should the legal strategy not stop the development.

BrooklynSpeaks, tougher than hinted, calls for major changes

Now that the BrooklynSpeaks web site has been unveiled, after a two-day delay, the message from the Municipal Art Society (MAS) and the civic groups behind the effort is tougher than hinted:
Tell the decision-makers today that the plan must be substantially changed or rejected. If New Yorkers speak up, we can achieve a better plan for New York.

The project principles draw significantly from the MAS's guidelines announced in June:
1. Respect and integrate with surrounding neighborhoods
2. Include a transportation plan that works
3. Include affordable housing that meets the community’s needs
4. Involve the public in a meaningful way

Not having seen the actual principles, Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco likely was too welcoming, telling the Times that the developer was “pleased to see that these groups want to talk about ways" to improve the project. Does FCR really want to see the project cut in half--a potential change not mentioned in the Times article?

In my piece reacting to the Times article, I gave too much weight to the Times's description that the effort was "focusing on mitigating the project’s impact rather than blocking it altogether." That's not untrue, as BrooklynSpeaks takes no position against eminent domain, but the posture is tougher than both the Times and I allowed.

BrooklynSpeaks represents a split in the opposition (though several BrooklynSpeaks members could be characterized as "concerned" rather than opponents), an assumption--as I wrote--that pragmatic pressure is a wiser tactic than outright opposition and an all-or-nothing legal fight.

Will it acquire more of a critical mass? It currently includes nine civic groups, seven from Brooklyn. Five of the groups are members of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), which was formed to respond to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. CBN has 35 members, ten of them block associations.

Reduced density

The BrooklynSpeaks site notes that the 8.7 million square feet plan wouldn't integrate into the surrounding neighborhoods. One recommendation is to create real public parks rather than building backyards (see graphic); another is to reuse historic buildings. But the major argument is for a substantial scaleback:
A substantial reduction might be:
A reduction of one third in the total amount of sf, as proposed by State Assembly Members James Brennan and others, to cap the development to a maximum of approximately 5.8M sf. This density would create development roughly comparable to the density permitted in parts of Downtown Brooklyn.
A reduction of one half of the total amount of sf, to cap the development to a maximum of approximately 4.3M sf. This would create a development roughly equivalent in density to Battery Park City in Manhattan, which has 152 units per acre. The Atlantic Yards plan would contain more than twice as many per acre if built as currently proposed.

Does that mean that the ultimate compromise would be somewhere between one-half and one-third? Note that Downtown Brooklyn was rezoned for office space, not housing--though most new construction is housing--and that even 5.8M sf would be a significantly dense development. I've suggested that a 50 percent cut should be a ceiling for discussion.

Deadening superblocks?

BrooklynSpeaks calls for the creation of new streets to extend the street grid from Fort Greene and criticizes the creation of superblocks, calling for Fifth Avenue to be left open, which would shift the planned arena to the east.

But that the criticism is selective; Pacific Street should not be demapped east of Carlton Avenue, but the demapping of Pacific between Fifth and Sixth avenues to create the arena superblock is accepted.

Major transportation changes

BrooklynSpeaks recommends significant changes in transportation. This reflects many points already made by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a coalition member:
--minimize construction of new parking
--eliminate the 944-space surface parking lot planned for Phase I on the block bounded by Vanderbilt Avenue and Carlton, Dean and Pacific Streets
--institute residential parking permits
--head off a secondary parking industry, as in the area around Madison Square Garden
--create strong incentives for transit use; rather than including 50% off a subway ride, a mass transit fare should be built into the cost of every ticket
--implement traffic calming to deter overcrowding on neighborhood streets
--take the drop-off lane for the arena and reconfigure it for bus access, so as to hasten bus rapid transit
--plan for additional subway capacity
--begin congestion pricing, as has been successful in London.

Affordable housing

The Municipal Art Society, the most prominent organization in Brooklyn Speaks, is an advocate of urban design, but two members are the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC) and the Pratt Area Community Council, which are involved in affordable housing. And though the advocates acknowledge that 2250 units of affordable housing is a step forward, it doesn't go nearly far enough:
However, two thirds of the units in the development will be sold or rented at market rate, and 60% of the affordable units would only be affordable to families making in excess of the Brooklyn median income, which is $35,000 annually.
Also, despite the fact that the proposed project will displace families earning less than $21,000 annually, none of the affordable units currently proposed are affordable to those families.

This would not only accelerate gentrification and displacement, there is no guarantee that more than a few affordable units would be built in the first phase of the project. BrooklynSpeaks proposes:
--many more affordable units be geared to those earning $35,000 and below annually, especially large families earning less than $21,000
--ensure that the proportion of affordable units built in the first phase be consistent with the project as a whole
--a potential increase in the proportion of affordable units in the overall development
--the potential creation of affordable homeownership opportunites on-site, rather than elsewhere.

The latter, however, would increase the project density. And it's unclear how the affordable housing would be financed. We don't know even now the sum of the subsidies for affordable housing. While an increased reach to accommodate poorer New Yorkers would demand more subsidies, the public shouldn't be asked to pay unless there's a clearer accounting of the project's costs and benefits--an issue not raised in BrooklynSpeaks.

Michelle de la Uz of the FAC told me that, even putting affordable housing aside, the profit and loss statements are an important element of transparency. Where could the money come from? Battery Park City has produced $130 million in revenue geared to hard to reach populations, she said.

Process issues

The sponsors of BrooklynSpeaks acknowledge some process issues:
The Atlantic Yards proposal was conceived by the developer and the political decision-makers behind closed doors and has moved forward with no significant input from New Yorkers. No Brooklyn official will get to vote on the project.

The solution:
Redesign the project with public input.
Create a subsidiary with local representation to manage future decision-making and an ongoing public process for the site.

While that certainly would be an improvement, it accepts--likely for political reasons--the project as it has arrived, with a single developer gaining backing for a project including the MTA's valuable Vanderbilt Yards 18 months before the agency put the railyard out for bid.

That legitimacy issue surely will be part of the inevitable lawsuit filed by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) over the eminent domain case.

As noted, some groups endorsing Brooklyn Speaks are essentially repudiating some of the principles for responsible development for the Vanderbilt Yard that they endorsed, including no use of eminent domain and a project evaluated via the city's more stringent land use process, not the state's fast track.

And other issues

BrooklynSpeaks acknowledges other concerns:
In addition to the issues addressed by the principles, community organizations have also expressed concerns with aspects of Atlantic Yards plan that include
disruptions during the project's construction;
increased noise;
air quality deterioration;
strain on police, fire and EMS services;
sewage and storm water runoff;
the effect of shadows on surrounding neighborhoods; and
the potential use of eminent domain;
as well as other issues.

That's a nod to the hugely-charged issue of eminent domain, which distinguishes this group from some other civic groups and the DDDB coalition, which does not accept the use of eminent domain to aid a private developer to build an arena. So far the Fort Greene Association and the Society for Clinton Hill, among others, have not signed on to BrooklynSpeaks.

Bad faith?

The sponsors of BrooklynSpeaks call the public process "deeply troubling" and the proposal "deeply flawed."

The strong implication is that Forest City Ratner, in its plans for the project, and the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), in its environmental review, have failed in their public responsibility.

But the language of BrooklynSpeaks is more diplomatic. If you're going to negotiate--and this is the start of a negotiation, with the main leverage newly-mobilized public opinion--professing bad faith is probably an unwise tactic. (In court, however, we might hear about bad faith.)

One lingering question: must all the changes sought be implemented to gain the support of BrooklynSpeaks? Would the coalition accept transportation improvements, a reconfiguration of the project, and increased housing for lower-income Brooklynites without a substantial cut in the density?

What next?

Supporters can use the BrooklynSpeaks web site to send letters to elected officials, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and the three state officials who must ultimately approve the project: Gov. George Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. (They will act after the ESDC board approves it.)

To see the letters, you have to log in and check a box saying you support the BrooklynSpeaks principles; if you don't, you're stymied.

As of last night, 695 people were listed as signing on to the principles. That didn't actually represent the number of people who logged on in just a few hours; rather, it included hundreds of people who had already endorsed the MAS principles regarding the plan.

Meanwhile, the Sept. 29 deadline for comments on the DEIS approaches; expect some detailed and tough critiques from the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods. While some of the critiques may buttress the general posture of BrooklynSpeaks, others may point to broader issues regarding the process and the project.

Crain's editor offers weak defense of poll

In his column this week, headlined An Objective View of Atlantic Yards, Crain's New York Business editor Greg David offers a weak defense of the deceptive poll the weekly sponsored last month. He writes:
Many have complained that the questions could have been worded to bring about a different result. That would be true if either Atlantic Yards opponents or Forest City had a chance to influence the poll. Opponents of Atlantic Yards are trying to shoot the messenger because the message is unpalatable.

The "objective" housing question

As I pointed out, the question about affordable housing was worded thusly:
The project will provide 2,250 low-, moderate-, and middle-income rental apartments. Is this a very important benefit, an important benefit, not an important benefit or no benefit at all?

Despite David's statement that Forest City did not formally influence the poll, the phrase "the project will provide" echoes the developer's syntax. The Atlantic Yards web site claims that "Atlantic Yards will also address..." and "The Atlantic Yards development will help..."

Such language suggests that the project itself is the actor, even though the housing would be provided by a developer backed by significant public subsidies.

Alternate questions

Consider some alternative ways to ask that question:
The project would include 2,250 low-, moderate-, and middle-income rental apartments, with an average rent of $1542.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but more than half would be too expensive for people at Brooklyn's median income.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but the inclusion of those apartments means the development would be significantly out of scale with its neighbors.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but most wouldn't be built until after 2010, and could be delayed by the market.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but we haven't been told the full amount of the subsidies used to support them.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but most wouldn't be built until after 2010, unlike city rezonings which require affordable housing to be built along with the rest of project.

And what about the pollster?

David also offers two perhaps contradictory sentences regarding pollster Charney Research:
Mr. Charney, a professional pollster whose firm had emphasized political work, wanted to raise his company's profile within the business community and thought a joint project with Crain's might help... His company had no ties to developer Forest City Ratner or its opponents and no vested interest in the outcome, except to embellish its reputation for objective polling.

So one way of raising the profile might be to produce a poll that businesses would appreciate.

I'm willing to believe that Charney did not slant the questions deliberately to favor the outcome achieved. It could have simply been ignorance. But ignorance is no excuse.

David has already written one wrongheaded column about the Atlantic Yards project. He's allowed his opinions, but they'd be more convincing if he didn't miss the facts.

Times's AY Op-Art more questionable than funny

So, was Bruce McCall's Op-Art piece in yesterday's New York Times a backhanded defense of Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards design as presented or a suggestion that a six to eight percent cut would be meaningless and even self-defeating?

I've heard both arguments and, actually, am not sure what he was after other than a springboard for some whimsical treatments of imaginary past downsizings.

I still find his premise questionable. First, it assumes the project is a done deal--and Atlantic Yards still must get state approval at two levels, and survive a court challenge. Second, the piece doesn't make sense; there's no real comparison between a finished project (like the Eiffel Tower), and a design, and McCall doesn't acknowledge that a six to eight percent cut would bring Atlantic Yards essentially back to its original proposed size. (Oops, maybe he only read one of the two Times stories.)

Perhaps most importantly, the Times devoted two-thirds of the op-ed page to fanciful drawings but it still hasn't shown the public any images of what the Atlantic Yards project would look like in the context of the neighborhood.

ESDC finally acknowledges Freedom of Information Law request

So maybe it was worth it for me to comment publicly at the Sept. 12 Atlantic Yards community forum regarding the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) failure to acknowledge my Freedom of Information Law request. I sent the ESDC a letter on July 26, and the agency should have responded within five business days.

I sent a follow-up letter in late August, as well. Both were ignored until I raised the issue in my testimony Sept. 12. On Tuesday I received, via email, a copy of a letter (above) mailed to me. (Click to enlarge)

The ESDC's response blamed "an inadvertent mistake" and promised a response to my request in ten days. Agencies, however, do have discretion over what they can share in response to such requests, so it'll be interesting to see the response.

How did Ratner get to build a downtown Brooklyn tower? The state won't say

So Forest City Ratner will build a $186-million Renzo Piano-designed tower at a site owned by the City University of New York's College of Technology bounded by Jay, Johnston, and Tillary streets. That site now includes the Klitgord Auditorium, where the Atlantic Yards public hearing and community forums were held.

The building would be about 1 million square feet--almost as big as Miss Brooklyn, the largest building in the Atlantic Yards plan--which suggests it could be 50 to 60 stories tall. It will include classrooms, luxury condos, and some affordable housing.

While the size of the development is apparently as of right, given the recent rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn, other questions remain. However, as the Brooklyn Papers reported, the state won't release details about the finances or the bid process:
The state will finance the CUNY portion of the development, while underwriting Ratner’s construction through bonds.
Ratner won the development rights in competition with one other builder — but state officials would not release information about either bid, nor what Ratner paid for the right to develop luxury housing at a crucial site at the corner of Jay and Tillary streets.

What transparency?

The Brooklyn Papers said in an editorial:
And then last week, state Dormitory Authority officials admitted that they signed a deal with Ratner to build a $186-million tower for New York City College of Technology that will include new classrooms and a gym.
As part of the deal, Ratner gets the right to build hundreds of units of luxury housing atop the school’s facilities.
Officials told us that Ratner beat out another developer for the lucrative contract, but would not tell us who the other would-be developer was and why Ratner’s proposal was better.
Considering that the winning bidder gets to sell luxury housing as part of the deal, it’s important to know the details of both parties’ bids.

Brooklyn Speaks to modify AY project--but which Brooklyn?

Essentially acknowledging that the Atlantic Yards project is a done deal, even before the most significant criticisms of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) emerge, several community groups in Brooklyn have lined up with the Municipal Art Society (MAS) to seek changes to the scale and design of the development. A new web site will be unveiled Saturday, BrooklynSpeaks.net.

As the New York Times reports today, in an article headlined Brooklyn Group to Propose Changes to Yards Project:
The group will prescribe substantial reductions in the project’s size and an increase in the percentage of subsidized housing allotted to poor families, among other changes, but will not take a position against eminent domain.
The groups, including the Pratt Area Community Council, the Municipal Art Society, the Boerum Hill Association and the Park Slope Civic Council, will unveil the proposed changes on a new Web site, BrooklynSpeaks.net, on Saturday, with less than a week until a state-mandated public comment period ends.

Several of the groups are members of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), the umbrella organization formed to recruit experts and present a detailed critique of the DEIS.

Heated debate

Unmentioned in the Times is the heated debate ongoing in Brooklyn, with some groups representing significant constituencies near the proposed project site, notably the Fort Greene Association and the Society for Clinton Hill, refusing to endorse the new venture yet.

Some groups endorsing Brooklyn Speaks are essentially repudiating some of the principles for responsible development for the Vanderbilt Yard that they endorsed, including no use of eminent domain and a project evaluated via the city's more stringent land use process, not the state's fast track. And the Boerum Hill Association just weeks ago reiterated major criticisms of the project, including the use of eminent domain.

The Times did quote Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) spokesman Daniel Goldstein as pointing out that, if the principle is to respect the neighborhood, "by ignoring eminent domain and the arena, they are disrespecting the neighborhood.” The MAS opposes the demapping of streets, such as Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues, but accepts the demapping of shorter streets for the arena.

How much of a scaleback?

What will BrooklynSpeaks say? Many of the principles will derive from the MAS's June critique of the project, including the creation of real public parks, not private enclaves, and the avoidance of superblocks.

The Times said the web site will call for scaling back the project’s square footage. It's unclear whether a target number will be mentioned. Any number would then become a negotiating point to compromise from--rather than a goal. But even a 50 percent reduction could leave the project as dense as the country's most dense census tract, so there's an argument for a cut of that magnitude as a ceiling.

The politics

The Times article suggests that "The new effort follows a series of legal and political setbacks for opponents of the project," citing a failed lawsuit and the recent losses by insurgent political candidates who emphasized their opposition to the project.

On the other hand, it's not clear what leverage--other than the MAS's capacity to earn the ear of some political leaders--this new group would have. After the Empire State Development Corporation approves the project later this year, it must receive the blessing of the three-member Public Authorities Control Board and one member, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, will be pressured to call for modifications.

Brooklyn Speaks will aim to collect signatures supporting its principles--and some of its leaders may be able to claim credit for negotiating a compromise that, to some degree, may have been in the cards already. Architect Frank Gehry said in January that the project is "coming way back."

A hint that a compromise is welcome came from Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco, who told the Times that the developer was “pleased to see that these groups want to talk about ways to improve what we believe is a very exciting project for the people of Brooklyn."

If the BrooklynSpeaks coalition wants more affordable housing allocated to the poor, then Forest City Ratner may seek these groups' support for additional subsidies.

What will those who wish to take a harder stand do? One person told me they may join the Brooklyn Speaks campaign, endorse the criticisms of urban design, but add their own criticisms as well.

Whose momentum?

Project critics also have not yet gained much momentum from the public hearing and two community forums held by the Empire State Development Corporation, each of which featured a majority of union supporters of the project. Then again, the pendulum may shift when the CBN submits its extensive criticisms of the DEIS before the Sept. 29 deadline.

The CBN has provided sketches of its criticisms on its web site. Among the litany:
--Many parts of the DEIS read like promotional material for the development, not a balanced analysis of impacts
--In the areas of traffic, transportation, noise, and construction impacts where the DEIS says there will be significant adverse impacts, the mitigations proposed are minimal and ineffective
--The DEIS states many times that this is an example of “transit-oriented development.” But building next to mass transit by itself doesn’t make this or any other development “transit-oriented"

Meanwhile, the MAS's focus on design issues slights some larger questions of process, issues that DDDB has sought to raise in postcards (right) to Assembly Speaker Silver. Brooklyn Speaks apparently ignores the single-source developer deal behind the Atlantic Yards project, the failure to adequately assess the fiscal impact, and the flaws in the DEIS.

(Note that the MAS has criticized the process, but that's more of a lament than a reason to oppose the project.)

Supporters of Brooklyn Speaks apparently believe that the effort is pragmatic politics, given the current constellation of forces, and that the modifications they seek would avert a much worse outcome. Meanwhile, DDDB and some allies will be rolling the dice with a lawsuit over eminent domain and, likely, the legitimacy of the environmental review itself.

As Brooklyn Speaks and DDDB offer dual letter-writing campaigns, DDDB is also raising money for the legal action.

Getting our money’s worth with Atlantic Yards? Few care, and here’s why

Who can oppose economic development, projects that bring--as Atlantic Yards proponents say--jobs, housing, and opportunity? But when major governmental subsidies are involved, the question gets more complicated. As former state Comptroller Carl McCall put it on Monday, “Somewhere along the way, someone has to say, ‘Are we getting our money’s worth?’”

The question hasn’t really been answered regarding the AY plan, but it’s not clear that anyone—besides a few civic groups and a journalist or two—is really asking. The panel discussion that McCall introduced, held at the Harvard Club by the Drum Major Institute, described a dysfunctional discourse in New York about such important civic issues. Reforms achieved in Minnesota, thanks to pressure from groups including unions, seem elusive here.

At the discussion, the most prolific journalistic defender of Atlantic Yards, Errol Louis of the Daily News, was chastised by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky for lacking a "principled response" to the general issue of subsidies.

Lessons from Minnesota

The session was titled Increasing Accountability for Economic Development Subsidies. The keynote speaker, State Sen. John Hottinger of Minnesota (right), described legislation that sets criteria for giving out subsidies (such as minimum wages) and requires subsidies in excess of $100,000 to be subject to public hearings. The law contains a “clawback” clause that requires businesses that fail to reach stated job creation goals to repay a portion of the subsidy.

(The direct subsidies for the Atlantic Yards project, in excess of $200 million, would ostensibly be for infrastructure and site preparation, not for “jobs.” Public spending--including tax breaks, subsidies for affordable housing, and public costs for education, sanitation, and public safety--would be much greater.)

In Minnesota, reformers initially met resistance from state leaders, including then-Gov. Arne Carlson. Hottinger was quoted famously as saying, “When the business community comes home at night and empties their pockets, they find loose change, lint, and Governor Carlson.”

However, a commission on subsidy reform, and some pragmatic deals among stakeholders—business and labor--led to a revision of the law in 1999. Hottinger noted that the state Chamber of Commerce opposed individually-directed subsidies rather than measures that helped the business community at large.

The legislation arose during the Clinton administration when there was a national debate about welfare, and, Hottinger said, “We framed it in terms of corporate welfare.”

The issue wasn’t whether the subsidies are good or bad, but how much they returned to the community. In Minnesota, as in several other states, local communities had competed against each other to attract business, but there was little sense of the overall pattern; the law required that the state department of economic development receive reports about each subsidy.

And in New York?

So, how does New York compare? “On paper, pretty well,” responded Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who represents a Westchester district and chairs the Corporations, Authorities and Commissions committee (right). “It just doesn’t work. It turns out that a fundamentally corrupt administration of the program undercuts whatever formal transparency exists.”

Though the state has reporting requirements regarding jobs created, Brodsky cited the example of a company that reincorporated under a new name to collect tax credits for jobs held by its predecessor.

“The power exercised in the political process by large corporations is so immense that the amount of subsidies is literally uncountable," Brodsky asserted. "Nobody loves the New York Times more than I love the New York Times. But the New York Times [company] is the recipient of enormous public power subsidies, of bonding and interest rate subsidies. Do they create jobs? Do they not create jobs? Is job retention as valid a reason for giving money as job creation? In the end, most states and most people in government will have to face the fundamental reality that resources are apportioned to the powerful in this state without regard to need. And if that’s going to change, it’s going to take a fundamental change in the political structures.”

Without subsidies, stasis?

Daily News columnist and editorial writer Louis (right) suggested that “part of the challenge of implementing a Minnesota-style subsidy accountability movement… is a lot of political energy kind of moves around from deal to deal." People focus on a project or two but not the broad problem.

Louis suggested that “very few” of the subsidy deals in New York are as outrageous as some mentioned earlier in the session. “Here we have a more mixed and nuanced set of deals.” He brought up the Yankee Stadium deal and then the West Harlem project pushed by Columbia University.

He highlighted the opportunity costs of not using subsidies. “I was born in the Manhattanville houses in Harlem. It’s across the street from where Columbia University’s talking about building its expansion. They gave us a tour… and I am not kidding. It looks pretty much the way it did in 1969… It seems to me, if you’re going to get any progress going, we probably need to spur this in some sense.”

“Ditto for the Atlantic Yards project, which is where I live now,” he continued. (Louis lives in Crown Heights, not Prospect Heights, but they're part of the same community board.) “There’s been too much written about it in the last four years. I know a lot of people in this room know a lot about the project. Suffice it to say that the railyards portion in particular and the area in general has been slated for urban development for decades. And there’s been a cost for not doing anything.”

