FOIL follies III: Ratner's mysterious tower at City Tech

This is the third of four articles about Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. The first concerned the Department of City Planning and the second concerned Assemblyman Jim Brennan's request to the Empire State Development Corporation, both regarding Atlantic Yards.

It slipped under the radar, the plan for a huge mixed-use facility on the New York City College of Technology campus (aka City Tech), in Downtown Brooklyn. The City University of New York (CUNY) decided nearly a year ago to enter into an agreement with the New York State Dormitory Authority (DASNY) and Forest City Ratner Companies.

The site of the building, at Jay and Tillary Streets, is part of MetroTech; the state owns the building site. FCR's portion would contain condos and rental apartments, with 20 percent of the latter affordable (thanks to city subsidies); there would be space for perhaps 400 rentals and 225 condos. City Tech would get classrooms, labs and faculty offices for degree programs in the sciences, healthcare and advertising design/graphic arts. If built at 1 million square feet--which isn't clear--the building would be nearly as big as Miss Brooklyn.

Though FCR was selected in November 2005, according to minutes from the CUNY trustees meeting, attention didn't surface until a 9/21/06 article in the New York Sun.

Unanswered questions

It's still a mystery. As the Brooklyn Papers pointed out last month, though two bidders competed for the rights, state officials would not release information about either bid, nor what Forest City Ratner agreed to pay for the right to develop the tower on the site of the Klitgord Center, where the Atlantic Yards hearings were held.

The Dormitory Authority--at least in fulfilling the letter of the law--has been the most responsive of the five agencies with which I filed FOIL requests. The agency promptly acknowledged my initial request, then promptly told me it had located a document, and delivered it upon receipt of a $9 check for copying costs.

What did I get? The Request for Proposals (RFP), which was issued 10/4/04, with proposals due by 11/22/04. I followed up, and was told that "the Dormitory Authority was informed by CUNY that based upon the RFP, Forest City Ratner Companies would be the developer. However, the Dormitory Authority was not involved in the procurement or RFP process nor was it involved in the evaulation of any such RFP responses."

I followed up with CUNY. City Tech spokeswoman Michele Forsten told me, "The negotiations are ongoing and are not public. If and when a development agreement is reached, it must come before the CUNY Board of Trustees for approval; that is a public process so there will be more information about the project available at that time. We expect this to happen in January, but there are no guarantees."

She added that a memorandum of understanding (cited in the minutes of the CUNY board) is currently in place. Still, there's a discrepancy between the size of the project, reported at 1 million square feet in press accounts, and the square footage mentioned in the memorandum, which adds up only to 862,000 square feet, not including parking.

I asked Forsten, who said that, because "there is no development agreeement and the design is a work in progress, there is nothing else we can say about the new building on the Klitgord site at this time."

Why FCR?

But why was FCR awarded the project? What made its bid attractive? I filed a FOIL request with CUNY last week.

The response was rapid, but again evasive. I'll get answers, it said, only after the "final agreement." While the final agreement may detail the contours of the project, Forest City Ratner has already been selected as the developer, based on the RFP. What exactly is the rationale for not explaining that?

RFP details

City Tech sought 477,000 gross square feet of new program space at the Klitgord Center site and an adjacent New York City Department of Education TV studio site. Given the recent rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn and the transferability of development rights from nearby building, there was an opportunity for a major development.

The development project, according to the RFP, includes:
--398,400 zoning square feet (zsf) from the Klitgord Center site
--388,920 zsf from CUNY's Main Complex

--(416,100) zsf subtracted for CUNY use (this assumes that some space would be below grade)

plus, potentially:
--238,600 zsf from the DOE TV studio site
--408,570 zsf from the city's Westinghouse High School site

That leaves potentially 1,018,390 zsf for private development--and a public-private project that could be, in total, 1.5 million square feet. However, those numbers don't conform to the numbers in subsequent press accounts and in the project memorandum.

Financial assumptions

The RFP suggests that the developer would have to provide the kind of detailed financial information that Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and Assemblyman Jim Brennan have sought regarding Atlantic Yards.

The RFP states:
4.3 Project Pro-Formas
The Technical Proposal shall include comprehensive financial data and pro-forma analysis for the Project, including a statement of assumptions supprot the calculations being made. Please state all appropriate costs in 2004 dollars, and state inflation and escalation assumptions
4.3.1 Provide the overall Project capital budget, including a breakdown of site acquisiton, development rights acquisition, construction, and soft costs
4.3.2 Detail the core and shell costs and fit-out costs for the different City Tech programmatic uses.
4.3.4 Provide a financing plan, including equity investment, construction loan and permanent financing. Highlight any grants or government incentives you plan on seeking.

The state budget, the RFP notes, allocated $86 million for expansion of City Tech. Respondents were asked to state how they might plan to use City Tech or CUNY funds. It also notes that, according to the State Finance Law and the Education Law, if the contract exceeds $15,000--which this obviously would--it must be approved by the State Comptroller and filed in his office.

Saving the state money

From the state's point of view, there's a significant logic to a public-private partnership: savings in money and time. According to the minutes of November 2005 meeting, Vice Chancellor Emma E. Macari said:
At the New York City College of Technology, the time line is that it would take us seventy-five months to do this project under regular capital projects if we are lucky, and it will take us according to the developers forty-nine months, so it is almost two years less and probably over $150 million less to build this space for New York City College of Technology. This is a wonderful opportunity to do projects and we are hoping that we can do more.

If so, there's no reason not to be transparent about it, is there?

A curious building

Footnote: the map shows the City Tech facilities downtown and also indicates an offsite annex at 636 Pacific Street in Prospect Heights, outlined in red. According to City Tech's Forsten, "636 Pacific Street was warehouse storage space that City Tech had years ago and no longer has."

Indeed, the building is no longer a warehouse. It was converted to condos and is part of the eminent domain lawsuit filed last week, given that Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn lives there and is a plaintiff.

The official plans

According to the minutes:
This project is currently planned to be developed as a mixed-use condominium building composed of three condominium units, as follows: (i) academic facilities, including, classrooms, laboratories, offices, a physical education facility and an auditorium containing approximately 262,000 gross square feet for NYCCT, (ii) a residential rental component to be owned by Forest City Ratner comprised of 80/20 multifamily rental housing containing approximately 375,000 gsf, (iii) a residential condominium component to be marketed for sale by Forest City Ratner containing approximately 225,000 gsf, and (iv) underground and/or adjacent off-site parking containing spaces for not less than forty percent (40%) of the units comprising the Residential Rental Unit and Residential Condominium Unit, which parking may be included in either the Residential Rental Unit, or the Residential Condominium.

Specifically, the agreements included (i) a conveyance of an interest in the Project Site to Developer and/or FC Owner during the construction period, which conveyance may be structured either as (x) a ground lease (the “Ground Lease”) of the Project Site to FC Owner during the development period or (y) a fee conveyance of the Project Site to FC Owner with an obligation running with the land to construct and convey the Academic