(Well, was there an RFP? No. Does the urban redevelopment area, ATURA, extend to the entire project site? No. Have some former industrial buildings in and around the proposed project footprint been rehabilitated? Yes.)

Brodsky responded that “it’s just untrue” that New York state doesn’t get some outrageous deals. He cited a couple upstate, then added, “Any stadium deal provides enormous—literally billions—with no ability to understand what we’ve done. So I call on Errol for a little more intellectual rigor. Because his response, which is interesting, is ‘We really need to get something going.’ OK, he’s right. What does that have to do with the creation of massive giveaways?… We get tough with poor people. We don’t get tough with rich people. Let’s find out how much we’re spending. It’s literally billions. Let’s find out who’s getting it. And let’s figure out what they’ve done with it.”

You get yours, I get mine

Louis responded, “What we have here is not a case of jobs simply fleeing… we get something that is probably a good thing, but we paid too much for it.” On the other hand, he said, turning to Brodsky, if a project were in Westchester, “it’s not necessarily such a bad thing for the people in his district and even for you as their representative.”

Brodsky interjected, “Accusing me of insincerity is not a response.”

Louis continued, “The question for me is: What are we going to have? The cost of it is an entirely separate question.” The “local selfishness” regarding subsidies, he said, is something “I accept as the lay of the land… If they’re going to get a billion-dollar TIF [tax-increment financing] deal in Rensselaer County, I think where I live, in Kings County, if somebody wants to bring a billion-dollar deal there, with way too much paid per job, in my neighborhood, where there’s a lot of unemployment, personally, I would say, ‘You know what? I’ll take that.’”

(It sounds a lot like August Wilson’s line in Radio Golf: I don't care if somebody else makes some money 'cause of a tax break. I get mine and they get theirs. And it sounds a lot like Louis’s enthusiastic and unskeptical endorsements of the Atlantic Yards deal. Since May, the Daily News has published five editorials, likely written by Louis, and a Louis column on AY. Why do I think he writes the editorials? Because his latest Our Time Press column sounds much like the latest Daily News editorial.)

Brodsky was unimpressed. “That is a prescription for a bigger disaster. ‘My pork is good. Your pork is bad.’ is not a principled response to the pissing away of billions of dollars.”

State Sen. Liz Krueger, who represents Midtown and the Upper East Side, said she’s made the argument that her district doesn’t need subsidies. “When we don’t have tax revenue for good schools or public transit, the public suffers.”

What next?

“We don’t believe in the free market,” said Brodsky, criticizing large corporations’ reliance on subsidies. “We have perfected in New York state socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”

Until there’s a political counterforce, nothing will change, said Brodsky, who said a public authority—common in the state, including the Empire State Development Corporation overseeing the AY plan—is “an executive agency unmonitored by a legislature.”

So, said moderator Andrea Batista Schlesinger, this challenges some of our notions about politics. Where, for example, is labor?

“Our experience is that labor has been where they should be in most instances,” commented Adrianne Shropshire, Executive Director, New York Jobs with Justice (right). She obviously wasn’t talking about Atlantic Yards, where the unions supporting the project have expressed little concern about environmental impacts, much less larger questions of pork.

Louis wasn’t optimistic. “Unless there’s a political force to change the way New York does business, I see nothing but bad news.”

He added some skepticism about agencies like the Empire State Development Corporation, and suggested most legislators wouldn’t act: “We also do have to look at the 733 public authorities… it’s not even so much that they do bad deals. They themselves are bad deals. In some of these cases it’s not even a matter of giving the subsidies to a corporation, it’s keeping the subsidy in house… Who is going to shine that light? Every year when we write editorials complaining about the member item that the legislature puts out are not publicized in any kind of systematic way that would enable anybody to figure out who did what. Those are not going to be the people who shine the light on corporations.”

Balance of power

To some degree, the discourse depends on “a big victim,” Brodsky said. The immediate example offered, by Richard Lipsky, lobbyist against big box stores (yet for AY) was Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden and poured thousands of dollars into the fight against the West Side Stadium.

It certainly makes you wonder whether a deep-pocketed business helping Brooklyn community groups might have counteracted some of Forest City Ratner’s publicity efforts.

News coverage & owners

Schlesinger asked if there was a relationship between news coverage and the vested interests of the corporate owners. Louis said of Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, a real estate mogul, “As far as I know, he owns half of New York and wants to buy the other half. On any given project, I can tell you, we—the editorial board—we don’t know, or don’t ask to know and usually are not told what interest he may or may not have…. The operating instruction that I receive is: Just go ahead and do your job.”

(There was no time to discuss the New York Times and the parent Times Company’s relationship with Forest City Ratner, as partners in building the new Times Tower on Eighth Avenue. The possible effect of the relationship on Times news and editorial coverage is worth a symposium in itself.)

Louis blamed public indifference. “It’s very hard to report this stuff. It’s very hard to get this into the press. I have probably a little more flexibility than many, but it’s very hard to explain this,” he said, pointing to the example of a firm saving money on a subsidized bond issue, and costs to taxpayers. “It’s tough to make the public care about this stuff.

“If you’re talking about Atlantic Yards, if you’re talking about the West Side Stadium, people want to know what is going to happen in their backyard,” Louis said. “To say that their kids are going to pay more in taxes to pay back the bonds for rich people that they maybe should have. Again, it’s not even a debate about whether the project should happen in a lot of cases, it’s ‘Is there too much subsidy behind it?’ It gets to be very gray, it gets to be very nuanced… And if it’s about transparency, people’s eyes simply glaze over.”

Who sets the agenda?

That raises a question: to what extent do newspapers—on both editorial pages and in news coverage—lead or just react? Why can’t newspapers analyze the fiscal impact of Forest City Ratner’s plan or point out that the state has been unwilling to release its economic study?

Often it’s that news outlets don’t trust their reporters. As Ian Buruma wrote in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday:
A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally underused.

Louis confirmed that point, as well. “I’ll say—hint, hint—it’s very much easier to say a respected think tank has put a report saying taxpayers are being ripped off, and there’s a press conference about it tomorrow.”

Brodsky didn’t have much hope for the press, calling it “no better than anyone else in society, and no worse.” Progress, he said, must come from “political activism with a coherent intelligible message that unites people around a common agenda.”

FCR's past plans for the railyard (and Nets), and future opportunities

So it turns out that Forest City Ratner had been looking at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard for quite a while. During a taping yesterday of Reporter Roundtable, the public affairs show on BCAT/Brooklyn Community Access Television, Dennis Holt, senior editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, told an interesting story.

Holt, whom Brooklyn Papers editor Gersh Kuntzman described as the "dean" of Brooklyn reporters, recalled attending the groundbreaking for Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Center mall in the early 1990s. (The mall opened in 1996.) Within the press packet was an aerial photo of the development site, just north of Atlantic Avenue and part of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA).

Superimposed on the photo, Holt recalled, was an arrow pointing to the MTA's railyard just to the south, between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street, with the statement, "Potential office building site."

A decade later, Forest City Ratner was thinking beyond just office buildings, leveraging an arena to gain public and political support for the biggest project in the history of Brooklyn. And, given that the arena couldn't fit over the railyard itself, the Atlantic Yards outline goes beyond the bounds of ATURA.

Within ATURA, an official urban renewal area, it would be easy to use eminent domain. But when the project outline extended all the way south to residential Dean Street, that made the politics of the deal more complicated. The city allowed the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to review and approve the plan, and the ESDC can override city zoning and exercise eminent domain.

(In the map above, anything in red--including a grayish red, but not the gray alone--is within ATURA. The blue-and-red striped area between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street includes the Vanderbilt Yard and is within both ATURA and the Atlantic Yards footprint. The blocks in solid blue, which continue down to Dean Street, are within the Atlantic Yards footprint but not ATURA.)

The Brooklyn Nets, first pass

And FCR actually had toyed with a Nets plan more than a decade ago, according to Shirley Morillo's recent Columbia University master's thesis, titled "Historic Preservation and the Changing Face of Large-scale Redevelopment Projects in New York City: An Analysis of the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards Project."

From Morillo's thesis:
In the early 1990s, in the midst of the Downtown Brooklyn planning and building cycle, the New Jersey Nets approached Forest City Ratner with a radical proposal – that he buy the team and build them a new arena on his project site. The developer initially dismissed the idea knowing that past stadium schemes had been attempted in the past and that they had failed.

The source: former Forest City Ratner executive Paul Travis. But the short passage raises a question. Was the developer concerned about unmitigatible environmental impacts like traffic? Or was the issue simply the politics of the deal?

What next?

Along with pursuing the Atlantic Yards plan, what else is on Forest City Ratner's agenda? There are hints that FCR is rebranding the adjacent Atlantic Center mall as part of the snazzier Atlantic Terminal complex.

And we know the developer retains 1.258 million square of development rights at the Atlantic Center site, enough to build three substantial towers. The presence of that opportunity must factor into FCR's Atlantic Yards plans. Based on the current configuration, according to an estimate in New York magazine, the developer might make a billion dollars.

Let's say there's community pressure to downsize the Atlantic Yards plan significantly. Forest City Ratner would undoubtedly protest and claim that its costs would increase, and a business has to make a profit. But until the developer opens its books, we don't know what downsizing it could afford. And whatever the Atlantic Yards bottom line, there's another opportunity across the street at the Atlantic Center site.

Beyond that, Forest City Ratner must be thinking ahead. Atlantic Yards wasn't invented in a day. So let's assume the developer is already planning and acquiring land for future projects in areas within the orbit of its past projects. There's still money to be made in Brooklyn.

At final AY forum, three voids—and some warnings about schools

Yesterday’s third and final public meeting on the Atlantic Yards plan, held by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), was in several ways a rerun of the points raised at the epic Aug. 23 public hearing and the barely-attended Sept. 12 community forum.

The forum at New York Tech’s Klitgord Auditorium drew a somewhat larger crowd than the one Sept. 12—about 200 people—but the expressions of support from union members and minority residents differed little from previous testimony in favor of jobs, housing, and opportunity. The meeting, scheduled to last from 4:30 pm to 8 pm, broke at 7 pm, reconvened a half-hour later, and continued for another 45 minutes.

Besides the void in the 800-plus-seat room—especially after the sizable union contingent left at 6:15 pm, having fulfilled their obligation—there were two other voids. Though there’s been much testimony about the 2250 units of affordable housing, nobody spoke for the unmentioned 4610 (as of now) households that would move into the market-rate rentals and condos that would be the financial engine of Atlantic Yards. The development would include 16 towers and an arena for the basketball Nets, built in two phases, and the market-rate units would be frontloaded in the five towers of Phase 1.

Also, though a representative of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN) did testify, experts commissioned by the organization (thanks to city/state grants) are preparing hundreds of pages of testimony that will be submitted by the Sept. 29 deadline for comments. In other words, because of the swift pace of the environmental review and the length of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and General Project Plan (GPP), some of the most and cogent commentary has yet to be heard.

Overcrowded schools

Some powerful testimony came from Mary-Powel Thomas, president of the District 15 Community Education Council, which includes part of the proposed AY site. Thomas warned that the DEIS uses two-year-old figures that are already stale. “The Brooklyn High School of the Arts, for instance, is shown at 47% of capacity. But last year a middle school moved into that building,” she said. “The high school is now bursting at the seams, with classes of 34 students.”

“Another high school in the study area, the Metropolitan Corporate Academy, is listed at 80% of capacity,” she added. “But this year, the school’s at 98% of capacity, with an average of 34 students per class.”

While the DEIS suggests that students might be sent to schools farther out in Districts 13 and 15, in the latter, Thomas warned, “those schools are crowded too.” Last fall, she advised the ESDC to interview the principals of area schools to determine their current capacity. “This was obviously not done,” she said, and again advised such research, “rather than relying on two-year-old numbers that treat children like sardines.”

Opposition points

Sandy Balboza of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association called for a supplemental DEIS, noting that the document ignores some 47% of the new developments planned in and around Downtown Brooklyn and thus underestimates traffic and other issues. She warned that an extension of the current 4 pm to 7 pm parking ban might benefit arena attendees but would hurt the business and residential community she represents.

CBN co-chair Terry Urban argued that the forum was the equivalent of a public hearing, and that the comment period should thus be moved back a month, to October 18. “ESDC is also in violation of the law,” she said, because it has not responded to the group’s Freedom of Information Law request.

CBN, Urban said, is “very troubled by public officials’ grandstanding” on jobs and affordable housing. “CBN will be addressing all the tasks [in the DEIS] in an objective manner.” For that, she was booed. (At right, renderings of the project scale.)

Timothy Logan, chair of the New York City group of the Sierra Club, warned that the DEIS contained no “environmental justice analysis” that assessed the project’s effect on poor people and communities of color. A representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council criticized the project’s effect on traffic, the provision of too little open space, and disproportionate density.

Dean Street resident Anurag Heda took a combative tone, saying, “I’m here to talk to you about the math,” contending that if the city took the public money for the project and directed it simply to jobs, many more jobs could be created. (The money’s not exactly fungible, since the public spending would include direct contributions, tax breaks, and increased public costs for services.)

Heda read from the chapter on neighborhood characteristics, which acknowledged that the project would bring a new scale to the neighborhood. “This is not new to the area,” he said, referencing the statistic that the project would be twice as dense as the most dense census tract in the country. “This is new to North America.”

Pratt Professor Brent Porter reprised his warnings about inadequate acknowledgement of the effect of shadows and the failure to assess “the tremendous wind impact.”

Enid Braun of the Friends and Residents of the Greater Gowanus (FROGG) wondered, “Whose basements will flood with sewage and whose lighting and air conditioning will stay on when this project is built?” She got booed.

Brooklyn Heights resident Sarah Rosenthal urged the long view. “Long after the construction jobs, people are going to be living with this development for decades,” she said.

Another opponent cited the new Richard Meier building at Grand Army Plaza, saying it would be profitable to the builder at only 15 stories. (However, there’s no plan to include affordable housing, and were the latter required by zoning, the building would be given a floor area bonus.)

Project supporters

“You don’t need eminent domain for honest work,” said Malcolm Armstrong, a Fort Greene resident, but that didn’t deter union supporters of the project. Speaking after Braun, carpenters’ union official John Holt Sr. commented, “I don’t want to hear about the sewers, the electric. We built it, and we build it big.”

Holt, a black native Brooklynite, segued into a discourse on the “haves and the have-nots,” and, in an echo of some testimony Aug. 23, laid claim to Brooklyn authenticity. “If you didn’t play kick the can, you’re not from Fort Greene,” he said, beginning a litany. Apparently not mindful of the financial profile of most future AY residents, he challenged project opponents: “We don’t have nannies. If we did, we wouldn’t be like you people and not pay taxes on them.”

Sal Zarzana, another carpenters’ union official, suggested that the criticism aired of the Atlantic Yards plan reprised that raised a quarter-century ago regarding Forest City Ratner’s first project, MetroTech. To the surprise of some listeners, he claimed that MetroTech—a well-insulated office park in downtown Brooklyn—is responsible for the success of Fulton Street merchants several blocks away and even the restaurant row farther away on Smith Street.

Suzi Gjoni, an immigrant from Albania who works as a matron at MetroTech and is represented by SEIU 32BJ, said, “I am here to tell you how important it is to have a union job that pays good wages and benefits.”

Authenticity issues

Some black Brooklynites offered support for the project that highlighted race and class tensions. “I’m a member of BUILD,” declared Anthony Wright, citing the jobs development group funded by the developer. “I’m also a member of the streets.” He described how he’d been clean of drugs and alcohol for 16 years: “Bruce Ratner’s project, I know in my heart, that it can change a lot of people’s lives.”

BUILD president James Caldwell, a courtly man, wanted to clear something up. “Our organization does not represent violence in the community,” he said, referencing comments by BUILD founder Darnell Canada (who has since departed), that a failure to approve Atlantic Yards would lead to “chaos” in the streets.

Caldwell was one of the few proponents to acknowledge environmental concerns, which he quickly dismissed. As for traffic, “we have the technology” to remedy the problems, he said. Regarding the heights of the buildings, “the experts will make the proper decisions to address the concerns, up in Albany.” (Actually, the density of the project is a political negotiation more than anything else.)

But Caldwell was most proud of the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which has been much criticized because it involves only eight organizations, most of them fledgling, and that the promises for affordable housing and job training would be hard to enforce. “People of color can sit down and negotiate a CBA,” he said. “Whites have always negotiated for us.” This comment—as with another proponent’s statement that “I’m not anti-white. I’m just pro-black”—drew no applause from the mostly-white union supporters of the project.

Other proponents questioned the Brooklyn longevity of project opponents. “If you are a true Brooklynite, where were you when they closed two hospitals in Community Board 8?” Leola Holmes asked. “So I say to all the visitors who are visiting in Brooklyn, let’s talk about what people really need.”

Early in the session, William Gillen, a longtime (white) resident of Brooklyn and project critic, offered his own authenticity: “Like [project supporter] Reverend [Herbert] Daughtry, I too hold Brooklyn dear.” He counted off five neighborhoods where he’d lived. “I believe I know something about Brooklyn. I believe this project is wrong for Brooklyn.”

Yes, he said, we need affordable housing, but we don’t need an arena to do it. He suggested relying on the public sector rather than a private developer, and cited the example of the Mitchell-Lama program, which created hundreds of thousands of units of subsidized housing.

After the break

After the break, the dynamic in the room had changed; much like in the final hour or so of the Aug. 23 hearing, when project opponents dominated. Newly reelected State Sen. Martin Connor of Brooklyn Heights, an AY supporter, nevertheless offered Markowitz-ian criticisms, saying the project was too large, needed better solutions regarding traffic, and should have new schools incorporated into it.

Connor’s rival Ken Diamondstone brought up some issues not previously addressed—“the effect on collision events with migratory birds” and the effect of noise from helicopters deployed for security, traffic, or news purposes.

Jeff Mermelstein, owner of a condo within the footprint that he’s agreed to sell to the developer, said his family would move to the Atlantic Yards project. He saluted Forest City Ratner for having “handled us with the greatest care and respect”--a statement that's been required of sellers in some previous contracts--and suggested that brownstone dwellers concerned about AY “are too afraid of change.”

Prospect Heights resident Steven Sullivan spoke urgently about how disappointed he was the Aug. 23 hearing, where he waited for six-and-a-half hours but was not called to speak. Some speakers then predicted a crime wave were the project not built, but Sullivan warned against “a quick fix” promised by the project: “Bruce Ratner is not a savior. He is a developer. He cares about you shouting down his opponents so he can railroad his plan through.”

With proper governmental planning, Sullivan said, an equilibrium might be reached and “hopefully I won’t ever have to sit in a room full of Brooklynites and feel so much animosity.”

Satire—and farce

Early in the session, Schellie Hagan of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition offered some satirical testimony: “I have been heard to speak harshly against Mr. [Bruce] Ratner and his works. Not today. Today I’m speaking for Bruce Ratner.”

Hagan cited the lengthy DEIS: “If you don’t love reading, 4000 pages might seem a lot, but think how many thousands more pages there would have been had Bruce not said, “Skip Terrorism! Skip heat islands! Skip wind!”

Meredith Staton, a project supporter and member of Community Board 8, signed up to testify, but when his name was called, Robert Puca, a fellow CB8 member and project opponent, protested that Staton had spoken at the Aug. 23 hearing. (ESDC barred people from testifying twice.)

The hearing officer queried Staton, who responded that he wasn’t sure at what events he had spoken. (He had in fact testified on Aug. 23.) Staton proceeded to talk about trolley transportation more than urge support for the project, but the bizarre episode led to some angry exchanges when he stepped down from the podium.

When the second-to-last speaker addressed the audience, the session crystallized into farce. “Why are you talking about the environment?” asked Tameika Brown, a single mother with a small child. “There’s already a hole in the ozone layer. I need a job.”

A voice came from the audience. “Because it’s an environmental impact hearing,” responded the Sierra Club’s Logan. The hearing officer chastened Logan for speaking out of turn.

There had been some tension in the final 45 minutes, as members of Fort Greene-based People for Political and Economic Empowerment booed project opponents, and the latter, outnumbering proponents, clapped heartily for those on their side.

But most of the acrimony evident on Aug. 23 was absent. When the hearing ended, several people wound up in spirited but mostly cordial conversations on the Jay Street sidewalk.

Next steps

More testimony, along with that of the CBN, undoubtedly will arrive in the next ten days. After that, the consultants who prepared the DEIS must respond to the comments in a Final Environmental Impact Statement, and the ESDC board must vote to approve it.

Before the project can proceed, the state Public Authorities Control Board must vote to approve it, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver will undoubtedly be lobbied to stop or reduce the project. And a lawsuit over eminent domain--and perhaps the environmental review itself--is likely.

Forest City Ratner executives have said they expect to break ground later this year, with the arena open for the 2009-10 season. Then again, they’re hedging their bets; yesterday they signed an option to extend the lease at the Continental Airlines through 2012-13.

At the Atlantic Antic: Nets promos, luxury housing, and some tough principles on AY

The Atlantic Antic is the borough's premier street fair, and yesterday's version was no exception, with the bonus of excellent weather. There was no shortage of Atlantic Yards-tinged moments; as I'll describe below, the Boerum Hill Association distributed some toughminded principles regarding the proposed Atlantic Yards plan, essentially calling for the density to be cut in half.

The Antic had relatively few of the generic vendors and food-sellers that mar so many street fairs, so the stores and restaurants on Atlantic Avenue got to strut their stuff. Stages every few blocks featured blues, country, and soul music--and one of the churches offered its own sidewalk performance. And Robert Puca of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (right) was there to provide another point of view in the vicinity of a Forest City Ratner table.

Forest City Ratner promotions

With Forest City Ratner as a sponsor, there was heavy promotion for the developer's malls and Atlantic Yards project. The company sponsored three tables. Though each table promoted the Nets and the AY project, the first focused on the Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center malls; I got a mug, a pencil, a keychain, and a mini-radio, all co-branded, in one fell swoop.

Further east, a table promoted the Nets. A third table featured autographs from Brooklynite and former NBA player Albert King, who rose in the Nets promotional hierarchy after his brother Bernard got arrested for beating his wife. People lined up to shoot hoops to win a free Nets jersey and other swag.

The developer is still handing out the brochure, released in May, that proclaims Atlantic Yards "a new vision for Downtown Brooklyn" but somehow neglects to picture the planned towers. FCR's Jim Stuckey told the New York Observer in July that the brochure wasn't meant to be an architectural brochure, and that images were given to the media not long after the brochure was issued.

Well, if it's a "vision," shouldn't people get a sense of it?

The three FCR tables distributed orange Nets balloons, which many stroller-rolling parents attached with nary a qualm, but probably the most popular Nets promotional effort came when a group from the Brooklyn Steppers marching band, rebranded as the Nets drumline, produced some powerful sounds.

[Clarification: a Brooklyn Steppers contingent has been operating as the drumline for two years.]

DDDB & CBN

Was it a coincidence that the drumline gathered near the table of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), the coalition opposing the Atlantic Yards plan? Well, the drummers were shepherded down Atlantic Avenue by two p.r. people who work for the developer.

Continuing its effort to marshal opposition to the plan, DDDB reported gathering some 428 names on petitions and 500 postcards sent to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Silver can modify or even stop the project from his position as a member of the Public Authorities Control Board, which must weigh in after the Empire State Development Corporation Acts.

DDDB also handed out posters urging "Stop Atlantic Yards" and listing four web sites, including this one, for people to "Learn More." (Note that my critical coverage of Atlantic Yards is aimed to be a broadly useful resource, not simply for those who want to stop the project.)

At the table for the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), visitors could watch a Google Earth-based view flyover of the proposed project, and were shown graphics with the projected shadow sweep. In lieu of attending the second and final Atlantic Yards community forum scheduled at 4:30 p.m. today, people were invited to offer three-minute testimonies about the project.

BHA criticism

The Boerum Hill Association distributed some detailed principles that would lead to significant modification--and possibly a scrapping--of the AY plan.

The principles include:
--the number of apartments should be cut by at least a half, so the density of the residential area would be now bigger than Battery Park City at planned full buildout (152 apartments/acre)
--no use of eminent domain (which means that the developer would have to change the plan to deal with holdouts, or negotiate further)
--traffic changes should be implemented before new development adds excess demands
--no demapping of streets
--creative solutions to parking, including residential parking permits
--no demolishing of existing buildings until replacement design and financing are in place ("Boerum Hill and the surrounding communities have lived with this situation in the past.")
--adequate schools for the children of new residents should be built within the project footprint.

Development looming

Meanwhile, signs of new luxury housing popped up along Atlantic Avenue, including the new project pictured, 75 Smith, from developer Shaya Boymelgreen. Though the project web site doesn't say so, it's right next door to the now-closed Brooklyn House of Detention, which might be said to have had a blighting effect.

At a table run by developer David Walentas's Two Trees Management, known for renovating DUMBO, I picked up a glossy brochure for the converted 110 Livingston, the Downtown Brooklyn building built as an Elks Club that formerly housed the Board of Education.

"As for amenities--110 Livingston will not be outdone," the brochure bragged, promising high-end appliances, a fitness center, and a 24-hour concierge. It's another luxury project subsidized under the 421-a plan, which supports all market-rate outer borough development, including the market-rate units planned for Atlantic Yards.

A city task force is reexamining 421-a, and I'd bet such luxury projects in the future won't get the tax break unless they include affordable housing. But the presence of so many subsidized luxury projects is one reason why the city has rezoned several neighborhoods to offers an inclusionary zoning bonus--more developable space for a builder who promises to include affordable housing.

And it's one reason why housing group ACORN negotiated to get affordable units included in the Atlantic Yards project--even though, unlike with a rezoning, there's no governmentally-negotiated cap on the development's size. And we don't know what the affordable housing would cost the public.

Instant gentrification at AY? The numbers are stark

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Atlantic Yards plan states:
Similarities between the proposed project housing mix and the housing mix currently present in the ¾-mile study area indicate that the socioeconomic profile of new households and existing households would be comparable.

I've already shown why that's not credible, as 84% of the 6860 proposed units would go to households that earn more than the neighborhood's median income. Now the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods has prepared a handy chart, as part of a slideshow about the project's environmental impacts. The chart compares the household income distribution in the AY plan with that in the 3/4-mile area around it, and the contrasts are striking.

Hakeem Jeffries, who won the Democratic primary on Tuesday for the 57th District Assembly seat--and that's tantamount to election--made affordable housing one of his issues. A Courier-Life article headlined Jeffries Heading to Albany, quoted him:
“We have an affordable housing crisis that is suffocating the neighborhoods of central Brooklyn and in communities across the district – Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“New York State has to get back into the affordable housing business and if we don’t our neighborhoods run the risk of becoming the bastions of the wealthy and well off, and working families and senior citizens on fixed incomes and the middle class will have no place to go,” he added.

The questions raised by the Atlantic Yards project include:
--to what extent does the provision of affordable housing justify a project that would be much larger than zoning would ordinarily permit and would have significant unmitigatible environmental impacts?
--does the provision of some affordable housing stem the tide of gentrification, or does the project as a whole have ripple effects that further that process?
--how much does that affordable housing cost the public?

Two panels of interest this week

On Monday morning in Manhattan (8 a.m.), the Drum Major Institute (DMI) will be sponsoring a panel on Increasing accountability for economic development subsidies, featuring former Minnesota State Senator John Hottinger. The senator sponsored a groundbreaking Minnesota law that requires that companies that receive public subsidies but fail to reach promised job creation goals repay the subsidy with interest.

A panel discussion on the implications of Hottinger’s work to New York will feature:
Errol Louis, Columnist, New York Daily News
Hon. Richard Brodsky, New York State Assembly
Adrianne Shropshire, DMI Fellow and Executive Director, New York Jobs with Justice.

I was asked to attend and ask a question, so I'll bring up the issue of Atlantic Yards. Brodsky has criticized the lack of accountability of quasi-public agencies like the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), which must approve the AY project. Louis has enthusiastically touted the project. Shropshire's organization is a coalition of numerous unions and civic organizations, including some, like ACORN and the Fifth Avenue Committee, that share similar goals but have emerged on opposite sides of the AY project.

BCAT panel

Also this week I'll be part of Reporter Roundtable, a 30-minute public affairs show on BCAT/Brooklyn Community Access Television. The topic: Atlantic Yards. The host is Gersh Kuntzman, editor of the Brooklyn Papers, which has often looked skeptically at the AY project, and the other panelist is Dennis Holt, senior editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which has often enthusiastically endorsed the project.

We'll be taping the show on Tuesday, the day after the second and final community forum on the plan. The show airs on Friday night at 9 pm and repeats several times.

"Atlantic Yards win by a mile"? The evidence isn't there

In a Daily News editorial yesterday, headlined Atlantic Yards win by a mile (and immediately promoted on the Atlantic Yards web site, right, and via an e-newsletter) claimed:
To the runaway victories of Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, add one more landslide: The Atlantic Yards project planned for Brooklyn was a huge winner at the polls.
Whether to build the $4.2 billion housing and office complex in Prospect Heights along with an arena for the pro-basketball Nets, was a central issue in five congressional and state races. Candidates who back the development won in four of the contests - and the fifth went to one of Albany's impregnable incumbents.

Actually, the results are more murky than claimed. Yes, opponents of the project failed in their efforts to establish a referendum against the project. However, support for Atlantic Yards was not a main factor in most of the victories, and the turnout was quite low.

And there's some counter-evidence, as well. Just this week, Community Board 6, representing an area on and beyond the southern border of the proposed Atlantic Yards site, voted overwhelmingly to oppose the plan in its current form. The other two community boards, CB2 and CB8, also are expected to vote on AY.

(At right, boundaries of 57th Assembly District, with proposed Atlantic Yards site in red.)

Congressional races

The editorial stated:
In the most high-profile race, Yards supporter Councilwoman Yvette Clarke won Shirley Chisholm's old congressional seat over three rivals. Only one opposed the project, and he came in last. The pro-development field pulled in more than 80% of the vote.
Rep. Ed Towns beat Councilman Charles Barron, who hammered the development.

Clarke won with fewer than 15,000 votes, in a race that got 18% of registered Democrats, and her web site doesn't even mention Atlantic Yards. (Neither did the sites for David Yassky, whose posture was positive but measured, and Carl Andrews.) As noted, Clarke's strength came from women, voters of Caribbean descent, and the unions backing her.

Barron got 38% of the vote against an 24-year incumbent, and was outspent by a margin of more than 9 to 1 (as of Aug. 23). Without the dubious participation of Atlantic Yards supporter Roger Green, who had no chance but took votes away from Barron, Towns would have been in even more danger. Towns's web site doesn't mention Atlantic Yards.

It's not clear that Barron's voters were necessarily motivated by the Atlantic Yards issue--he's been quite visible as a Councilman, but his web site does mention his stand on AY. Then again, there's little evidence that Towns's votes came because of his support for Atlantic Yards.

State races

The Daily News editorial stated:
State Sen. Marty Connor, a booster, decisively defeated anti-project gadfly Ken Diamondstone, who spent more than $265,000 of his own money on his campaign.

Here's another way to look at it. Connor, a veteran of 28 years, got only 55% of the vote. Still, as I pointed out, Diamondstone's totals probably have more to do with the money he spent than the Atlantic Yards issue.

(Above, May 2006 ad from Hakeem Jeffries in the Brooklyn Downtown Star.)

The editorial said:
And Bill Batson, a former union staffer who ran a single-issue, anti-development campaign for the Assembly, got creamed - 64% to 25% - by Hakeem Jeffries, who favors Atlantic Yards. Jeffries won 105 of the 109 election districts in the race.

Yes Jeffries earned a much higher percentage of the votes, but he had a much longer history among voters, had at least three times as much money as Batson, had union and ACORN support, and his total of 5770 was only 2359 more votes than he earned in 2002. He earned votes from 9.6% of the Democrats in the 57th district.

Jeffries says he didn't change his position. Perhaps, but he certainly changed his promotion of his position, from a cautious text ad in the spring to one, as the election approached, with dramatic graphics and language. (Note that ad at right is augmented with box at the bottom.)

It's a victory, but it's hardly a definitive sign of Atlantic Yards support. After all, Freddie Hamilton, an unabashed supporter of the project, won only 1008 votes. A "win by a mile" would have carried Hamilton to the top. Rather, undecided voters might have voted for Jeffries based on his advertised call to scale down the project, fight eminent domain, and delay the deliberations.

Did Jeffries ask constituents for support based on his Atlantic Yards stand? It wasn't one of his campaign planks, or even on his web site.

And what about Boyland?

The Daily News editorial said:
Only entrenched incumbent Sen. Velmanette Montgomery managed to survive as a Yards foe.

Note the distorted language here. While Connor, according to the editorial, "decisively defeated" Diamondstone, he got only 55% of the vote. By contrast, Montgomery "managed to survive" but earned 65% of the vote.

It's disappointing that the newspaper took a swipe at Montgomery rather than her law-evading challenger, Tracy Boyland, who still has reported only $100 in spending. Apparently the zeal to promote the project took precedence over the importance of serving as a civic watchdog.

The polls

The editorial concludes:
Add these election results to recent polls, and the result is the same: A solid majority of Brooklynites want the thousands of jobs and affordable-housing units that are included in Atlantic Yards. And the opponents have revealed themselves, once again, to be a small but vocal group that uses press conferences, blogs and bluster to disguise thin support in the neighborhoods they so often claim to represent.

First, a solid majority of Brooklynites didn't vote.

The Crain's poll, as I've argued, was deeply inadequate. As for the depth of the opposition and support, that's hard to measure. What if the poll had asked different questions? What if a deep-pocketed backer (like Cablevision in the West Side Stadium controversy) amplified community concerns? What if the New York Times editorial page didn't feel any pressure to support a project by the parent company's business partner?

Hardly any Atlantic Yards supporters attended the Atlantic Yards community forum Tuesday, and most were union representatives obligated to be there (and who live outside the city). Couldn't that be seen as an absence of support for the project? (Or was it just the flip side of the opposition boycott?)

Informing the public

What if the newspapers had printed graphics that show the project's astounding scale, relative to its neighbors? (Rendering by Jonathan Barkey.) What if any daily newspaper had followed up on the state's untenable claim that the project would bring $1.4 billion in benefits?

Most people polled by Crain's said they weren't following Atlantic Yards closely, and those who did so were more likely to have negative views (though their numbers grew by cutting into the undecideds rather than those positive toward AY).

There are all kinds of ways to shape opinion about this project, but it's safe to say that most people remain underinformed--and most people didn't vote.

Forest City CEO: Crain's poll a boost after New York mag article

In a conference call on 9/12/06 with investment analysts, executives of Forest City Enterprises expressed optimism about the Atlantic Yards project developed by subsidiary Forest City Ratner. They said they expect government approval before the end of the year, yet also displayed some defensiveness about critical press coverage.

First, Bob O’Brien, executive vice-president of finance and investment, offered a summary of the process:
New York continues to be our most active development market We continue to move forward with perhaps our most visible and ambitious project, Atlantic Yards. As we’ve indicated previously, we’ve acquired the vast majority of the land in Brooklyn necessary for the development. In the second quarter, the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] certified the draft EIS—environmental impact statement—adopted the General Project Plan, and authorized a public hearing. The first public hearing occurred in August and we expect a final ruling on approval of the EIS before the end of the year. Our long term objective is to build the Nets basketball team into a great franchise, relocate the team to Brooklyn, a city of two million people, and to develop a large-scale mixed use project with the Nets and the Frank Gehry-designed arena as catalysts for the project and the further development of Downtown Brooklyn. Our commitment to build affordable housing as part of this development is one of the largest of its kind and addresses a significant housing shortfall for the people of New York.”

Nongovernmental hurdles?

Later, Joanne Minieri, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of Forest City Ratner, was asked about the governmental and nongovernmental hurdles facing Atlantic Yards. Her response:
We are in the ESDC approval process. We’ve had a public hearing in August. There will be two more community forums, and basically by September 29, the record will be closed for all public comment. We expect that within the last few weeks of November, ESDC will move to get the Public Authorities Control Board approval for the project. Right now, we’re basically receiving public comment and the state and city are reacting to them.

It sounds like the developer is receiving the comments, but that's the job of the ESDC (via consultants paid by FCR)--and not the city. Still, if the city is in fact reacting, shouldn't those agencies be telling us?

But Minieri neglected to mention another likely factor: a lawsuit over the use of eminent domain in the project, and perhaps also regarding the ESDC's environmental review.

One more boost

Near the end of the call, CEO Chuck Ratner felt compelled to bring up Atlantic Yards again:
I just want to add that there was an article in the past week or so, I think it was in the Crain’s in New York, which referenced polling on our project in Brooklyn. You know, you’ve read lots of negative publicity, bad article in New York magazine, but the truth is that poll came out extremely strong for us. Not only do we have the full commitment of the leadership, the governor, the mayor, the borough president, the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate, but we have very strong support, 60-plus percent from the people who live in Brooklyn. And that also, I think, speaks very well, to our track record, our credibility, the way we’ve hung in there and made our case, and it gives us real optimism for how it will come out.

[Note: it sounded to me like Ratner said "bad article" rather than "that article" in reference to the New York magazine piece, but if any listener hears differently, let me know.]

As I argued, the poll was deeply flawed, and different questions might have yielded a different result. Had the conference call been held a day later, though, Ratner undoubtedly would have cited the election results as well.

As for how the developer has "made our case," well, that's not clear. Was Ratner talking about the no-towers brochure? The apparently-shelved Brooklyn Standard? The stage-managed public hearing? The "absolute absence of democratic process" that the New York magazine article identified?

Forest City restructuring

As for the restructuring in which Forest City Ratner properties will be folded into the parent Forest City Enterprises, Chuck Ratner said the deal with his cousin had been under discussion for years. Minieri added:
Clearly it is a great time to sell real estate. Forest City [Enterprises] and [Forest City Ratner CEO] Bruce [Ratner] were able to negotiate a fair price as well as a tax-effective structure. The resulting transaction provides Bruce, who is now 61 years old, with greater liquidity and a marketable asset for his estate planning.”

Bruce Ratner will own 4% of the company stock and will become a member of the Forest City Enterprises board. Chuck Ratner said that Bruce Ratner will continue in his role, noting that the latter had commented, “This business is my life.”

Was the restructuring because, as suggested on No Land Grab, Bruce Ratner was having trouble raising capital? None of the analysts in the call raised the question, and none have done so since the deal was announced last month.

So why did Green target Barron more than Towns?

An intriguing excerpt from Maurice Gumbs's blog on Room 8, regarding the 10th District Congressional race:
One of the peculiar things was a sudden spurt of activity from Roger Green during the last few days of the election. Roger, who certainly knew that he was not in the running, had people putting up his posters in the areas where Barron was strongest. The act seemed determined to take away votes from Charles. Charles still would not have won, but he might have narrowed his loss to much less. Roger had no money to spend. So it would be interesting to find out who paid Roger to take away votes from Charles Barron.

Besides Forest City Ratner, who else might have had an interest in having that? I wrote on Monday that it was certainly in the developer's interest for Green to take votes from Barron, given the latter's opposition to the Atlantic Yards plan. Perhaps campaign disclosure forms--Green had raised less than $46,000 as of Aug. 23--will tell us. Federal campaign finance reports are due by Oct. 15.

Among Green's contributions were some from people connected to the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement:
--$500 from Hallene Condon of the Darman Group, which has conducted forums for minority and women business owners
--$680 from Keith Lewis of Youth America, which is part of the Downtown Brooklyn Educational Consortium
--$1500 from Richard Hill of Quantum Partners, a Virginia firm that is apparently the minority-owned business hired by Forest City Ratner to provide financial services.

Election results no anti-AY referendum, but not an endorsement either

So people are sorting through the election results and, as Ben Smith wrote yesterday in The Daily Politics, it looks superficially like a win for Forest City Ratner and Atlantic Yards: anti-AY 11th Congressional District candidate Chris Owens came in last in a tough four-person race, with the winner AY proponent Yvette Clarke, and 57th Assembly District insurgent Bill Batson lost decisively to Hakeem Jeffries, who's been generally supportive of the project despite issuing some periodic (and especially last-minute) criticism.

(At right, the 11th CD, with the red dot representing the location of the Atlantic Yards development.)

Smith wrote:
But there was another lesson from the election. [11th CD candidate David] Yassky lost, in part, because he supported Atlantic Yards. The strength of [State Senator Martin] Connor's challenge came partly from that source. And pro-development candidates like Hakeem Jeffries frantically muddied the water around their positions as the race wore on. The lesson for officials close to the project is that they're not going to get any votes for supporting the project, even if that's the majority's vaguely-held opinion; but they will get some motivated enemies.

They may not get votes for supporting Atlantic Yards, but they will get union, editorial, and fundraising support.

Also, consider that turnout remained low, even for the high-profile Congressional race. It drew 18% of eligible Democrats, the Assembly race drew 15%, and primary between incumbent Velmanette Montgomery and challenger Tracy Boyland in the 18th Senatorial district drew just 12%. (At right, the 57th AD map, with the Atlantic Yards footprint in red.)

As hinted above, while the results certainly weren't a referendum against the project--as many AY opponents sought to achieve--it's hardly clear that they were a referendum for the project.

In an article in today's Daily News, Smith reprises the issue:
"To the extent the hard-line critics [of Atlantic Yards] attempted to make this a referendum on their position, the results speak for themselves," Jeffries said.

Money talks

Ken Diamondstone, who garnered a much greater percentage of the vote against Connor than did Batson or Owens against their respective opponents, benefited far less from anti-Atlantic Yards sentiment than his large personal contributions to his campaign.

It's simply too hard for a candidate to make headway without significant funds. Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), which did a pretty good job at convincing its followers to stay away from the Atlantic Yards community forum on Tuesday, is an officially apolitical 501(c)3 organization. Sure, DDDB people did volunteer for Batson as individuals, and their contributions were key to his fundraising, but the group didn't solicit money for Batson, despite some well-heeled individuals on its advisory board.

There is a fairly crude calculus at work: money gets more fliers and posters and election workers. It doesn't necessarily work--Yassky outraised his rivals--but money sure helps.

District lines

Also, let's remember that the lines for the election districts are not exactly coterminous with the areas where the greatest concern with Atlantic Yards might be found. In the 11th CD map and the 57th AD map, the Atlantic Yards project would be in the far west and center west fractions of the districts, leaving large populations to the east and south. In the 18th SD (right; footprint in red), there are large areas south and east of the footprint--no wonder incumbent Montgomery, in campaign literature I was sent, didn't mention that she opposed Atlantic Yards. (Boyland didn't mention her support for the project, though many believe the developer helped in her campaign.)

Still, when Public Advocate Norman Siegel, a project opponent, won the 57th last year, that was seen by DDDB as a sign that an opponent could win the Assembly seat. But clearly there were more factors than Atlantic Yards at play in his success.

I'm told that Jeffries, who'd run twice for the seat before, ran particularly strongly in the southeast segment of the district compared to some precincts closer to the proposed AY footprint. So it's hard to say that Atlantic Yards was a decisive issue for those Jeffries voters; he campaigned on a range of issues and has a track record in the district.

[Update: Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest. Jeffries worked harder. Batson told the Brooklyn Papers: “He beat me fair and square. He must have met every voter in the Ebbets Field houses.” And that's in the southeast segment.]

Were an election district drawn in a circle emanating from the project footprint, it would not resemble the 57th; rather it would inevitably encompass neighborhoods to the south like Park Slope and Boerum Hill, where there are significant concerns about the project.

Numbers in the 57th

Of 60,391 Democrats in the District, the vote totals were:
5770--Hakeem Jeffries
2226--Bill Batson
1008--Freddie Hamilton

In 2002, Roger Green beat Jeffries with only 71 fewer votes cast, by a margin of 5522 to 3411. Given that Jeffries this time gained support of the party machinery, as well as most union backing, he would be the natural heir to many of Green's voters, despite the presence of Green ally Hamilton.

So perhaps Batson--despite losing by a significant margin--got few of those previous voters and instead drew new ones. If so, they weren't enough, and most people stayed home.

DDDB's Daniel Goldstein told the Observer that he preferred to see the election results as a sign that 88% of the voters opposed the use of eminent domain. Still, the issue is more subtle, since Jeffries has criticized eminent domain for an arena, rather than for the project as a whole.

As for Jeffries' controversial mailer, suggesting strong opposition to aspects of the project but not Atlantic Yards itself, Goldstein told me, "For voters interested in Atlantic Yards, and not tied into the opposition, Hakeem's mailer may have been enough [to convince them of his concern about the issue]. But I don't think it was Atlantic Yards by a longshot. He had institutional support and he had the money."

Jeffries also had endorsements from the New York Times and the New York Daily News.

Still, Goldstein suggested that, from the perspective of DDDB, Jeffries would be a better representative than outgoing Assemblymember Roger Green. Still, DDDB has some fences to mend; a commenter on the Observer blog point out that AY opponents put "I love Ratner" stickers on Jeffries posters. (And I'm told that some Jeffries supporters tore down Batson banners.)

When the Atlantic Yards project goes to the Public Authorities Control Board for final approval, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver should turn an ear to the representative of the 57th Assembly District. Will Jeffries ask Silver to wait six months, as the candidate told Community Board 2 in August, for a real examination of the community impact?

On the Times's Empire Zone blog, Nick Confessore wrote:
But today’s results bode relatively well, instead, for project developer Forest City Ratner.... Now let’s see if anyone’s public posture on the issue — Mr. Jeffries, we’re looking in your direction — begins to shift or solidify in the days ahead.

The Clarke election

One commenter on Smith's blog wrote:
Don't get the logic. Clarke supports Ratner and she won. Don't tell me the 15,000 people who voted for her don't care about Atlantic Yards. If I'm an elected, my conclusion is that backing the project won't cost me. As for the enemies, they seem to be toothless.

I suspect that--as the Observer report points out--she was going for her base with women, voters w/Caribbean ties, plus the union households that the health care union 1199/SEIU would bring out.

I don't think Atlantic Yards was a big issue for Clarke voters--I couldn't even find AY on her web site--but I think that Forest City Ratner certainly supported Clarke. First, there were contributions from Bruce Ratner's brother Michael Ratner and sister-in-law Karen Ranucci.

Second, it's possible that FCR played a role in engineering support for Clarke from Roberta Flack, who doesn't exactly live in Brooklyn. In August, Flack both appeared at a rally for Clarke and another for the AY project.

AY & the Congressional race

The Atlantic Yards issue was a big one between Yassky and Owens, and Lumi Rolley on NoLandGrab argues that Yassky's fence-sitting position cost him votes that instead went to Owens.

Owens targeted Yassky, and it's plausible that many progressive voters in Park Slope chose Owens over Yassky. But it's also plausible that other Owens supporters leaned his way for other reasons, including respect for his father, the outgoing incumbent Rep. Major Owens, and they would have preferred another black candidate to Yassky.

Had Yassky taken a harder line on the Atlantic Yards, he might have gained more votes from project opponents. But he also might have lost key backing from black signatories of the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement.

Public support for AY?

Smith wrote that support for AY is "the majority's vaguely-held opinion." It could be, if you go by the recent poll by Crain's New York Business. But different questions might have generated different results.

Boyland's campaign

Boyland's campaign finance transgressions got a pass. Smith wrote:
The only race that went the other way was a half-hearted challenge by Tracy Boyland to Velmanette Montgomery, which the incumbent won handily.

Confessore called it "a late, not-quite-serious, and never-quite-official challenge" and suggested:
Although that 33 percent Ms. Boyland got with a couple of fliers, nary a public campaign appearance, a few dollars in contributions makes you wonder what she could’ve done with a real campaign.

I got three fliers from Boyland in the mail last Saturday, and her posters were quite visible. And it’s not that she had only “a few dollars,” it’s that she only reported $100, and failed to meet state filing deadlines, thus violating the law. Maybe one of these days we’ll find out how she paid for all the mailings and posters.

Another commenter wrote of Boyland:
How does anyone explain that large bus she chartered sitting on the corner of Green Avenue and Adelphi Street yesterday afternoon.

Batson's "what if"

And another raised a different possibility:
And finally, why not speculate what might have happened if Bill Batson had had the money that Boyland... had had?

Actually, on a vote per dollar basis, Batson did fairly well. He
raised nearly $50,000. Jeffries raised more than three times that since the beginning of 2005, but didn't get three times Batson's vote total.

Still, it's possible to draw votes while being significantly outspent; City Councilman Charles Barron did so while losing narrowly in the 10th CD race to incumbent Rep. Edolphus Towns. But Barron was a known quantity. Batson was a new candidate against Jeffries, a strong candidate with a track record as an insurgent against Green.

But the question remains: does Jeffries' margin of victory signal an endorsement of his position on Atlantic Yards, a failure of the Batson forces to get the Atlantic Yards word out, or a more mundane mix of political and institutional factors?

And what about Tish?

As a commenter on Smith's blog asks:
Well what does this mean for [City Council Member] Tish James? Does she tone down her Ratner criticism or face the future like Owens and Batson, her endorsed candidate?

James won reelection decisively in 2005, but her district is much smaller than the state and federal districts above. By the time her Council term expires at the end of 2009, the first phase of Atlantic Yards may be nearing completion, after slight or significant compromises, or it may have been mired in the courts. But the results in the 57th AD do make her job tougher. After endorsing Batson, she now must work with Jeffries.

The Ratner contributions just keep coming

Bruce Ratner's sister-in-law Karen Ranucci, a Greenwich Village resident, gave $2500 on 9/11/06 to the campaign of Karim Camara, the 43rd Assembly District incumbent from Crown Heights.

Camara, an Atlantic Yards supporter, beat Jesse Hamilton by a 65%-35% margin. Camara has been close to former Democratic Party chair Clarence Norman and his father.

[This corrects an earlier version of this post, which said Camara was unopposed.]

AY forum on Election Day brief and low-key, though criticism of scale won't disappear

If a Martian had attended the community forum yesterday on the Atlantic Yards plan, the visitor would’ve concluded that citizens—except for a group of construction workers, a few community activists, two happy property sellers, and some other locals—weren’t much exercised about what would be the largest development in the history of Brooklyn.

Perhaps 125 people cumulatively came to New York City Tech’s Klitgord Auditorium in Downtown Brooklyn, a room that can hold more than 800, for a mostly low-key hearing, scheduled from 4:30 to 8 pm, that was over before 7 pm. By contrast, the epic and raucous hearing Aug. 23 lasted seven hours and left hundreds of people frustrated that they couldn't get in and/or testify.

The polls yesterday afternoon were still open, and many of those concerned about the 22-acre, 16-skyscraper-plus-arena project, were busy with politics. Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the coalition of project opponents, urged its supporters to instead participate in the electoral process. (Project opponents supported Bill Batson in the 57th Assembly District, Chris Owens in the 11th Congressional District, and incumbent Velmanette Montgomery in the 18th Senatorial District, and only Montgomery won. Results here.)

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) didn’t bring its red-shirted followers as before. Nor were there nearly as many Community Benefits Agreement signatories present.

Stakes re-established

Still, the "jobs and housing" mantra was heard again from supporters, and several critics pointed out that the ESDC’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) raises the spectre of numerous backed-up intersections, too little open space, and strained community facilities.

Gib Veconi of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council argued that the proposed mitigations in the DEIS don’t include the more important one. Atlantic Yards, he said forcefully, must be scaled down, not by six to eight percent (a figure floated in a New York Times report last week, and then quickly criticized), “but radically.”

Veconi, whose group encompasses block associations around the proposed footprint, also pointed out the “absurd claim” that the site would remain blighted without the project. "It's time to stop pretending that a project that leaves our streets and transit system crippled with unmitigated impacts is 'transit-oriented,'" an assertion in the DEIS, he said. "It's time to stop presenting a private courtyard of a luxury apartment complex as public open space.... And we need assurances that more of the promises of affordable housing will become reality at the beginning of the project."

Unlike the previous hearing, there were only a few moments of acrimony. There were no lines to get in, so no controversy over line management—an issue about which the ESDC heard an earful. Also, while the ESDC had asserted that the previous hearing had been run fairly, the agency followed a rule that would’ve made a huge difference on Aug. 23: the microphone was turned off for all speakers when they hit their three-minute limit. (Some speakers at the previous event spoke for nearly double that time.)

Union presence

The single largest contingent Tuesday came from the construction unions—and the dozens of members filled out slips from a pad titled “Mandatory Union Activity Program.” As at previous hearings, they supported Forest City Ratner’s project forcefully, noting that the developer, unlike many others in Brooklyn, uses organized labor.

“It’s a win-win,” insisted Brian McBrearty of the sheet metal workers, who acknowledged that, while he doesn’t live in Brooklyn, “I am compassionate” toward concerned neighbors. “Nothing’s perfect.” He added that he thought the project would “help the Fort Greene and Park Slope communities continue” with the Brooklyn renaissance.

Dennis Milton, a business agent for the ironworkers union, implicitly questioned the importance of analyzing the ESDC’s lengthy and complicated Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). “We don’t need an environmental study; what we need is jobs,” he said. (Today's Times article, headlined At Atlantic Yards Hearing, a Gathering Small and Civil, noted the contradictions in a Long Island-based construction worker carrying a sign stating "Yes in my backyard.")

CB concerns

No politicians were present--though I'm told City Council Member Letitia James stopped by briefly--and only a few community board members testified. Robert Matthews, chair of Community Board 8, one of the three that borders the project footprint, said that CB8 is aware of the need for housing and development, “but we cannot turn a blind eye to the negative effects.”

He cited inadequate efforts to address traffic congestion and community facilities, saying that hospital, police, and fire service would be strained. “Day care centers in the area, he said, “have a two-year or longer waiting list.”

MAS criticism

The Municipal Art Society, which was not called to testify on Aug. 23, emphasized concerns raised in the organization’s analysis of Forest City Ratner’s plan. The MAS’s Vanessa Gruen cited as critical issues “the design guidelines that permit the Urban Room to be surrounded by large-scale, opaque signage” as well as a schedule that calls for the southeast block in the project to supply surface parking and a constructions staging area for several years.

Citing a failure to adhere to five proven urban planning principles—including the creation of real public parks rather than private enclaves and retaining public streets rather than creating superblocks—the MAS recommends that the state not approve the Atlantic Yards plan in its current form, Gruen said.

CBA support

While many Community Benefits Agreement signatories already spoke on Aug. 23, a few did get their turn Tuesday. Len Britton, executive director of the New York Association of Minority Contractors, said he was testifying on behalf of 200 firms and 1000 employees. He said the CBA was “regarded as one of the best in the entire country.”

The CBA would designate 35 percent of the 1500 annual construction jobs for minorities, and ten percent for women. Anne Rascon, executive director of Nontraditional Employment for Women, garnered cheers from the male construction workers when she talked about how her organization ‘preapres women for high-wage jobs.”

She added, in a stretch, “Many of these women will be living in the new housing.” (There would be a lottery, and 50 percent of the affordable housing would go to residents of the three adjacent community boards.)

Neighborhood critics

The Friends of South Oxford Park, which opened in June after ten years of preparation, pointed out that there would be too little open space in the area after the introduction of some 20,000 new residents.

They decried the effort of construction noise on the park: "Why should our newly flourishing park be subject to shadows on the playground on spring afternoons and winter days?” Who, they said, will pay for the replacement of trees with “more shade-tolerant species”?

Michelle Williams, a homeowner in Fort Greene’s Atlantic Village, suggested it was absurd to add a population of nearly 20,000 people and not build new schools—and added that the area was already poorly served by police. She pointed out that the DEIS states that impacts at South Oxford Park of the noise, dirt, and pollution from construction "cannot be practically mitigated." Is the health of youth in Fort Greene insignificant, she asked, compared to building mostly luxury condos? Clinton Hill resident Grace Shannon expressed a personal fear: "My asthma would go out of control."

Jim Vogel, a resident of Pacific Street near the proposed project site, criticized “a developer that has consistently failed to keep his promises.” He made a dig at Forest City Ratner’s transportation consultant, saying “I live on Pacific Street between 4th Avenue and Flatbush, or as Sam Schwartz would describe it, the 4th Avenue Viaduct.” Schwartz has recommended that northbound traffic on busy Fourth Avenue be diverted via Pacific Street, which is residential on one side.”

Vogel questioned “the role of the ESDC, which has said it has assumed the role of advocate for the developer. Who is looking out for the public?” He was speaking personally, though he is secretary of Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, a coalition of community groups that will be submitting detailed testimony on the project.

Also, two representatives of the Sierra Club argued that the project would strain the power grid and wastewater treatment facilities.

Housing advocates concerned

Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community development corporation, noted that, "One of the first questions you're asked when you walk through the door is whether you're for or against this project. It's really a false choice. I think the question before us really is: Can we have an Atlantic Yards development with all of the benefits that this project purports to have, and address the impacts that it has?... A public process should try to rectify those two things."

She went on to criticize assumptions in the DEIS, noting that the affordable housing in the project would serve higher-income people than in existing rent-stabilized units nearby. People represented by her group earn under $20,000 a year and would not qualify "for the lowest-income units in the project." To fight displacement, she said, “We have to increase the number of units at 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI) and below.”

Only 225 of the 2250 affordable housing units (of 6860 total) would be available to those earning 30% and 40% of the AMI. (The rub is that the New York AMI is calculated using not just the five boroughs but also wealthy suburbs, and the Brooklyn median income is just about half of the New York AMI.)

How to pay for such housing remains a question—Bertha Lewis of ACORN has argued that the developer needs both subsidies and market-rate units to produce affordable housing at the current proposed income levels.

The bigger fiscal picture troubled Deborah Howard, executive director of the Pratt Area Community Council, another community housing agency. “What is the true cost of this project?” she asked, pointing to many unknowns. She suggested that $200 to $300 million in subsidies might better spark "good jobs" at the Navy Yard. She also warned that, despite the language in the DEIS, the project would cause displacement among merchants along Fulton Street near the project. (PACC has established a merchants association there.)

Happy sellers

Two property owners who’d made deals with Ratner provided almost comically enthusiastic support for the project. Menachem Friedfertig, a real estate investor from Crown Heights, had bought at auction a garage at 622 Pacific Street within the project footprint, then sold it to the developer. “It was the most amazing thing,” Friedfertig said. “Mr. Ratner, he was so fair. He was such a mensch.” Friedfertig, an Orthodox Jew, unveiled a shofar—the ram’s horn used in Jewish ritual—as a gift to Bruce Ratner and proposed that the developer “should blow it on opening day at Ratner arena.”

(In September 2004, Friedfertig was more confrontational, telling the New York Sun that “I am waiting for Ratner to make a realistic offer, or I could just go ahead with the development.” Forest City Ratner typically requires those who sell property to express support for the project or state publicly that they were treated fairly.)

Paul Hamilton said he’d owned a home in the footprint for the past 26 years, and “I’ve grown up and grown older in that house… I love that neighborhood, and I have loved it during two and a half decades of non-attention by the city and private developers, and I love it now as it’s poised for a new life.” (Hamilton is a minister in College Point, Queens, so it’s not clear how much time he spends in Brooklyn.)

He praised Forest City Ratner as “bridge builders” for having met him and his tenants halfway—“and they’ve met the community more than halfway.” He said, “I call them developers with compassion,” said Hamilton. He teaches human services at Metropolitan College in Lower Manhattan, and claimed that “my students are hitching their wagons to the Atlantic Yards star.”

He later said there was no requirement for him to speak on behalf of the project. Asked if he’d sold already to Forest City Ratner, Hamilton replied, “It’s in the process.” (City property records suggest at least part of it was completed in May.) Hamilton said that his Dean Street building does not contain rent-regulated apartments, though the opposite has been reported. A tenant lawyer has argued that Forest City Ratner needs the state to pursue eminent domain on the developer’s own building to evict rent-regulated tenants and other lawyers have criticized the developer for leaving tenants vulnerable by offering them unfair relocation agreements.

(The Times story gave Hamilton two paragraphs but didn't mention the developer's general policy of requiring sellers to speak favorably of their experience. Then again, the Times was the only daily to cover the hearing in an article today, and the newspaper even deployed two staffers.)

Other supporters

As at the Aug. 23 hearing, supporters cited jobs and housing without addressing the details of the DEIS. Speaking fervently, though mainly to absent targets, Ahalia Smith criticized those opposing the project as hypocrites, unwilling to rent out their brownstones “at rent-stabilized levels.” (Maybe that's because they didn’t get major government subsidies?)

Supporters included representatives of the Harlem Business Alliance, the Salvation Army, and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Captain Brian Glasco of the Salvation Army's Bushwick Corps said he "constantly interact[s] with Brooklyn residents who are struggling to make ends meet." He cited a woman who works 40 hours a week at $8 an hour. "The constituents I serve will benefit from Forest City Ratner's development," he said. (Actually, as de la Uz's statistics pointed out, someone earning that $8 wage wouldn't even be eligible for the affordable housing.)
Chamber President Ken Adams said the organization’s position had been established via a canvass of its members. Some members welcomed a basketball team, others seek affordable housing for their workers, and others valued the long-term effect of a $4.2 billion project, he said. Some Chamber members have expressed concerned about the project, Adams said, but added that they were meeting with the developer.

A final community forum will be held at the same place next Monday at 4:30 pm. Expect a larger crowd. The comment period closes at 5:30 pm on Sept. 29.

My testimony

Given the low turnout, I decided to testify. I spoke briefly, but didn't address the project's pros and cons. I said I'd filed a Freedom of Information Law request on July 26 and the ESDC had not, as required by law, responded within five business days to acknowledge my request. In fact, the agency hasn't responded at all. Why can't the ESDC follow the law?

On 9/12, a day for an election--and a hearing

Yesterday Lumi Rolley of No Land Grab observed:
Many Brooklynites are wondering why Bruce Ratner plans to build:
a glass and steel skyscraper,
towering above an arena,
at one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn,
over a transit hub that has already been targeted by terrorists.

I wonder less about Ratner's motives than whether our government regulators will assess the security risks. Given that post-9/11 security is not within the scope of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), that responsibility--and the responsibility remains--will fall to our elected officals.

Whether they support Atlantic Yards or not--and Atlantic Yards Vote and NLG will let you know--our elected officials (and that includes ones not in races today) owe the public a responsible analysis.

I wonder how many will be at the community forum (not an actual public hearing, so let's consider the term "hearing" in the headline colloquial) this afternoon on the Atlantic Yards plan. And I wonder how many of the people will address the DEIS, or simply rally for/against the project.

We know that a lot of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn followers won't be there, so does that mean that ACORN and BUILD and the unions will instead spend their time in the political process as well?

Harsh words for planning--at Ground Zero

Yesterday, in an essay headlined At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote:
The designs unveiled last week for three sleek glass towers at ground zero rise above the mediocrity we have come to expect from a planning process driven by political opportunism, backdoor deal-making and commercial greed.

Couldn't that also be said about Atlantic Yards? That passage reminded me how much civic and journalistic attention has been paid to Ground Zero. The attention is legitimate, but the pool is finite.

In the absence of the Ground Zero controversy, or the West Side Stadium controversy (in which community groups found their voices amplified by the deep-pocketed Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden), wouldn't Atlantic Yards have popped up on the radar screen of more New Yorkers?

The unwritten story: Forest City Ratner and Brooklyn politics

The outline has emerged, perhaps for the first time, of Forest City Ratner's extensive reach into Brooklyn politics. Of course the borough's leading real estate developer--in terms of major projects--would play a significant role, but little analysis has appeared in the press.

It's well-known that FCR spends a lot of money on lobbying, but that Bruce Ratner and his lieutenants eschew local campaign contributions.

Still, that Watergate-era adage remains operative: follow the money.

Contributions via surrogates

As I've reported, Bruce Ratner's relatives and associates have contributed regularly to political races in Brooklyn (and beyond), especially as election day approaches.

What makes this curious is that Michael Ratner, the eminent human rights lawyer, and his wife, both Greenwich Village residents, make some contributions from Forest City Ratner's offices in Brooklyn. Michael Ratner apparently does have an office there, but his wife sure doesn't--and they apparently put their progressive ideology in check when blood meets Brooklyn.

A curious polling firm

Someone is paying the shadowy, California-based polling firm Pacific Crest Research, to push-poll Brooklynites in favor of 18th Senatorial District candidate Tracy Boyland (and to ask about Atlantic Yards), to query Brooklynites about the 11th Congressional District race (and ask about Atlantic Yards), and to query them about other local races.

FCR won't admit/deny that the firm is their client. However, who else is interested in these topics, especially since the polls also include nongovernmental but AY-connected figures like the Rev. Herbert Daughtry?

At this point, Forest City Ratner's failure to disavow any role in the Pacific Crest Research calls should be taken as probable cause--not proof, but certainly sufficient to be raised publicly.

Political ties

Sure, people have personal ties independent of their jobs, but it's always convenient if the politicians they help share the interests of their employers. FCR executive Bruce Bender is playing some role in helping Boyland, according to the Brooklyn Papers.

A hand in Green's race?

And why has Assemblyman Roger Green remained in the three-way race against Rep. Edolphus Towns and City Councilman Charles Barron, even though Green has little money and has hardly campaigned vigorously? The Times reported Friday:
Two months ago, the challengers — City Councilman Charles Barron and Assemblyman Roger L. Green — talked about joining forces and whether one should drop out of the race in order to defeat Mr. Towns. But since then, their deliberations have spiraled into a series of meetings, angry charges and accusations of betrayal.
In an interview this week, Mr. Barron said that he had reached an agreement with Mr. Green more than a week ago in which they agreed that Mr. Green would drop out and support the Barron candidacy.

Green claimed unconvincingly that he was campaigning vigorously. He told the Observer: "I'm a deliberative person," Green added. "I try not to be impulsive in my decision making and my actions."

That's hardly an explanation.

But look at it from a FCR-centric view. Towns supports the Atlantic Yards project, as does Green. (Both Towns and Green, though the former more recently, have received contributions from Michael Ratner.) Barron is a staunch opponent.

By staying in the race, Green--who has decent name recognition due to his longevity in office--may siphon votes that Barron could have taken in a two-way race. Green, could go to work for Forest City Ratner, as did his aide Randall Toure, or be very employable in an organization related to the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement.

Was Green's candidacy serious from the start? A veteran political observer told me that it was, as Green had hoped to get union backing for his bid--unions were furious with Towns for some of his votes. Once Green failed to get the union nod, his fundraising dried up, and his candidacy was doomed.

The larger picture

Political reporters have often been tone-deaf to the Forest City Ratner/Atlantic Yards element in local politics; remember how Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum's equivocations were ignored last year?

It's time to wise up.

Another AY error from the Times; mayor sanguine about subway crowding

In an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, headlined The Bloomberg Vista, Jonathan Mahler describes the mayor's development plans:
[Deputy Mayor Dan]Doctoroff set about identifying underused areas that could be repurposed. Here, the city’s outdated zoning codes played to his advantage. Because New York’s last comprehensive rezoning took place in 1961, when there were nearly one million more manufacturing jobs in the city, there were large tracts of idle land across the five boroughs. If necessary, Doctoroff figured, the city could employ its powers of eminent domain to condemn private property before turning it over to developers. “You have huge swaths of the city that are no longer relevant to its economy,” he told me, “old piers on the waterfront, elevated freight lines, military bases like Governors Island, warehousing districts, rail yards.” The approach mirrored Doctoroff’s strategy for NYC 2012, which envisioned transforming neglected pockets of the city into sporting venues.
The Olympic plan is dead, but signs of the Bloomberg administration’s development strategy will soon spring to life around the city. “We are literally dragging New York into the 21st century,” Doctoroff says. A two-mile stretch of dormant Brooklyn property along the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront was recently rezoned for housing and parkland; a decommissioned Navy port on Staten Island will be turned into apartment complexes, restaurants and a recreational sports facility; the crumbling Bronx Terminal Market will be demolished and reconstructed as a retail mall; the Atlantic railroad yards in Brooklyn may someday soon house the New Jersey Nets, as well as mixed-income apartments and 600,000 square feet of new office space. These are just a few of the dozens of development projects currently on the boards. All are contingent on the continuing strength of the city’s economy. Most are years away from completion; some, like the Atlantic yards plan, face strong community resistance. But the mayor’s office has already rezoned the equivalent of nearly 4,300 blocks throughout the five boroughs for commercial and residential use.
(Emphasis added)

Let's note that rezoning is accomplished by the mayor's office working in tandem with the City Council, so it's more democratic than autocratic. Let's remember that the Atlantic Yards plan would not proceed via a rezoning; it would be a state override of city zoning.

Most importantly, the railroad yards could never house the Nets, the apartments, and office space because they're too small. For the umpteenth time, a reporter has assumed that Atlantic Yards and the railyards are coterminous, even as the latter would be a little more than a third of the AY project.

Mayor shrugs off infrastructure

The article notes:
Nevertheless, the mayor’s ambitions can hardly be concealed, and his critics on the right would prefer that he leave development to the free market. “We have such pie-in-the-sky ideas from Bloomberg,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an influential conservative research group. “Meanwhile, the infrastructure that the city should be focusing on, like the subways, is being ignored. That’s the real barrier our natural growth is going to bump up against.” (For his part, Bloomberg told me: “I take the subway. My attitude is go earlier if the train’s crowded.”)

Would that be his advice to Brooklynites faced with train and platform crowding if the Atlantic Yards project proceeds as planned?

Bohemia meets AY?

In a Times Magazine essay yesterday titled Where It’s At, under the rubric of The Way We Live Now, James Traub writes about the shifting state of bohemia:
[John] Reed’s latter-day descendants are threatened not by penury but by gentrification. How can Bohemia contend with the twin baby stroller? The other day, walking around Fort Greene, one of Brooklyn’s current claimants to downtown cultural status, I stopped at an office building called 80 Arts. In the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts, or MoCADA, which occupies the ground floor, an exhibition of major black artists had just come down. I picked up some fliers from the counter. One, issued by a company called Downtown Babies, advertised “Creative Play and Music Classes” and “Themed Birthday Parties” to be held at MoCADA. Downtown Babies — the end of Bohemia as we know it.
80 Arts had been gutted and renovated as part of a “cultural district” established by a “local development corporation” organized around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the cultural mega-institution of Fort Greene. Here was a planned Bohemia — surely a contradiction in terms. Indeed, many locals, and local organizations, had protested the development (as they are now even more loudly protesting the Atlantic Yards, a nearby mega-project featuring skyscrapers and a basketball stadium to be designed by Frank Gehry). But MoCADA owes its presence in Fort Greene to the cultural district; should the project be fully implemented, a new theater and public library will be built as well.

The two are hardly comparable--the Atlantic Yards project, with its basketball arena, would have much greater effects on surrounding neighborhoods. Still, it is interesting that Bruce Ratner has long been a power on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; surely an improvement in the neighborhood would bolster the Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center malls Forest City Ratner operates nearby. Indeed, the latter is slated for redevelopment.

The inevitability of AY?

Traub's article closes:
And so the Bohemias of yesteryear have gone the way of Reed’s Spanish longshoremen. But is that so bad? Take a walk in Fort Greene, an ethnically and economically mixed neighborhood with tree-lined blocks of fine brick homes. A block away from 80 Arts, beyond the town house that the painter David Salle has lavishly rehabilitated, lies the lime-green Habana Outpost, an eco-friendly cafe where mothers push downtown babies on swings amid racks of folkloric skirts, priced to sell. And then, moving up Fulton Street, once a commercial swamp, there’s the wine store and the soul-food restaurant and the beloved Cake Man Raven. A few blocks away stands the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has been irreproachably avant-garde since long before there was any money in it. Fort Greene feels less like Bohemia than what the scholar Joel Kotkin calls an “elite urban enclave” — a place suited to the sophisticated tastes of the “knowledge workers” who now propel New York’s economy.
But the wheel of development that brought in those young cosmopolites, and priced out a number of the area’s longtime, predominantly black residents, has not stopped turning: the Atlantic Yards project threatens to disrupt Fort Greene’s delicate ecology once again. We want to preserve our precious and beloved utopias like paperweight worlds; but the city — at least this city — will not permit it.

Actually, the soul-food restaurant and Cake Man Raven appeal to a somewhat different crowd than the wine store, and rely in part on long-established black residents who aren't leaving, because they bought a while back or they live in rent-regulated housing.

As for the final paragraph, Traub seems to be suggestion that the Atlantic Yards project is inevitable, the price of progress that will sacrific "our precious and beloved utopias" like Fort Greene. Except that Fort Greene has gentrified only the past few decades, following the 1978 designation as a historic district. Some 30 years ago Fort Greene was significantly rundown.

If the city will not preserve "paperweight worlds," shouldn't the change at least proceed through a publicly accountable process?

Boyland's $100 mystery campaign and the state's weak campaign finance laws

If you've gotten Tracy Boyland fliers in the mail or have seen posters up in the 18th Senatorial District, you know that the candidate challenging incumbent Velmanette Montgomery (who opposes the Atlantic Yards project) must be spending some serious money.

Just yesterday, I received three different Boyland mailings--one with the not-so-subtle message of "Progress for us," accompanied by three photo-ops at housing projects.

However, according to Boyland's filing with the New York State Board of Elections (BOE), Boyland has only $100 to spend--from herself. (See below, and click to enlarge.)

That was from her required 32-day pre-primary report, due in early August. Her 11 day pre-primary report was due September 1. She hasn't filed yet. And if she doesn't tell the public who's funding her before the primary election in September 12, well, she'll get away with a slap on the wrist: a fine of $500.

Ratner's role?

Is Forest City Ratner backing Boyland, who supports Atlantic Yards (though doesn't say so in her mailings)? The Crain's Insider last month quoted sources saying Boyland was using the same consulting firm--Knickerbocker SKD--that FCR uses for its deceptive Atlantic Yards mailers. Boyland told the Brooklyn Papers that she's friends with FCR's Bruce Bender.

I've reported on how a push poll from Pacific Crest Research--likely a client of Forest City Ratner--attempted to sway voters to Boyland, an Atlantic Yards supporter. Forest City Ratner wouldn't comment on the company's role in Boyland campaign, according to the Courier-Life chain.

Boyland herself has been elusive. She didn't fill out a candidate's questionnaire from the Brooklyn Papers, nor return phone calls. And, as the Village Voice reported in 2004, she has a history of playing fast and loose with campaign finance regulations.

Losing endorsements

Boyland's lack of transparency has driven even pro-AY editorial pages at the Daily News and the Courier-Life chain to endorse Montgomery.

(The Courier-Life calls Boyland "a phantom" and hails Montgomery for not being "afraid to challenge the status quo" in opposing Atlantic Yards. Still, the editorial page endorses 57th Assembly District candidate Hakeem Jeffries while claiming that anti-AY candidate Bill Batson is backed by what is mischaracterized as the "NIMBY" crowd. Isn't Montgomery also backed by some of the same people? The Brooklyn Papers endorsed both Batson and Montgomery.)

Weak state penalties

Can Boyland get away with this? The sanctions for flouting state campaign finance laws pale in comparison to those regarding city or federal campaign laws. Candidates who fail to file their state reports on time get a letter sent five business days later warning that they face a judgment with a maximum amount of $500, plus court costs and interest.

"That's the only thing we can do," Lee Daghlian, director of public information for BOE, told me. "We can't civilly fine."

While candidates miss deadlines frequently, it's often because they're new to the process. That's not the case with Boyland, however, a former term-limited City Councilwoman from a Brooklyn political dynasty.

"We pursue them all who should file. It takes a couple of months to get a judgment," Daghlian said. Given that there are six filing deadlines for each race, there could be six separate fines if a candidate missed each deadline.

It's tougher elsewhere

"We've asked for years to be able to levy civil fines, like the city campaign finance board or the FEC [Federal Election Commission] does, but the legislature hasn't responded," he said.

In New York City, candidates who fail to file see the penalties grow each day, plus a multiplier depending on how much they've raised. The FEC also adds a base fine linked to the amount of money raised, plus daily penalties, as well as a multiplier based on the number of previous violations.

Boyland's empty promises

Boyland, despite her entrenched status in Brooklyn politics, was described in the push-poll as "a candidate who would be new to Albany and try to shake things up." One of her mailings promises "a new era of understanding."

Apparently neither applies to campaign finance laws.

CBN, CB reps slam AY hearing oversight; ESDC mostly shrugs

No crowd control. Atlantic Yards supporters allowed to cut the line. Failure to allow those waiting to enter the hearing room in a timely manner. Verbal abuse and racially inflammatory references.

Those are some of the charges in a blistering letter sent Thursday by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN) to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), complaining about how the agency "planned and executed" the Aug. 23 public hearing on the Atlantic Yards project, held at the Klitgord Auditorium of NYC Technical College.

Some of those complaints are repeated in letters to the agency from Community Board 2 chair Shirley McRae and Joanne Simon, district leader for the 52nd Assembly District.

The agency's response to the CBN letter and to some questions I sent about the fairness of the process--and asking whether it would be different at the upcoming community forums on Sept. 12 and Sept. 18--was brief. It didn't address whether the mike would be turned off after three minutes, as was done infrequently--I clocked project supporter the Rev. Herbert Daughtry at 5:45, albeit with delays for cheers--or whether there would be stricter controls on heckling.

Spokeswoman Jessica Copen emailed me:
At the public hearing on Aug. 24, ESDC followed our practices and policies regarding hearings. We intend to conduct the forums similarly. We hope that the attendees at the upcoming forums will respect all the speakers so that we can conduct the forums efficiently and maximize the number of speakers in the time available.

That hardly responds to the issues. (Also, it was Aug. 23.) The agency did send an extensive reply to McRae that partly responded to the letter but evaded a crucial issue, as ESDC took no responsibility for the management of the outside line.

CBN's charges

CBN's letter began by noting that the ESDC, before the hearing, would not even provide information on how hearing procedures would be conducted, instead choosing to treat "CBN’s offer of assistance as a Freedom of Information request," which has not yet been provided. CBN collected the names of more than 300 people who never made it into the auditorium.

(CBN, focused on public education and response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement is officially neutral on the project, but many of its constituent groups oppose Atlantic Yards.)

The letter from co-chairs Candace Carponter and Therese Urban states:
Unfortunately, even getting on line early did not guarantee members of the community at large admission to the hearing. We can obtain affidavits from at least two individuals - one an AP reporter, and both who were near the front of the line - attesting that the hall was half-filled when the doors were finally opened at approximately 4:10 p.m.
In addition, the individuals manning the doors, who were variously described as being employees of the ESDC, the developer Forest City Ratner Companies, members of the New York City Police Department, and the security and/or management of the building, routinely allowed union members, members of BUILD (an organization funded largely by the Developer), and members of other organizations supporting the project to enter through a side entrance designated for press and electeds.
When representatives of CBN and a member of Community Board 2 challenged those manning the doors, they were told that the individuals being admitted were either members of the press or were carrying speeches for elected officials, even though these admissions were witnessed at approximately 7:30 p.m., long after the electeds had completed their speeches. In order to prevent continued unfairness, the Community Board 2 member stationed himself at the side entrance for more than two hours.
Chaos ensued in the front of the lines outside as well. We have witnesses who can attest that busloads of children were unloaded and ushered to the head of the line; that gatekeepers allowed people wearing stickers and carrying signs in favor of the project to join others already at the front of the line while unaffiliated attendees were directed to the rear; and that members of the Carpenters’ Union were permitted to open the police barricades and crowd into the front of the line before the doors opened.

Hearing tone

The letter challenges ESDC procedures:
In addition to failing to guarantee fair and impartial access to the hearing, the ESDC also did nothing to prevent the hearing from quickly developing an acrimonious tone, and in some instances, took action that only served to inflame the already heated emotions of the hearing’s participants.

By shuffling the cards, and attempting to balance pro and con speakers, that meant that many later-arriving people were called to testify before others who'd been on line all day. Moreover, CBN said, that process "overtly encouraged the public" to argue for or against the project, "rather than to respond to the substantive issues raised by the DEIS and the GPP."

The letter charged:
However, rather than quelling the vitriolic rants of several ”supporters” of the project, the Hearing Officer appeared cowed by the inappropriate behavior, and permitted outright threats to go unchallenged; in fact, the most vocal “supporters” were allowed to remain at the microphone for more than the three-minute limit. (CBN can provide affidavits to support this abuse.) Grossly inappropriate and threatening comments were permitted at the microphone, among them this quote from a Community Benefits Agreement participant and one of the founders of BUILD, in describing the possible reactions of ex-convicts with whom he works, “So you better hope this project goes through or else you'll be the victim. If this project doesn't happen, I guarantee you: You will have chaos in this community."
Much inappropriate behavior also came from individuals not at the microphone. Some of the comments from the audience that were allowed to continue, unchecked, were: "No jobs means we WILL ROB!” and “You can say what you want, but we’ll be waiting for you outside when this is over."

Racially inflammatory, certainly, but "racist references," as the letter states? Some project supporters may seize on this distinction. (Let's note that racially-charged rhetoric has come from both sides in this debate, such as ACORN's Bertha Lewis, BUILD's James Caldwell, community activist (and DDDB advisory board member) Bob Law, and DDDB's Daniel Goldstein.)

CBN's requests

CBN asked for "a formal investigation into the manner in which this particular public hearing was conducted" and that no additional hearings or forums be held unless "appropriate controls for the method of conduct of the hearing and audience behavior are put in place."

McRae's letter

McRae wrote to the ESDC on 8/28/06:
I personally observed...gatekeepers allowing people wearing stickers and carrying signs in favor of the project to join others already at the front of the line while unaffiliated attendees were directed to the rear.
Supporters of the project continued to receive preferential treatment after the doors opened. A member of Community Board 2 informed me that two gentlemen wearing badges indicating an affiliation with Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), one of the signatories of the benefits agreement signed with the developer, stood at the front doors and allowed some individuals to bypass the line.

She pointed out that the time available for substantial comment on the issues was reduced by the number of speakers who repeated boilerplate support for the project, and that people who arrived early in the day did not see their names called in order. She pointed out that members of the community board worked hard to prepare for the hearing:
Of the twelve people associated with Community Board 2 that signed up to speak, only four were able to that evening. Seven speakers were not called and one was called but had already left due to childcare responsibilities.

ESDC's response

Rachel Shatz, Director of Planning and Environmental Review, responded to McRae 8/31/06, explaining that the agency:
--hired 10 security guards to maintain order
--no one besides specific individuals "was sanctioned by ESDC to be allowed to bypass the line"
--given the predominance of pro-project speakers at the head of the line, ESDC attempted to provide balance by reordering the speaker cards
--written testimony has the same weight as oral testimony.

As to Shatz's point about balancing the order of speakers, it did help project opponents in some ways. For example, photographer Jonathan Barkey, who offered dramatic testimony accompanied by his renderings of the project, arrived at 4 pm, as I've been told, but was called within the first group from the public.

Shatz, however, punted on a key issue:
The ESDC staff members working at the hearing were occupied with signing in the speakers, manning the materials inspection desk, providing project materials, running speaker cards to the hearing officer and listening to the public presentations. It was not appropriate to assign them to sidewalk control, since steps had been taken to provide security and police oversight in that area.

Three minutes?

Since McRae didn't raise it, Shatz didn't address the conduct of the hearing officer and his unwillingness to hold people to the three-minute limit.

That issue came up in Simon's 8/25/06 formal complaint to the agency:
While generally respectful of witnesses [hearing officer Edward] Kramer had a heavy hand on the time clock for those who were testifying about environmental impacts, allowing project supporters to preach and scold well beyond the 3-minute limit... Had such testimony been remotely on topic, I might be less offended, although it still would have been unfair.
Every person testifying at the Aug. 23 hearing supported affordable housing and jobs. Those who testified on point however, supported the creation of affordable housing and jobs in a healthy and safe manner, something the GPP [General Project Plan] (as acknowledged by ESD) does not provide.

Affordable housing: timing, enforceability, and ACORN compromises

So, how can we be sure all the affordable housing at Atlantic Yards would be built? A politician is trying, but he's getting pushback from ACORN.

From the Courier-Life chain this week:
Assemblymember Jim Brennan has written to city and state economic development officials asking for assurances that the 2,250 affordable housing units would indeed be built.
“Currently there is no guarantee that 2,250 affordable housing units will be built,” said Brennan, noting that only 404 of such units are scheduled to be built as Phase 1 of the project.
The remaining 1,846 affordable units are scheduled to be built beginning in 2010, but there is no express contractual commitment at this time between city and state governments and FCRC, said Brennan.
“The affordable housing development should come first and be guaranteed,” said Brennan, adding that the public is being asked to support the project on the basis of that promise.
The affordable housing component of the proposed development came about as per a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) between New York ACORN and FCRC.
“First things first, Mr. Brennan,” said New York Acorn Executive Director Bertha Lewis.
“The ESDC has to approve the plan and once they do, the state Public Authorities Commission approves the plan, and the 2,250 affordable units are part of that plan,” she added.

But Lewis didn't address the issue; just because they'd be part of the plan doesn't mean they'd be delivered, since the second phase of the project would depend on the success of the first phase--as well as other changes in the economy.

It seems that the Atlantic Yards plan doesn't meet the standard set in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, in which affordable housing would have to be built simultaneously.

And still unmentioned is the total amount of public subsidies needed for the housing.

Is it enforceable?

How enforceable is the housing agreement? An 8/29/06 article in Metro NY stated:
Should FCR not meet its housing obligations, it has agreed to pay $500,000 to a fund for community groups backing the plan.

That didn't ring true, since the only monetary clause in CBA involves a $500,000 payment if Forest City Ratner doesn't fulfill its job training obligations. While that sum could fund job training, it certainly couldn't pay for housing.

I couldn't get Forest City Ratner to confirm or deny the statement, though they apparently haven't asked for a correction. I asked ACORN, and was told no such clause existed.

Going to court

But what could happen? The CBA provides for binding arbitration, as well as the opportunity to go to court to enforce the agreement. It states:
[T]he court shall have the power to order affirmative equitable and/or affirmative injunctive relief, temporary or permanent, requiring Developer to comply with this Agreement or monetary damages; it being acknowledged that monetary damages may not be an adequate remedy for defaults under this Agreement by Developer.

ACORN spokesman Jonathan Rosen added:
After reviewing your question with ACORN's pro-bono counsel, I can safely say that if the MOU were not fulfilled ACORN could seek injunctive relief. The legal standard for obtaining this kind of relief is (a) likelihood of success on the merits and (b) irreparable injury if FCR were to proceed without compliance which cannot be satisfied with monetary damages. While courts tend to favor monetary damage remedies, we believe we have a strong legal argument for injunctive relief since the goal of the parties to the CBA is community benefit rather than financial gain and it would be difficult to quantify the damages arising from the breach in financial terms. The language of the CBA supports this although this language alone would not be definitive.

In order to bring an action, there is a 60-day cure period. The coalition or the member that controls the particular chapter of the CBA (ACORN, in the case of housing) can elect to bring an arbitration or court proceeding. That party can go directly to legal action if irreparable injury would result from delay.

Political pressure

Also, of course, ACORN could bring political pressure, such as by picketing. Would ACORN, for example, accept some compromises in the final number of units? Perhaps not, but ACORN has already accepted compromises in other ways:
--not protesting when Forest City Ratner turned the 50/50 housing pledge into a 50/50 rental agreement
--describing the project in the Brooklyn Standard as a 50/50 project, even though it's not
--not objecting when the developer decided to shift 450 of the affordable units to a higher income band, meaning fewer units for moderate-income people
--not objecting when FCR characterizes the subsidized apartments as 50% two- and three-bedroom, even though that refers to floor area rather than number of units
--not criticizing the construction schedule, as noted above.

More Ratner-related contributions: $10,800 to State Sen. Connor

Incumbent State Senator Martin Connor, who's in a tough primary race against Atlantic Yards opponent Ken Diamondstone, just reported $5400 each from Michael Ratner and his wife Karen Ranucci (or, as it says, "Ranvcei"), along with contributions from developers David and Jed Walentas, and the District Council of Carpenters. (Note: Diamondstone gave himself $100,000 in the past week, apparently borrowing against his retirement funds.)

These contributions come from the Ratner/Ranucci home address in Greenwich Village. So why have four other contributions each been addressed from 1 MetroTech Center North, the home of Forest City Ratner in Brooklyn? I'm told that Michael Ratner, whose work at the Center for Constitutional Rights is obviously consuming, has a little-used office at FCR headquarters. It is, after all, a family company.

And when will Tracy Boyland, challenging State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, meet the September 1 deadline for the 11-day pre-primary filing?

FCR's secret scaleback options--and maybe a smaller Miss Brooklyn

We learned this week that Forest City Ratner might reduce the scale of the Atlantic Yards project by 6 to 8 percent, which likely would still leave the project larger than its incarnation in December 2003. And that would still be less than the rather arbitrary 15 percent cut recommended by the Times editorial page.

Few were impressed by the rumored cut, but let's look further down the road. This can't be the last scaleback--not when the public comment period remains open, and before the Empire State Development Corporation approves the project and sends it to the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB).

With the project still at 8 million square feet, there will be pressure on Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who killed the West Side Stadium with his PACB vote, to negotiate further changes. The Slatin Report on Wednesday quoted a veteran of municipal planning who predicted that the project would be cut 10 to 20 percent.

Prepared for cuts

Forest City Ratner is ready. A source tells me the developer has long had a scaleback model prepared that illustrates significant concessions. And documents from the New York City Housing Development Corporation (NYC HDC) hint that several buildings could be considerably smaller than currently projected.

Indeed, no building is described as more than 40 stories tall, even though five buildings currently planned would be more than 400 feet in height. Proposed buildings are described with flexibility: 30-40 stories tall, 25-30 stories tall, or 20-35 stories tall. Still, the documents are not conclusive; they can be revised, and do not include market-rate space that could add to the size of the buildings.

Looking at the numbers

Remember, Forest City Ratner in December 2003 announced the project at 8 million square feet, last year increased it to 9.132 million square feet, and on 3/31/06 cut it to 8.659 million square feet at the end of March, falsely claiming that they had "identified innovative ways to scale down the original design...." (Emphasis added)

Indeed, Forest City Ratner's announcement previewing the 5/11/06 press conference featuring Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin gave a hint that the 5 percent scaleback was only one step, saying that the new plans "are not final images." Earlier this week, the developer announced cuts of 500,000 to 700,000 square feet, to 8.159 million or 7.959 million square feet.

Arguments for cuts

Assemblyman Jim Brennan last year called publicly for a 50 percent cut, and City Council Member (and Congressional candidate) David Yassky more recently has suggested it privately--and even such a reducation might still leave the project the one of the densest residential communities in the country.

Brennan and several Assembly colleagues this spring proposed a reduction in scale by about one-third (albeit with new subsidies). Architect and blogger Jonathan Cohn suggested an even larger reduction. I pointed out that the proposed Atlantic Yards density, in terms of apartments per acre, would be more than double that at Battery Park City and other major developments.

New York Magazine in May floated a "kinder, gentler" version: 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.

Even though the Assembly bill was killed, the criticism won’t go away. At the 6/15/06 Municipal Arts Society (MAS) forum, former city Planning Commissioner Ron Shiffman expressed doubt that some of the professed advantages--notably the adjacent transit hub--could support the scale of the proposed development. He called the density "extreme."

FCR's back pocket plan

A person with knowledge of the Atlantic Yards project, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that the developer has been girding for such a scenario. The source told me:
There was always a scaled-back model that made considerable concessions to the public's concern and dismay apropos of height and density issues. The model was to be hidden from public view, but would be revealed to the appropriate parties at the appropriate time.

Even as architect Frank Gehry's team created this hidden model, FCR was contemplating an exhibition space to help explain the project, hoping to convince skeptical Brooklynites of its merits. Though Forest City Ratner does operate an invitation-only Atlantic Yards Information Center at the Atlantic Center mall, it has never become a public space, and the display there is more show than dialogue.

The source said that the hidden, scaled-down model was to be produced only for "significant players"--a tactic that contradicted the intent of the proposed exhibition.

I asked FCR executive Jim Stuckey after the hearing on Aug. 23 if the developer had a scaled-down model. My question was general--I didn't mention my source's comments--and Stuckey said no.

(I don't like using anonymous sources, but I'll note that the Times quoted an FCR executive anonymously on Tuesday, and the Slatin Report quoted several development experts anonymously, given their concern over FCR's reach.)

Justifying the size

So far Forest City Ratner has claimed that the location near the transit hub and the rezoning of nearby Downtown Brooklyn are justifications for the size of the project. (At right, current square footage estimates from the Empire State Development Corporation's General Project Plan. Click on all documents to enlarge.)

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and ACORN's Bertha Lewis have justified the scale because of the inclusion of affordable housing. But all explanations run up against the "extreme density" issue. But neither the cost nor the subsidized housing should justify overdevelopment that, for example, provides much too little open space for the population.

A more rational planning process might have led the city and state to invest in infrastructure up front, then put the site out to bid, as has been proposed for the Hudson Yards in Manhattan.

Smaller building plans?

So what might Forest City Ratner consider? Via a Freedom of Information Law request, I received several documents from NYC HDC, all of them Resolutions of Declarations of Intent, passed between July 20, 2004 and July 19, 2006. The declarations, passed by the HDC board, do not assure tax-exempt bonds for a measure of affordable housing; they simply mean that a developer may apply for such financing.

Nor do they provide definitive information on the final plans for the buildings. The HDC officials I spoke to--Senior VP Rachel Grossman and Communications Director Aaron Donovan--stressed that the most solid numbers were the dollar figures. Most documents described HDC first mortgages that would range from $100 million to $150 million per building.

I received documents regarding only about half of the towers planned for the Atlantic Yards site, and none regarding buildings over the railyard.
Note that the documents only address tax-exempt bonding, which would be only one component of the housing subsidies. The bonding would be for buildings with mixed income rentals: 50% market, 30% middle-/moderate-income, 20% low-income.

Scaleback hints

The documents offer some tantalizing hints. As noted, no building is described as more than 40 stories high, or 400 feet, while five buildings currently planned would exceed that height. While the heights of the buildings seem flexible, the amount of space requested for housing subsidy is a single number--which hints that, if a building is reduced in height, the bulk might remain constant.

And some buildings could be much smaller than currently planned. Take, for example, Building 3, on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between Dean and Pacific streets. While it is described by the ESDC in the General Project Plan as a 428-foot building with 650,437 square feet, the resolution passed by HDC on 12/2/04 describes a 25-30 story building with 315,000 square feet, or less than half the bulk.

Note that, until a City Council meeting 5/26/05, Forest City Ratner was promising that the buildings around the arena would be office space (or "jobs"). By taking the preliminary steps toward HDC financing six months earlier, the developer was already hedging its bets, establishing the option to include housing in the building.

Or take Building 7, at the southwest corner of Atlantic and Carlton avenues. The ESDC describes it as a 460-foot building with 733,810 square feet; the resolution passed by HDC on 11/7/05 (right) describes a 30-40 story building with 380,000 square feet.

Or consider Building 15, east of Sixth Avenue between Dean and Pacific streets. The ESDC describes a building 272 feet tall and containing 341,910 square feet. The resolution passed by HDC on 11/7/05 describes a 20-30-story building with 260,000 square feet.

Here are a site plan and a block/lot map.

Alternative explanations

Despite the apparent plain language of the documents regarding height and square footage, they're not definitive. I showed a few to Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, and he said they suggested four potential scenarios:
--the buildings would be larger than described, because the documents don't include condos on top of the rentals
--Forest City Ratner would ask for the documents to be amended and thus would increase the space
--FCR could get approval for subsidies at one site but move them to another building
--FCR would, as the documents hint, build the buildings at a lower density.

Note that some documents seem to confirm some of FCR's current plans. For example, the most recent resolution passed--on 7/19/06--describes Building 11 as 20-35 stories and 315,000 square feet. The ESDC describes it as 202 feet tall and 330,778 square feet.

(I didn't get a response from the developer. On Wednesday morning, I emailed a query to an FCR spokeswoman; on Wednesday afternoon I followed up by phone. Yesterday late afternoon I got an email saying my query had just been noticed. But I wasn't expecting much anyway; the developer hasn't commented to the press about the 6 to 8 percent reduction.)

What of Miss Brooklyn?

The HDC documents even offer an alternate take on Frank Gehry’s Miss Brooklyn, or Building 1, now proposed as a 620-foot building with 1.1 million square feet, including offices, condos, a hotel, and retail space. (Earlier this week, the Times reported that the developer was considering shrinking the building so it didn't compete with the 512-foot Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower.)

According to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the building would not contain affordable housing. So there’s no need for HDC tax-exempt bonding.

Then again, Forest City Ratner did ask HDC for the option to apply for tax-exempt bonds. A resolution passed by the agency on 4/12/06--a month before Gehry came to town to defend the building--suggests an alternate version of Building 1: a 30 to 40-story building with 415,000 square feet.

Would this would be a drastic cut to Miss Brooklyn, or does it only indicate the mixed-income rental part of a larger building? Maybe something else going on. The HDC document pictured above refers to a proposed development at 177 Flatbush Avenue and 608-620 Atlantic Avenue: Miss Brooklyn. An HDC document from 9/22/05 describes a similarly-sized building, 30-40 stories and 380,000 square feet, at 181 Flatbush Avenue--the next tax lot.

Are these two versions of the same building? Could they be combined into one? Would these simply be rental components of a larger building that would also include office spaces and condos? It's unclear.

Similarly, HDC has apparently passed multiple resolutions regarding adjacent tax lots--and essentially the same proposed building--in at least two other cases. "The only thing we know is they [Forest City Ratner] are giving themselves the flexibility of coming back to get tax-exempt financing on these sites," HDC's Grossman said.

Other questions about the buildings, she said, were for the developer.

Closer look at Crain's poll: those who follow AY project are more critical

So, are people who know more about the Atlantic Yards project more likely to oppose it? Yes, though the results from the Crain's poll weren't as dramatic as I'd have thought.

From Wednesday's Crain's Insider:
ATLANTIC YARDS POLL
The Crain’s poll on Atlantic Yards prompted immediate spin yesterday from project detractors, who claim that the survey showed 60% support for the development because most people know little about it. But of respondents who said they are following the Forest City plan closely, 59% were favorable and 38% were negative. Of those not following it closely, 60% were favorable and 22% were not. The poll also showed that savvy advertising and public relations by Forest City could increase support further. After callers were read three negative statements and then three positive statements about the project, support rose to 71% from 60%. The statements moved Brooklynites the most, raising the borough’s favorable portion to 74% from 60% and reducing the unfavorable portion to 24% from 33%. Support went up among all demographic groups, but the biggest jump was among blacks and Hispanics.

That contradicts to some extent the assessment I made. Yes, those with close knowledge are more critical, but the difference comes from the undecideds, while the support, at least as expressed in this poll, seems consistent.

But my criticisms of the poll questions stand. And why exactly is Crain's hailing the developer's media techniques? Crain's said:
The poll also showed that savvy advertising and public relations by Forest City could increase support further. After callers were read three negative statements and then three positive statements about the project, support rose to 71% from 60%.

What if we inverted some of that logic? Consider this:
The poll also showed design of the poll could increase opposition to the plan. After callers were read three positive statements and then three negative statements about the project, support went down.

Or another way:
The poll also suggested that accurate journalism could counter "savvy advertising and public relations". After callers were told that the Community Benefits Agreement was with handpicked groups and not actually negotiated, unlike CBAs elsewhere, support went down.

An exchange with Crain's

I queried Crain's editor Greg David about the poll, who emailed in response:
The questions were drawn up by Charney Research. We reviewed them, but our revisions were minor matters of fact. This was an independent, professional opinion research firm with no particular interests in the matter.
Doing the poll was my idea. I thought an scientific telephone survey by an independent, professional pollster would add an important element to the debate. I had no preconceived idea of what the results would be.

I responded that, while I didn't doubt him, different questions could have produced a different poll:
Nobody's against affordable housing in the abstract. However, had people been told, say, that most of the affordable housing would be unaffordable to those at Brooklyn's median income (because they earn too little to qualify) or that most would not be available until after 2010, well, the results might be different.

David responded:
All I can say is that Charney had no motive to be anything but professional and had no axe to grind and no interest in the results.

And I responded:
I don't doubt that. But that doesn't mean he fully understands the topic.

Indeed, the quote from Charney in the original Crain's article sounds hubristically conclusory:
The meaning of the poll is that New Yorkers are broadly pro-development, and that includes people in Brooklyn who are close to this project," says Craig Charney, the research firm's president.

Rethinking the housing question

Consider the housing issue, which 83% percent of respondents judged positively. They were asked:
The project will provide 2,250 low-, moderate-, and middle-income rental apartments. Is this a very important benefit, an important benefit, not an important benefit or no benefit at all?

Consider some alternative ways to ask that question:
The project would include 2,250 low-, moderate-, and middle-income rental apartments, with an average rent of $1542.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but more than half would be too expensive for people at Brooklyn's median income.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but the inclusion of those apartments means the development would be significantly out of scale with its neighbors.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but most wouldn't be built until after 2010, and could be delayed by the market.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but we haven't been told the full amount of the subsidies used to support them.

The project would include 2,250 affordable apartments, but most wouldn't be built until after 2010, unlike city rezonings which require affordable housing to be built along with the rest of project.

The meaning of the poll is that it matters how you ask the questions.

Where does Hakeem Jeffries stand on AY? The obfuscation mounts

So what does Hakeem Jeffries, the fundraising frontrunner for the open 57th Assembly District seat, really think about Atlantic Yards? His web site is silent. An ad he placed in the Downtown Brooklyn Star in May (right) was muddled, critical in many ways, but unclear on whether he was ultimately pro or con. And since then he has only made his bottom line more confusing.

The ambiguity of Jeffries' Atlantic Yards position places him in between rivals Freddie Hamilton, a supporter of the project and a signatory/beneficiary of the Community Benefits Agreement, and Bill Batson, a staunch opponent of the project, though Jeffries' latest statements show him trying hard to encroach on Batson's constituency. The new Assemblymember, who will succeed project proponent Roger Green, will have a chance to influence Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose vote on the Public Authorities Control Board--the final step for this project--killed the proposed West Side Stadium.

Leaning toward support

A 7/3/06 article in the New York Times, headlined Atlantic Yards, Still but a Plan, Shapes Politics in Brooklyn, provided the clearest view:
Pressed on whether he would support or oppose the project as it stands, Mr. Jeffries first said it was "an interesting question." After some prodding, he said he would "be more inclined to support it than not," in large part because the project includes a large component of below-market housing.

And the endorsement Jeffries received from the Working Families Party--which was founded by ACORN and which has office space one floor away--hints that the candidate won't deviate too far from the interests of ACORN, Forest City Ratner's prime partner in the Atlantic Yards project. [Update: Maybe we shouldn't read as much into that endorsement. As noted in the comments, the Working Families Party is officially neutral on the Atlantic Yards project.]

More importantly, Jeffries has the support of the Rev. Al Sharpton and many Brooklyn Democratic Party pillars, as well as contributions from unions such as the Carpenters--all supporters of the project.

At CB 2

Jeffries impressed, surprised, and frustrated attendees at the August 3 meeting of Community Board 2, one of three simultaneous meetings community boards held on the Atlantic Yards issue. The transcript:

Let me just thank the community board for your leadership on this issue, and having this opportunity for the community to publicly comment on this important issue that’s affecting us. As Sen. Montgomery knows, there’s a lot of dysfunction in Albany, a deal of dysfunction with state government.

The public authorities are in desperate need of reform… The first place to start was with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, until this report was issued. And then I realized that if we’re going to reform the public authorities we really need to start with the Empire State Development Corporation.

It really boggles the mind that you could issue a flawed report, endorse a flawed project as a result of a flawed process. And I say that, you know, it’s a flawed report for any number of reasons. And I haven’t been able to make my way through it but what I’ve read, and others who have studied it, it’s clear that it fails to address the most important aspect of this project, which is the serious impact that bringing in an additional 20,000 people into a small Prospect Heights community is going to have on the public infrastructure and the public services.

And how can you issue a report without comprehensively addressing the fact that this type of project will have a dramatic and adverse impact on public education, on fire and police protection, on sanitation, on traffic and on transportation. It’s a flawed process for reasons that have been articulated by folks here today and I’ve spoken about this publicly and I join with the community board if they’re going to move forward and try to address this.

You can’t simply have two hearings, one of which you schedule on primary day, and the other which you schedule in late August. Now I know as a parent of two children that many folks from our community go away in the last two weeks in August. So these hearings have been scheduled in a way to minimize public input and to minimize the opposition, and I think we should call on a moratorium of the process moving forward, and an extension of at least six months so there can be real community impact.

And finally, let me just imply say, in terms of the flawed nature of the project, eminent domain is the most sacred power that the government can exercise and it can only be exercised in limited circumstances. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it here today that this project should not move forward using eminent domain for a private developer to build a basketball arena.

This led to applause, as well as questions of whether, forced to choose between a pro or con position, which way he'd lean.

Eminent domain?

But what if eminent domain supported affordable housing?

In July, I questioned him. “What’s important to have happen is to see whether the developer can make the case that there's an absolute and explicit and necessary connection between an arena and the housing,” he said. "The eminent domain, in my understanding, is what's necessary as a result of the arena, not as a result of building the housing along the railyards."

I suggested that eminent domain would be used for both the arena and housing. "That's something I would be interested in looking at, but I've got to see that information," Jeffries said.

He should have done so by now. The housing would not be limited to the railyards, and properties beyond the arena block would be subject to eminent domain.

Jeffries' bottom line?

Given this backdrop, I recently queried Jeffries' campaign, asking for any amplification of the oral statement and the statement to the Times. I also asked the bottom line question: "Are you for or against the project as currently proposed (and that includes some implied smallish reduction in scale)?" And I asked if he'd clarify his position on his web site.

I got the following quick response from People for Jeffries:
Thank you for your email. The campaign is currently gearing up its Get Out the Vote operation. Hakeem's position on the proposed Atlantic Yards project is clear. We encourage you to refer to the many public statements Hakeem has made regarding this issue to the media, and at two public debates, as well as the open letter to the community placed in Brooklyn Downtown Star several months ago.

Shortly after I got the response, a Jeffries mailer (above; click to enlarge) was sent to voters, and it continued to muddy the waters. He's against "the private abuse of eminent domain," but that doesn't mean he's against "the private use of eminent domain." And it doesn't say where he thinks that Atlantic Yards project would fit.

Jeffries' ambiguous stance is politically understandable. Similarly, 11th Congressional District candidate David Yassky's web site ignores Atlantic Yards. Like Yassky, Jeffries is a smart lawyer. (Unlike Yassky, Jeffries has a longer history in his distict.) Ambiguity may be a prudent political tactic. But it can also make a lot of people wonder.

Further obfuscation

As the election approaches, another mailer has appeared, according to Atlantic Yards Voter Guide. "No eminent domain abuse unfairly displacing our neighbors," it says. "No skyscraper city dimming our future. No backroom deals drowning out our voices."

In the gray box, AYVG adds--for clarity--Jeffries' statement to the Times that he'd be more likely to support the project than not. The ad doesn't say how big the project should be, as AYVG points out, or why a six-month extension would cure the process problems, and it sets up a false dichotomy between project supporters and those who want nothing built.

Frankly, when I first saw this obfuscatory flier, I thought it was a parody of some sort. But I don't think so.

CBN, Brooklyn Views pile on the DEIS criticism

Graphics and data bulletins emerging from the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN) provide snapshots of criticisms from experts who will submit more substantive analysis to the Empire State Development Corporation later this month. First, CBN offers some graphical representations (right) from the Environmental Simulation Center, which show not only Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan but also the alternatives.

The latest data bulletin offers some harsh criticisms of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). Some excerpts:

DEIS overall

Many parts of the DEIS read like promotional material for the development, not a balanced analysis of impacts. There is more focus on the presumed benefits of the project than on the costs or problems. The purpose of the environmental review is to disclose potential impacts and identify negative impacts, not promote the project.
The three alternative plans (UNITY, Extell and Pacific) are never analyzed or discussed in any detail. For the most part they are only described; the relative impacts are never quantified. They are simply discounted as not achieving the project goals that promise more housing and jobs, but the quantitative goals set up by the developer are self-serving. The alternatives would all bring new housing and jobs and result in fewer negative impacts, yet because they don’t achieve the numbers arbitrarily advanced by the project developer they are discounted.

Land use and zoning

Since 1974, the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA) plan never outlined development over the rail yards nor did the City ever consider expansion of ATURA boundaries beyond the rail yards. Therefore, statements asserting that the Atlantic Yards project is consistent with ATURA are not supported by facts. It has been the City’s policy over the last 30 years NOT to make the rail yards a development site, NOT to expand ATURA, and NOT to change the zoning even while it undertook a massive rezoning in downtown Brooklyn.
The DEIS states many times that this is an example of “transit-oriented development.” But building next to mass transit by itself doesn’t make this or any other development “transit-oriented,” otherwise any new development in New York City could be “transit-oriented.” The project will result in more traffic and no transit improvements. It will provide 3,800 parking spaces and shuttle arena customers from remote parking.

Housing

Some 70% of the housing units in the project will be market-rate, but the DEIS gives the impression this is an affordable housing project.
The analysis of indirect displacement doesn’t try to estimate potential increases in rent and house prices in the surrounding area due to the project. The DEIS reasons that since the surrounding neighborhoods are already gentrifying, the project won’t be responsible for any future gentrification. This has to be proven, and the DEIS doesn’t prove it.

Community facilities

There is no analysis or review of existing and projected response times for Police and Fire, only short statements from the City agencies.
There is no analysis of the adequacy of existing fire equipment for emergencies in the proposed high-rise buildings, which would be the tallest in Brooklyn.

Urban design/shadows

While the DEIS states that shadows will produce a significant negative impact, it does not elaborate on the effects of that impact, including the cost in terms of long-term energy use (that is, higher fuel costs in winter, loss of opportunities for the use of solar energy, etc.).
The DEIS does not assess the negative health impacts on residents or productivity losses due to the loss of sunlight.

Noise

The DEIS uses outdated criteria for measuring noise levels.
Noise monitors were placed mid-block and therefore did not measure the worst-case scenario.
The DEIS mitigation measures do not address street noise, only interior noise.

Construction impacts

The “solution” of providing double-pane windows and air conditioners to residents and community facilities in the area condemns everyone to their private spaces and makes a mockery of the project’s claims it will provide a quality urban environment. These solutions don’t take into account children playing in schoolyards, on sidewalks and in their back yards. They project a ten-year construction period in which everyone should stay indoors.

Criticism from Brooklyn Views

In Purpose and Need, architect Jonathan Cohn of Brooklyn Views points out that the Atlantic Yards DEIS initially offers a clear Purpose and Need: “The overarching goal of the proposed project is to transform a blighted area into a vibrant mixed-use community.”

Cohn asks:
Does the Purpose and Need include providing an arena, a hotel, and exactly 6,860 units of housing? These sound more like specific features of the current plan. To include them as part of the Purpose and Need confuses the means with the ends, resulting in a document that can not be disputed but is ultimately meaningless: since the project is the same as the objectives, nothing can be changed. Because if it was, it wouldn’t meet the objectives. And, as we’ve previously noted, we see the results of this in the subsequent dismissal of the alternatives.
...On the other hand, an enormous event venue, which causes huge traffic surges, congestion, noise and air pollution, is in fact the antithesis of a vibrant mixed-use community. That is why, for example, it would be necessary to override current zoning that does not provide for arenas in residential areas. Enormous event venues can be, in fact, blighting influences in and of themselves.
...If the arena is, in fact, part of the purpose and need of the project, say so, and show clearly how it furthers public policy. If the scale is required to make the project financing work, show us. The EIS should not be executed with a nod and a wink. Revise and resubmit a truly transparent document.

The Observer warns about AY delay; dailies tell us (duh) scaleback means little

An online article in today's New York Observer, headlined In Big Slow Brooklyn Build, Is It Affordable Housing Last?, has some real news, while two daily stories tell us what the New York Times should've told us in a lead story yesterday: a six to eight percent cut in the Atlantic Yards plan means little.

Matthew Schuerman's Observer article expands on some issues I raised last Friday:
More than four-fifths of the subsidized housing, as well as seven acres of open space, will begin construction only in the second phase, between 2011 and 2016. That’s only if the project stays on schedule. State Assemblyman James Brennan, who represents neighborhoods to the west of the site, said he believes that Mr. Ratner, the chief executive of Forest City Ratner, will only follow through on the affordable housing if he makes enough money in the first phase.
“The point is that if the venture is not successful or not as successful as planned, much of the affordable housing will be at risk or not happen,” Mr. Brennan said. “The real-estate market is softening across the nation, interest rates have gone up, and three million square feet is a lot of feet to sell.”
In a Sept. 1 letter to Charles Gargano, the state official in charge of reviewing the project, Mr. Brennan asked the state to “enter into arrangements with Forest City Ratner to assure the public that the 2,250 units of affordable housing will be developed as planned and that construction of all of these units will be included in Phase 1 of the project, scheduled to begin in 2007.”

Forest City's spokesman Joe DePlasco said that the developer "is committed to building affordable housing as part of the Phase 1 plan," but wouldn't say how much. And, Schuerman points out, if the developer goes for a version of Phase 1 with more office space, the amount of lower-rent subsidized housing would decrease.

As for ACORN, which will market the affordable housing, they're not complaining--a sign that the overall deal must be more important than delivering many affordable units soon:
“Right now we are absolutely comfortable with the phasing assumptions that are being used by the ESDC,” spokesman Jonathan Rosen said.

Schuerman states as fact basic information that others in the media seem compelled to ascribe to "opponents":
Still, even an 8 percent drop would only bring Atlantic Yards in line with the eight-million-square-foot project Mr. Ratner first announced back in December 2003.

Financial viability?

The Observer quotes a developer:
“When you add a projected 50 percent affordable housing—whatever that means—and when you include a money-hemorrhaging sports franchise, the economics of it are illusory to me,” an experienced developer who has done work in Brooklyn said. “But I hope it will happen.”

But Forest City has a history of moving slowly:
“The quality that Forest City has is that they are very disciplined about moving forward in stages,” said Rich Moore, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets who covers Forest City Enterprises. “They build one office tower and see if they are doing well, and if they are not, there is always the option of waiting until the market catches up to them or of altering their plans.”

Indeed, Ratner's MetroTech Center project in Brooklyn was supposed to be finished within five years after groundbreaking in 1989, but the last building originally planned didn't open until 2003, nine years late. That pattern could leave construction staging areas and parking lots on the Atlantic Yards site for a long time.

Times gets reaction in Brooklyn

A New York Times article today, headlined Developer’s Plan for a Smaller Yards Project Matters Little, More or Less, in Brooklyn, quotes some people near the proposed project site, and finds few are impressed with, as one called it, "a non-change."

While the article points out how the project size had actually grown since announced in December 2003, it doesn't explicitly state that the proposed reduction would bring Atlantic Yards back to its originally proposed square footage.

The article does offer some basic wisdom that should've been in yesterday's lead story:
“With practically every large development project, people ask for far more than they need,’’ said Ron Shiffman, a former member of the New York City Planning Commission, who recently joined the advisory board of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, an umbrella organization for groups opposed to the project. “The city is never really very good at setting their own standards and criteria for scale.”
Mr. Shiffman speculated that the small reductions being contemplated are “more of a show than a substantive reduction,” aimed at politicians who do not want to stop the project but do want to claim credit for having gained concessions from the developer. “This is similar to the playbook and strategy that Ratner has used for all of his developments,” Mr. Shiffman added. “I think this is predictable, and that they concluded that the politicians needed something to go back to their constituents with.”

Metro gets it

A story in Metro today has an apt headline: In Atlantic Yards dance, return to first position?. It points out that size of the project would be the same as initially announced and offers some criticism from urban planners:
“Having something to give up is not a highly unusual tactic, and in this case, it doesn’t address the issues,” said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society. “It’s modeled on projects that have proven not to work, with its private but seemingly public space, like a campus.”
...Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the Regional Plan Association, called these changes “clever,” adding they have not addressed concerns about the public space, especially in its eastern portion, which will contain the bulk of the apartments and open space. Because this will be part of the second phase of development — not expected to begin until 2010 — Soffin said the plans would inevitably change in response to shifting real estate demands and that while the current open space design “nicely hugs” the buildings, if they change, the open space may get lost in the process.

Daily News says Marty's fine

A Daily News article, headlined Ratner offers to downsize again states:
A source confirmed yesterday that Ratner is now considering chopping an additional 500,000 to 700,000 square feet as he negotiates with the city, which critics noted would bring the development to just over or under its original size.
"It's obviously not enough," said City Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn). "They've got to really go back to the drawing board and dramatically downscale this project if they want support in the community."

Borough President Marty Markowitz, whose mild but substantive criticisms at the August 23 public hearing were almost certainly cleared with the developer, said he welcomed the changes.

About that poll

Both the Times and the Daily News quote the Crain's New York Business poll as evidence that the project has widespread support, but without any analysis of the poll's flaws.

A Daily News editorial, headlined Develop, don't delay Brooklyn (Editorial board member Errol Louis is obviously quoting himself), also relies on the flawed poll:
Still, the project is a hit with New Yorkers: A poll by Charney Research shows that 71% of Gotham residents view Atlantic Yards favorably or very favorably, and 86% see its affordable housing and construction jobs for local residents as an important benefit.

Another set of Pacific Crest Research calls

I'm told that Pacific Crest Research has also been calling Brooklynites about the 57th District Assembly race, involving Atlantic Yards opponent Bill Batson, AY proponent Freddie Hamilton, and Hakeem Jeffries, who has offered a range of criticisms but has said he would choose to support the project. And, as in the brief call I received, callers are asking about Atlantic Yards.

Note that Forest City Ratner has neither confirmed nor denied a relationship with Pacific Crest.

Crain's poll questions were stunning generalities--and described the CBA as a negotiation

So Crain's New York Business has posted the full results of the poll it commissioned regarding Atlantic Yards.

The conclusion: when asked about the project in stunning generalities, especially deceptive ones about the Community Benefits Agreement, people approve of it. (Yes, polls are by nature general, but we should have gone beyond "jobs, housing, and hoops" by now.)

That's about it, until someone conducts a more specific poll that actually addresses issues of density, public responsibility, facts and promises about affordable housing, and the use of eminent domain.

Below, the poll details, with some comments interpolated.

Respondents 601

1)How closely have you been following news about the Atlantic Yards development project: very closely, fairly closely, not too closely, or not at all?
1) Very closely 6%
2) Fairly closely 14%
3) Not too closely 21%
4) Not at all 56%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 2%

Very/Fairly closely 20%
Not too closely/Not at all 78%

So most people are uninformed. The poll informs them only slightly more, but its inadequate information is what they'll have to rely on.

2)The proposal calls for seventeen buildings, including residential housing, a Nets arena and office buildings in Brooklyn, on 22 acres near Atlantic Ave. which currently have MTA rail yards, empty lots, low rise apartments, abandoned buildings and condos.

Are you very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable to this project?
1) Very favorable 23%
2) Somewhat favorable 37%
3) Somewhat unfavorable 13%
4) Very unfavorable 13%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 15%

Very/Somewhat favorable 60%
Very/Somewhat unfavorable 25%

Here are things people have said about this project.

3)There will be significant costs to the city, including more schools and water and sewer services. Does this raise very serious doubts, serious doubts, some doubts or no doubts about it for you?
1) Very serious doubts 14%
2) Serious doubts 20%
3) Some doubts 26%
4) No doubts 35%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 4%

Very serious/Serious doubts 34%
Some/No doubts 62%

Why not try to quantify the costs--in the billions--and to point out that the costs are not simply city services that any development might create but also subsidies and tax breaks?

4)The project is out of scale with the neighborhood - the buildings are taller, including a 62-story office tower, and it will promote gentrification. Does this raise very serious doubts, serious doubts, some doubts or no doubts about it for you?
1) Very serious doubts 11%
2) Serious doubts 18%
3) Some doubts 29%
4) No doubts 37%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 5%

Very serious/Serious doubts 29%
Some/No doubts 67%

How about saying that the scale is out of line with city zoning? Or that it will promote gentrification even though its backers say it won't? Then again, the poll quotes "things people have said" about AY, rather than approaching clarity.

5)The city's land-use review process was not used to consult the surrounding community. Does this raise very serious doubts, serious doubts, some doubts or no doubts about it for you?
1) Very serious doubts 16%
2) Serious doubts 24%
3) Some doubts 32%
4) No doubts 23%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 6%

Very serious/Serious doubts 40%
Some/No doubts 55%

Do people know what the process is? What if it was pointed out that the city process would require four public hearings and a vote by the City Council, while the fast-track state process involves one poorly-managed public hearing, two follow-up community forums (one on the day of the primary election).

Here are some other things people have said about this project.

Notice how the last three questions are all positive things. Also notice how there's much less middle-ground--the equivalent of "some doubts" above is "not an important benefit" below.

6)The project will provide 2,250 low-, moderate-, and middle-income rental apartments. Is this a very important benefit, an important benefit, not an important benefit or no benefit at all?
1) Very important benefit 46%
2) Important benefit 37%
3) Not an important benefit 7%
4) No benefit at all 7%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 3%

Very important/Important benefit 83%
Not important/No benefit at all 14%

And who exactly would be eligible for those apartments?

7)The developers negotiated with neighborhood groups and agreed to provide affordable housing and construction jobs for local residents. Is this a very important benefit, an important benefit, not an important benefit or no benefit at all?
1) Very important benefit 51%
2) Important benefit 35%
3) Not an important benefit 6%
4) No benefit at all 6%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 2%

Very important/Important benefit 86%
Not important/No benefit at all 12%

The developers negotiated? That's a highly-partial reading of the Community Benefits Agreement. For another interpretation, try Good Jobs New York.

8)The project will bring professional sports back to Brooklyn with the Nets arena. Is this a very important benefit, an important benefit, not an important benefit or no benefit at all?
1) Very important benefit 24%
2) Important benefit 34%
3) Not an important benefit 24%
4) No benefit at all 16%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 3%

Very important/Important benefit 58%
Not important/No benefit at all 40%

9) After hearing this, are you very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable to the Atlantic Yards project?
1) Very favorable 30%
2) Somewhat favorable 41%
3) Somewhat unfavorable 13%
4) Very unfavorable 11%
9) Don't Know/No Response/Refused 5%

Very/Somewhat favorable 71%
Very/Somewhat unfavorable 24%

"After hearing this" suggests that the last three positives are the dispositive issues.

The Ratner campaign money trail leads to... Michael (& his wife)

Dennis Kucinich, Jonathan Tasini, and... Edolphus Towns.

Deborah Glick, Liz Krueger, and... Martin Malave Dilan.

The first two names in each trio are noted progressives, while those coming third are undistinguished products of the Brooklyn machine (who also support Atlantic Yards). Towns and Dilan have drawn criticism from progressives for their votes, respectively, for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and to require inadequate protections against lead-paint hazards.

But all have received campaign contributions from Michael Ratner (right), the eminent human rights lawyer. While Ratner's not talking, his Brooklyn political contributions seem guided not by ideology but by the interests of Forest City Ratner (FCR), the development company run by his brother Bruce.

Michael Ratner and his wife, Karen Ranucci, both Greenwich Village residents, have recently made campaign contributions using Forest City Ratner's Brooklyn building as a return address. Ranucci has matched many of her husband's contributions. And Bruce Ratner's girlfriend, Pamela Lipkin, as well as other Ratner family members, have made contributions engineered by an FCR lobbying firm.

Even though Bruce Ratner no longer contributes to political races himself, his inner circle seems willing to help out. Indeed, Michael Ratner/Ranucci contributions to Yvette Clarke suggest that the developer supports--or at least supported--the pro-AY City Councilwoman in her bid to win the tight four-person race for the open 11th Congressional District seat.

And Michael Ratner/Ranucci contributions to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver--sent from the Brooklyn address--hint that the developer won't forget to lobby the individual on the Public Authorities Control Board who has the greatest power to stop or shape the Atlantic Yards project. (Click on graphics to enlarge.)

FCR's Bender makes it happen

Here's an example of how the fundraising works. City Council candidate Letitia James late in her 2003 campaign called Bruce Bender, Forest City Ratner's executive vice president for government and public affairs. Her campaign needed some money.

Bender told her he'd take care of it, James said. On 9/24/03, Ranucci and Lipkin each wrote checks for $2750, the contribution limit. (Only eight of James's 514 donors gave the maximum, and just three of those eight were individuals. Most of her support came in checks ranging from $50 to $250.)

When I pointed out the identities of the donors, James told me that she knew that FCR had contributed to her campaign, but hadn't known the names. And yes, she realizes that the developer probably feels betrayed that, after her election, she emerged as a staunch opponent of Atlantic Yards, which was officially announced on 12/10/03.

More on Michael

Among the Ratner family members, Michael Ratner has the highest individual profile; as president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), he's led the fight to provide legal representation and fair procedures for Guantanamo detainees. Harper's publisher John D. MacArthur called him "America's most important civil libertarian." His wife Ranucci is (updated 2/17/08) development director of the progressive radio show Democracy Now.

Ratner is also an investor in the Nets basketball team and may well have a stake in the family-controlled Forest City Enterprises, parent of Forest City Ratner. (The parent company recently agreed to buy Bruce Ratner's share.)

Is there a larger agenda to Michael Ratner's contributions? Two candidates receiving recent contributions, Dilan and Silver, are running unopposed in the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to election.

Moreover, three contributions each from Michael Ratner and Ranucci appear in the state campaign finance database as being sent not from Manhattan, but from 1 Metro Tech Center North, the same building where Forest City Ratner has its headquarters.

I tried to query Ratner via CCR's press counsel, Riptide Communications. "Michael doesn't speak about his political contributions," spokeswoman Mahdis Keshavarz told me.

Forest City Ratner's policy

As noted in my report, Forest City Ratner has recently cut back on its political donations, as Newsday reported (Ratner Breaks the Mold, 1/23/04):
Though [Bruce] Ratner’s company still spends significant funds to lobby City Hall, Ratner a few years ago sharply cut back on donating funds to political campaigns - an unusual move for a real estate developer.
“He decided this was getting him into trouble, because every time he won a project, people would say it was because he gave money,” said former city Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, who has known Ratner for 34 years.

Gifts to Dilan

Michael Ratner and Ranucci each gave $2500 contributions to Dilan on 1/11/06 from the MetroTech address; another pair of $2500 gifts, two days later, had no specified address attached. (Did they realize that MetroTech was a tipoff?)

Why Dilan, who's tight with the Brooklyn political machine? Perhaps because he's been a supporter of Atlantic Yards.In the June/July 2005 issue of the Brooklyn Standard, the State Senator wrote a welcoming letter to the editor, hailing "the fantastic Atlantic Yards project." (Then again, when queried by the Brooklyn Rail, he acknowledged that he was unaware that the Standard was promoting the project and, had he known better, “I don’t think I would have written a letter, no.")

Dilan won his 2004 race by a more than 8 to 1 margin and faces the same Republican today, with no Democratic primary. He doesn't need the money. Were the contributions to ensure his appearance in a Forest City Ratner mailer (right) sent in May?

Why Silver matters?

Michael Ratner and Ranucci each sent $3000 contributions to Assembly Speaker Silver on 6/8/06 via the MetroTech address.

Silver is untouchable as a candidate, but he wields the key vote on the three-person Public Authorities Control Board, which must vote to approve the Atlantic Yards project after the Empire State Development Corporation signs off. It's not a formality; Silver stopped the West Side Stadium.

He's shown no such inclination regarding the Atlantic Yards project, though it's plausible that he could object to the scale and force the project to shrink. Silver will be the focus of some intense lobbying later this year and, indeed, he's already in the loop. The New York Times, in an article today on a modest cut in the project's size, reports:
I’ve been told they will modify the project in order to address some of the concerns about the development,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who has supported the project. “I’m not sure all the criticisms will be addressed or that all the critics will be happy. But I understand there will be modifications.”

Brooklyn contributions

The state campaign finance database suggests two patterns regarding Michael Ratner's giving. He has supported Manhattan progressives like Assemblymember Glick and State Senator Krueger, likely out of ideological conviction.

On the other hand, Michael Ratner and Ranucci have made regular contributions to Brooklyn clubhouse candidates. They each made $2000 contributions on 1/6/04 to State Senator Carl Kruger [corrected 2/08: I originally had Carl Andrews], $2500 contributions on 9/4/02 to Assemblyman Roger Green, now a leading supporter of the Atlantic Yards plan, and $3100 contributions on 8/2/2000 to Assemblyman and then county Democratic leader Clarence Norman, who early this year received a two- to six-year prison sentence for campaign violations.

Michael Ratner and Ranucci on 10/20/05 each gave $2000 to Clarke, one of the four candidates for the open 11th Congressional District seat. Clarke was considered a leading candidate due to her history in the district and her gender, but has faltered recently after acknowledging she didn't actually graduate from college.

Michael Ratner and Ranucci on 11/7/05 each gave $2000 to incumbent Towns, who represents the 10th Congressional District. Towns is being challenged by Assemblyman Green, a fellow Atlantic Yards supporter, but his more serious rival is City Councilman Charles Barron, a project opponent.

The contribution from the Manhattan progressives to Towns came just a few months after he provoked the ire of labor and Democratic activists for his CAFTA vote.

Bundling for Thompson

In 2001, Michele de Milly, whose firm has long done p.r. for FCR, organized five contributions of $4500--for a total of $22,500--to William Thompson's campaign for city comptroller. The donors were Michael Ratner, Ranucci, Lipkin, Bruce Ratner's daughter Rebecca Ratner, and Ellen Ratner of Washington, another family member.

Thompson is now a supporter of the Atlantic Yards project, even though it raises similar issues--questionable financing and the absence of a transparent public process--that he cited when criticizing Mayor Mike Bloomberg's Hudson Yards plan in October 2004.

Lipkin's gifts

Lipkin has made fewer contributions, though she did give $4950 last year to the campaign of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. Gotbaum was criticized severely for supporting the Atlantic Yards project while claiming to be opposed to the use of eminent domain.

Even the Bronx

Forest City Ratner has three Bronx projects, but they've been up and running for a while, so it's not easy to discern a connection between FCR interests and Michael Ratner's $6000 contribution to the Bronx Democratic Trustees Committee on 12/5/05.

Ratner and Ranucci each gave $2000 on 11/30/05 to the campaign of Bronx Assemblyman Jose Rivera, the county Democratic Party chair, who is running unopposed. Rivera is a development enthusiast. According to Gotham Gazette, at an April City Council meeting on the new Yankee Stadium plan, Bronx Democratic boss Jose Rivera led a group of construction workers in a cheer of "Build It Now!"

Casinos upstate?

Another curious pair of Michael Ratner/Ranucci contributions came just last week, on 8/31/06, when each gave $5400--from the MetroTech address--to the reelection campaign of State Senator Marc Coppola, who's in a tight primary race upstate.

It's unclear what interest two Greenwich Village residents have in a campaign to represent Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Nearly all of Coppola's donors are local. Still he has played a key role in discussion of a proposed Buffalo casino, which is highly controversial. Forest City Ratner was lobbying New York City regarding casino gambling way back in 1999. And Forest City Ratner's parent company, Forest City Enterprises, has tried to get into the casino business in Pittsburgh.

Eminent domain in Queens

A check of the campaign database this morning showed additional $5400 contributions from both Michael Ratner and Ranucci to State Senator John Sabini of Queens, who's in a hard-fought primary battle against City Councilman Hiram Monserrate. Both contributions were sent from the MetroTech address. More contributions may surface as candidates belatedly file their disclosure forms.

The issue in Queens may be eminent domain, as the Queens Ledger reported last week:
Perhaps the topic that best highlighted the differing political styles of Monserrate and Sabini was issue of eminent domain at Willets Point. The pair both agreed that any use of eminent domain, generally speaking, should be held to the highest scrutiny, but Monserrate has been an outspoken critic of using eminent domain at Willets Point at all, whereas Sabini has largely played a behind-the-scenes role, or no role in Monserrate's opinion.

And Forest City Ratner is a finalist for the redevelopment plan at Willets Point.

AY likely still larger than the original under new scaleback (but does the Times notice?)

A New York Times article today, headlined Developer Said to Cut Size of Brooklyn Project, describes a proposed 6 to 8 percent cutback in Atlantic Yards, stating:
Officials say that Forest City has not settled on the final numbers for the project, but that it plans to reduce the size by 500,000 to 700,000 square feet by eliminating hundreds of market-rate apartments. That would enable the developer to cut the height of some of the towers, including a 350-foot building on what is known as Site 5, on the west side of Flatbush Avenue, and possibly at Miss Brooklyn.

This is the lead story for the entire newspaper. They should have done better. Unmentioned is the sequence of proposals, which show that the project could still be bigger than originally announced:
December 2003: 8 million square feet
September 2005: 9.132 million square feet
March 2006: 8.659 million square feet

A reduction of 500,000 square feet would make the project 8.159 million square feet, while a cut of 700,000 square feet would mean 7.959 million square feet.

And even a reduction in bulk would leave Miss Brooklyn and the building at Site 5 quite large. Right now, the former would be about three times the bulk of the Williamsburgh bank, in square footage, and the latter would be nearly twice the size of the bank. In fact, a cut of 700,000 square feet from Miss Brooklyn alone would still leave it bulkier than the bank.

All in the timing

A new cutback was expected; the only question was when. Borough President Marty Markowitz offered criticisms at the August 23 public hearing, saying that the project was too big and that the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, at 512 feet, should remain the tallest building (while the proposed "Miss Brooklyn" would be 620 feet), but it's hard to believe that Markowitz didn't vet his words with the developer.

But the cutback won't assauge critics. The Times reported:
“I don’t think the bottom-line community concern is really about aesthetics, which is what shaving a few stories off the heights of the buildings is about,” said James F. Brennan, a Brooklyn assemblyman. “I don’t think this flies.”

New carrots?

There's a tantalizing hint of a tradeoff:
But according to executives briefed by the developer, Mr. Gehry has objected to any changes in his design for Miss Brooklyn. Forest City, they say, will continue to set aside 2,250 apartments for low, moderate and middle-income tenants, even as it seeks additional subsidies for that part of the development.
(Emphasis added)

And why hasn't the public been told what the housing subsidies would be?

Belated high-rises?

The article states:
Mr. Ratner’s project won widespread support in December 2003, when he first announced plans to build a glass-walled arena for the Nets and to erect 4,500 apartments, half of them subsidized. For the romantics, there was the appeal of the borough having its first major professional sports team since the agonizing departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957.
But over the following two years, the size of the project swelled to 7,300 apartments and the high-rise towers — 19 to 58 stories — took shape, looming over the four- to six-story buildings in the adjoining neighborhoods.

The high-rise towers were there from the start, in renderings released in December 2003.

The article continues:
In March, Forest City reduced the project by 475,000 square feet by cutting 440 market-rate condominiums, but that went largely unnoticed.

What was largely unnoticed was that the developer lied in saying that the "original design" had been reduced. The Times in its coverage at least pointed out that the square footage was greater than the original amount proposed.

Endgame

Today's article continues:
The reduction in the project’s scope comes as the Empire State Development Corporation prepares to hold two more public hearings later this month before voting on the project in October. Officials say the developer is likely to unveil the changes around Sept. 25, when the City Planning Commission is expected to issue design guidelines for the project and recommend changes, including a reduction in density.

September 25 is conveniently after the two community forums, and just three days before the end of the comment period to the Empire State Development Corporation.

And it's all set, according to the Times:
At that point, there could be a long line of politicians and activists hoping to take credit, including the Bloomberg administration, Mr. Silver, Ms. Millman and Mr. Markowitz.
“Everyone’s going to take credit for something that everyone knew would happen,” said an executive who works with Forest City. “For these guys, it’s very important.”

Then again, the Times said that the last public hearing was August 24, rather than August 23. And the article says a recent Crain’s New York Business poll shows that most New Yorkers approve of the project, although opposition is strongest in Brooklyn, without any caveats.


Gargano flexible

Charles Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, displays a new flexibility. The Times reports:
"I’m sure the developer is looking at ways to reduce the size of the project,” said Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, which has granted initial approval of Atlantic Yards. “It would be a good thing for everyone. It’s an important project for Downtown Brooklyn.”

Well, not only did the Times not catch him on the Downtown Brooklyn error, they didn't point out his statement last December to the New York Observer, which reported:
“There is no need to scale down the project,” Mr. Gargano said, although the environmental-impact study that will gauge the project’s impact on traffic, sewage, school population and so on is still underway.

Pacific Crest Research is back, asking about the Congressional race

Would you believe that today, about a month after I was push-polled, I got another call from Pacific Crest Research, a “national polling firm,” according to the young woman from Utah on the phone, conducting “a very brief public opinion survey on some very interesting issues in Brooklyn.”

This one wasn’t a push-poll, since there was no attempt to present new information and sway me about a candidate or an issue. But the topic was mainly the highly contested 11th Congressional District race and again the signs point to developer Forest City Ratner as the entity concerned enough to ask such questions.

Top issues

After being asked if I’d vote in the Democratic primary, I was asked if things were going in the right direction or off on the wrong track. Then I was asked which of the following six issues was most important:
--the war in Iraq
--affordable housing
--education
--crime
--health care
--jobs and the economy.

AY opinions

Then I was asked my opinion about “a major development project known as Atlantic Yards,” with a sports arena as the “centerpiece,” and “a number of high-rise apartments” around it. (Actually, it’s not the centerpiece, and there would be 16 towers.)
Strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose, strongly oppose

Political figures

Then I was asked my impression of the following public figures, four of them rivals in the Congressional race:
--Chris Owens
--Carl Andrews
--Yvette Clarke
--Major Owens (the exiting incumbent)
--David Yassky
--Marty Markowitz (Brooklyn Borough president)

Then I was asked whom I’d vote for and the chances I might change my mind and vote for another candidate.

Demographic questions

The final questions were demographic:
--age
--last grade of school completed
--liberal, conservative, or moderate
--own or rent
--religious background
--from a West Indian or Caribbean background
--Latino or Spanish-speaking
--white, black, Asian
--total income

So what’s the goal?

Is Forest City Ratner trying to figure out how to influence the Congressional race? Or is the developer trying to gauge the attitude of the supporters of various candidates so as to respond after the election? Or could it be some other patron altogether?

I asked a supervisor who’d commissioned the poll. He said staffers aren’t told, and that only the president of the Pacific Crest Research knows. His name is Matt Hewitt.

Jobs & housing promises sway Crain's poll, but what was left out?

So it doesn't make much of a difference, apparently, that the number of jobs promised in the Atlantic Yards plan has plummeted precipitously, that the percentage of affordable housing would not be the once-promised 50 percent, that 900 of the promised 2250 affordable housing units would rent for over $2127 a month (for a four-person household), and that most of the affordable housing wouldn't be built until the second phase of the project, after 2010.

That's a conclusion after a poll in this week's Crain's New York Business is described in a headline as "60% support big Brooklyn arena plan," with the deck "Prospect of housing and employment sways New Yorkers, Crain's poll finds."

Of course, a poll can also find what the pollster is looking for, and I'm confident that the issues above weren't raised in the poll. (I've asked for the questions, but haven't seen them yet.)

What if people were better informed? What if, say, our local press checked and pointed out that:
--claims of $1.4 billion in revenue were vastly inflated, and that our government isn't telling us the truth
--that the average rent in the affordable housing, if all the units were distributed to four-person families, would be $1542 (note that there would be 225 apartments in the first band, 675 in the second, and 450 in the other three)
--that the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard was sold for less than half its appraised value and that gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer has objected to the city's below-market offer for the Hudson Yards.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is this: a little more than one in four Brooklynites, and only one in five New Yorkers are following the issue closely. It would be interesting to drill down: do the people who remember the most recent New York Times editorial support the project, and do the people who remember the New York magazine cover story oppose it?

Note that the poll was taken during the week after the Aug. 23 public hearing. What if the press had reported that many of the people praising the project came from groups that had already benefited from the developer's largesse?

Along with Crain's, the poll results have been reported dutifully in the Daily News.

The article says

Erik Engquist's Crain's article begins:
The colossal and controversial Atlantic Yards development is favored by a solid 60% of city residents and disliked by only 25%, according to a Crain's New York Business poll. New Yorkers cite the jobs and affordable housing that it promises for Brooklyn as the two most important benefits of the project. Support for the proposal is running at a robust 60% in Brooklyn as well, though opposition there is stronger, with 33% viewing it unfavorably. The poll, conducted by Charney Research between Aug. 23 and Aug. 28, surveyed 601 people representing a cross section of the five boroughs. It has a margin of error of 4%.

Without knowing the questions asked, it's hard to really estimate the validity of the poll, as noted in a previous Pace poll. Were any questions asked about eminent domain?

Little shrinkage?

Engquist continues:
The public's opinion of the 8.7 million-square-foot project influences the state officials in charge of the approval process, which is nearing a conclusion. If they take their cue from local sentiment, the officials will probably demand only a modest reduction in the development's size--not a fundamental redesign. "The meaning of the poll is that New Yorkers are broadly pro-development, and that includes people in Brooklyn who are close to this project," says Craig Charney, the research firm's president.

Is this a plebiscite? Why should uninformed New Yorkers regulate the scale of the project, rather than close analysis of the DEIS, such as the effect of development on traffic? Another meaning of the poll is that a combination of Forest City Ratner publicity and weak journalism have papered over major questions about this project.

Not a racial divide

The article states:
Support for Forest City Ratner's $4.2 billion plan runs across racial, economic and gender lines, the poll shows. The proposed complex of 16 office and residential towers and a basketball arena is viewed favorably by 56% of African-Americans, 58% of whites, 68% of Latinos and 72% of Asians. The results contradict the popular characterization of detractors as white elites and fans as poor minorities. Only 26% of whites say they are somewhat or very unfavorable toward Atlantic Yards, compared with 30% of blacks. Opposition among residents of households with income below $20,000 or above $100,000 was identical: 29%. It was 22% in households with incomes between those amounts.

That's interesting. It's still fair to say that the most visible detractors are mostly (but hardly exclusively) white and the most visible fans are poor minorities. They're the ones with the greatest stake--homeowners and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, and members and followers of groups like BUILD and ACORN that have been supported by Forest City Ratner.

The effective CBA

The article continues:
The poll shows why Forest City has trumpeted its deal with community groups setting aside apartments and construction jobs for local residents, and why opponents have tried to discredit the pact. A whopping 86% of respondents call it an important benefit. That figure is 70% even among those who don't like the project.

It's not simply that opponents have tried to discredit this pact. Opponents have seized on valid criticism from impartial experts like Good Jobs New York.

The article continues:
Housing important
The project's proposed 2,250 apartments for low- and middle- income renters receive a similarly robust endorsement: They are deemed an important benefit by 92% of the development's supporters and even by 66% of its detractors.

Again, unless it's explained that it's a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus, and that the affordable housing would come late in the project, unlike in actual rezonings, it's difficult to characterize.

B-ball blahs

The article continues:
Forest City's plan to move the Nets from New Jersey to the arena, at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, is less of a factor. Only 58% describe it as an important benefit, while 40% say it's not. More men than women praise the basketball component, and college-educated women are the least impressed, with 53% calling it unimportant. In fact, college-educated women are the least enthusiastic about Atlantic Yards as a whole. Yet half of them like it, while 32% do not.

This suggests that it did make sense for Forest City Ratner to play down the "Jobs, Housing, and Hoops" slogan. That makes today's Daily News headline, N.Y.ers all pumped up over Nets deal - survey, sound odd.

Most unaware

The Crain's article states:
The Crain's poll indicates that 28% of Brooklynites and 20% of New Yorkers are following the issue closely. Most New Yorkers are not bothered by some common criticisms of the project. Only 34% say its significant costs to the city--such as those schools and infrastructure entail--raise serious doubts in their minds. Just 29% express misgivings when told that the project, which includes a 62-story office tower, is out of scale with the neighborhood and will promote gentrification.

Maybe that's because most people don't know what the costs are, or have seen graphics that show the scale of the project, or have been told about the immense flaws in the DEIS.

What ULURP?

The article states:
Of greater concern is the fact that the city's land-use review process was not used to consult the community on Atlantic Yards. That raises doubts in 40%, including 53% of those who are college-educated, but just 27% of those who didn't get past high school.

Were respondents asked what they thought of the Empire State Development Corporation scheduling a community forum on primary day?

Rugged optimism

The article closes:
City will deal with it
"I don't think the neighborhood had enough input, and I think it's too big a project," says Richard Wald, 64, of Far Rockaway, Queens. "I'd like it to go back to the drawing board." He says that though it would be nice to have the Nets, they should return to their former home on Long Island. "City land is too valuable," he explains. Edward Altman, 83, of Brooklyn Heights, sees the project differently. "There are problems with Atlantic Yards, but they'll be overcome and I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages," he says. The project would create jobs and residential units, he says. "I know most [of the housing] will not be moderate- or low-income, but enough of it will be. "The stadium for the Nets has been overemphasized," Mr. Altman says. "It's not like a football stadium where you get 70,000 people in the daytime. It's 19,000 people--at night." Though he acknowledges that traffic would increase, "the city will have to find a way to deal with it," he says.

Mr. Altman, meet Mr. Ketcham, who says the city is unprepared.

Two errors in nationwide AP story on AY

There were two fundamental errors in an otherwise reasonably balanced Associated Press story that appeared in dozens of newspapers nationwide today. The article, headlined Project Divides Brooklyn Residents in most papers, states: The $4.2 billion Atlantic Yards project, to be built over a rail yard...

As noted multiple times, and as the New York Times has finally gotten right, the 22-acre project would be built over and around the 8.3-acre railyard.

Another error was more subtle. The article stated:
Supporters say the hearing illustrated the breadth of an extraordinary local coalition in favor of the plan

So the AP didn't take the statement as gospel. But it didn't provide rebuttal either, and thus didn't acknowledge that the "extraordinary" coalition mainly of groups that stand to benefit from the project, and that the Community Benefits Agreement differs significantly from those pioneering agreements negotiated in Los Angeles, where signatories refuse to accept money from the developer.

Of course the affordable housing deal gets a bare summary:
Under the deal, 50 percent of the 4,500 rental apartments proposed would go to people with income starting at $21,270 per family of four and reaching $113,440.

What it doesn't say is how many of the affordable apartments would be accessible to typical members of ACORN, which negotiated the deal. Answer: less than one-third.

The innocence of our Borough President

On August 23, at the press event/rally for the Atlantic Yards project, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz described his support for the project:
The jobs that will be created, to help break the cycle of poverty in this borough, by targeting especially the folks that live in public housing around the arena, for all the apartments that will be available for people—the number one concern in our borough is the lack of the ability to live here. And I hope this project will inspire many other developers and builders throughout Brooklyn and New York to think about the possibility of creating housing with a mix of income levels. The right way—setting an example, innovative housing across America.
(Emphasis added)

Earth to Marty: developers don’t add affordable housing out of their own generosity. They answer to owners and shareholders. They include affordable housing when the incentives are right. For example, New York City recently rezoned several neighborhoods, including the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront. The inclusionary zoning offers developers more space to build if they include affordable units.

The Atlantic Yards project is similar, except for a crucial twist. The Empire State Development Corporation overrides city zoning, so there’s no cap on development. Rather, the size of the project is limited only by the political winds. The inclusion of affordable housing did not formally allow Forest City Ratner to add further square footage to its project. Rather, what I call a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus allows the developer to argue that its out of scale development should not be reduced.

The more things change...

A public hearing in a big city is apt to be a curious affair, simultaneously discouraging and heartening. The ones I know best are held in New York's City Hall, alternate Thursdays, on measures that require decision by the city's chief governing body, the Board of Estimate.
...Sometimes the sessions are calm and speedy; but often they are tumultuous and last not only all day, but far into the night.
...In one sense, the whole affair is exasperating. So many of the problems need never have arisen.
...So many of the conflicts would never occur if planners and other supposed experts understood in the least how cities work and respected those workings. Still other issues, it appears, involve forms of favoritism, deals or arbitrary administrative acts which outrage voters but for which they can find no effective place to point responsibility or seek repair. In many cases too (but not all), the hundreds of people who have lost a day's pay, or have made arrangements for care of their children, or have brought their children along and sit hour upon hour with youngsters fidgeting in their laps, are being hoaxed; it has all been decided before they are heard.

--Jane Jacobs, Ch. 21, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

AY displacement? Rev. Daughtry is incredulous (and uninformed)

An article in the Courier-Life chain this week, headlined Atlantic Yards Shockwaves: Rent Hikes For Its Neighbors , summarizes the displacement issue as presented in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement:
Renters in unregulated buildings in Bedford Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Gowanus may be forced to search for new digs if the controversial project comes to pass, the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for Forest City Ratner’s plan reveals.
But in the future—and even already, there might be little to fear, the document notes. Real estate pressures have already forced out many lower- to moderate-income residents. It is assumed, then, that those left behind will have enough money to absorb the project’s impact.

FCR spokeswoman Lupe Todd and ACORN's Bertha Lewis make the argument, which also appears the DEIS, that the inclusion of affordable housing in the project would stem gentrification. And the Rev. Herbert Daughtry said, “This project will ensure the presence of minorities…where everything around [the project] is in the luxury class.”

Well, not at all. Most new construction is market-rate, but the question is what happens to people who live in affordable apartments that are not rent-regulated. The Courier-Life report suggests that Daughtry shouldn't moonlight as a tenant lawyer:
Asked about the threat to renters, Daughtry was incredulous. “There has to be some kind of legal protection,” he said.

A closer look

However, as I noted, 5735 of 6860 units (84%) in the Atlantic Yards project would go to households earning over $50,000, which is the household income in the surrounding study area. That contradicts the DEIS statement:
Similarities between the proposed project housing mix and the housing mix currently present in the ¾-mile study area indicate that the socioeconomic profile of new households and existing households would be comparable.

I pointed out a crucial error in the DEIS. It stated:
The distribution of affordable and market rate rental units would also be similar on the proposed project site and in the ¾-mile study area. A housing unit is generally considered “affordable” if the household occupying it pays 30 percent or less of its income towards housing costs. As of the 2000 Census, approximately 59 percent of all renter households in the ¾-mile study area were spending less than 30 percent of their household income on housing costs. This is similar to the proportion of affordable units planned as part of the proposed project.

Yes, 50 percent of the project rental units would be affordable. But that doesn't mean they'd be affordable to the same group of people. If the median household income in the study area is $50,000, current affordable rents are much lower than the affordable rents that Atlantic Yards renters would pay.

New community forum coming; backlash against hearing "circus" continues

An article in this week's Courier-Life chain, misleadingly headlined New Public Hearing Set, explains that the Empire State Development Corporation has added a second "community forum" on Sept. 18, on top of the one originally scheduled for Sept. 12, to accommodate the hundreds of people who signed up to speak at the Aug. 23 public hearing but never were called.

The Sept. 12 date had been criticized because it coincides with the primary election and many potential attendees might want to spend their day volunteering for a candidate. ESDC spokesperson Jessica Copen said, “We wanted the public to have another opportunity to voice their views about the project.”

The deadline for public comment has been extended from Sept. 22 to Sept. 29. Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) notes that the law requires the ESDC to hold written public comment open for ten days after the public hearing, and argues that a letter from DDDB attorney Jeffrey Baker forced ESDC to follow the law and extend the comment period. Baker wrote:
We are not aware of any factual or legal distinction between the “public hearing” held on August 23rd and the “community forums” to be held on September 12th and 18th.

Hearing backlash begins

The Courier-Life also reported that several people had issued strong criticism of unfair procedures at the Aug. 23 hearing:
Shirley McRae, Chair of Community Board 2, who has called on the ESDC to extend the period of time the public has to review and respond to the DEIS and GPP, lambasted the organization of the hearing in a recent letter to the ESDC.
In it she wrote, “The hearing was in my opinion so poorly managed as to negate its purpose, to obtain public comment on the [GPP and [DEIS] for the project.”
McRae went on to say that the ESDC did not rent a large enough venue to accommodate the more than a thousand speakers and would-be speakers who showed up, that the line to get in was not maintained fairly, and that speakers were not called in the order of their arrival.
“I personally observed...gatekeepers allowing people wearing stickers and carrying signs in favor of the project to join others already at the front of the line while unaffiliated attendees were directed to the rear,” she said in reference to supporters waiting to speak.

Carolyn Konheim of Community Consulting Services, which has issued a detailed critique of the DEIS methodology regarding traffic and transit, was also angry:
Asked how she felt about the organization of the hearing, Konheim said, “The hearing wasn’t organized; it was orchestrated.
“The circus was as far as one can get from what should have been a serious consideration of the justification of a major public investment,” she said, adding that the hearing officer, attorney Edward Kramer, should have ruled “inflammatory threats and rallying cries” out of order.
As for whether she will try again next time, Konheim said, “I probably won’t attempt to speak at the forum unless they issue a speakers list in advance – and promise to stick to it.”
She continued, “Once inside the auditorium, they were able to perform their ‘street theater’ early in the evening, allowing one side of the issue to dominate the television news broadcasts.”

AY Phase I: 83% luxury housing and 40 low-income rentals a year

It's not as bad as Assemblyman Jim Brennan warned, but the Atlantic Yards project would include a relatively small amount of affordable housing--some 17%--in the first phase and just 162 low-income rentals over four years.

Brennan raised suspicions at the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) hearing August 23 that affordable housing would be limited to Phase II (scheduled completion date: 2016) of the Atlantic Yards project.

That's not true. Still, Forest City Ratner and its partner ACORN have offered no specifics regarding how much affordable housing would be built in Phase I, which would involve five towers (of 16 planned), plus the arena, scheduled for completion in 2010.

The DEIS, however, provides strong hints. In attempting to estimate the effect on community facilities such as schools, the DEIS in Chapter 5 offers these projections (above; click on all graphics to enlarge):
--1946 market-rate units, both rentals and condos
---162 moderate- to high-income rentals
----80 low-to-moderate income rentals
---162 low-income rentals

That makes for nearly 83% luxury, market-rate units. If you add the 162 moderate-to high-income rentals, which would easily rent for more than $2000 a unit for a four-person family, that makes 2108 units, or nearly 90% of 2350 total units.

(Note that, in other contexts, the term "moderate- to middle-income" has been used by the Empire State Development Corporation instead of "moderate- to high-income.")

It provides strong evidence that, as Brennan and others have suggested, the financial success of the project as a whole--and the provision of most of the affordable housing--depends on the success of the market-rate units. Moreover, should the housing market change, Phase II--with most of the affordable units--could be delayed.

The 17% affordable housing represents about half of the onsite affordable housing promised (33%) and about one-third of the original 50/50 pledge.

Condos vs. rentals

Given that Forest City Ratner promises that half of the rentals would be affordable, the numbers suggest the following breakdown for the first phase:
--404 market-rate rentals
--404 affordable rentals
-1542 market-rate condos

As of now, the developer plans 4500 rentals and 2360 condos in the project as a whole. The numbers for Phase I represent 65% of the projected condos but only 18% of the rentals.

Remember that FCR initially promised that half of the entire project would be affordable, then, when Housing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed with ACORN, limited that pledge to the rentals. But the MOU doesn't require that the rentals and condos must be built at the same time. (Above: the five towers of Phase I, plus the arena.)

Where they'd go

The DEIS also suggests that the two westernmost buildings in the project--at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues--would be condo-only. The document assigns 750 market-rate units to Community School District 15, which would encompass the project west of Fifth Avenue. (Look to the top right of the district boundaries, just below the wedge that encompasses the Atlantic Center and Atlantic Terminal malls.)

The absence of affordable units in CSD 15 suggests that the market-rate units would be condos.

The two buildings west of Fifth Avenue, as shown in the graphic above, would be the flagship "Miss Brooklyn" (or Building 1), as well as the building at Site 5, the current location of P.C. Richard and Modell's.

The buildings east of Fifth Avenue would be in Community School District 13. Three buildings in Phase I would be built around the arena and east of Fifth Avenue. (Look toward the bottom center of the graphic.) School district boundaries are here.

The vague GPP

On the other hand, the Empire State Development Corporation's General Project Plan leaves the issue unclear:
Residential development in Phase I would be a mixture of rental and condominium housing. Between approximately 1,275 and 2,350 residential units would be created, and 50% of the rental units in Phase I would be affordable. All rental buildings would be mixed-income buildings with a combination of low-, moderate- and middle-income and market-rate units integrated throughout the building.

The larger number of residential units would be built if Forest City Ratner chose the residential variation--currently the one under the most discussion--while the smaller number would be built if the project included more office space.

While the document doesn't specify the mix between condos and rentals, the term "all rental buildings" suggests that some buildings would be exclusively condos.

Bottom line

As noted, 2108 of the 2350 units would rent for more than $2000 a month, or be market-rate condos that likely would cost more. Another 80 units would be assigned to moderate-income people earning 60 to 100% of the Area Median Income. The rent would be $1418 for a four-person family.

Low-income families would find 162 units available, with three-quarters of the units assigned to families earning 41-50% of AMI, and one-quarter of the units going to families earning 30-40% of AMI. For four-person families earning $28,361 to $35,450, the rent would be $797. For families earning $21,270 to $28,360, the rent would be $620.

Note that the 2005 median income for Brooklyn was just reported as $37,332. That means that no one earning 50% of the Brooklyn median income would have a chance at Atlantic Yards.

Many in ACORN shut out

Most members of ACORN who responded to a survey on the Atlantic Yards project earn under $30,000 a year. That means they'd be eligible for only a fraction of the 162 low-income units in Phase I.

Also, half of all affordable housing units would be reserved for those in the three Community Board districts bordering the project site. So those cheering for Atlantic Yards at the recent hearing would have a long shot at the 2010 housing lottery.

Atlantic Yards proponents say it's also important as a model. But the project build pattern would diverge from that established in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning last year. For the latter rezoning, negotiated by the City Council, Affordable units used to earn the [inclusionary zoning] bonus must be created no later than the development receiving the bonus.

I've described the Atlantic Yards project as a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus. Forest City Ratner gained political support for an out-of-scale project by agreeing to affordable housing, but the negotiator was ACORN rather than any publicly accountable body.

The example in Greenpoint-Williamsburg suggests that publicly-negotiated inclusionary zoning plan may better ensure the public interest.

Letter to Village Voice re ACORN/FCR responses

Criticizing Cynthia Carr's Atlantic Yards article ["Life in the Footprint," August 2–8], ACORN's Bertha Lewis writes that ACORN worked with the developer "to guarantee that 50 percent of the 4,500 new units" will be affordable. However, that pledge applies only to the rentals. Soon after signing the affordable housing agreement, Forest City Ratner added thousands of market-rate condos--now 2360.

FCR's Jim Stuckey writes that current renters in the AY footprint have been offered comparable apartments. However, South Brooklyn Legal Services warns that the relocation agreements do not provide differential rent--the difference between what renters now pay under rent regulation and the cost of a temporary unit--for more than three years. Stuckey calls Atlantic Yards "a new model" for affordable housing. The project is better seen as a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus, in which the outsize scale is justified by the inclusion of subsidized housing. However, only a small amount of the Atlantic Yards affordable housing would be built in the first phase. Better models have emerged publicly, via the City Council,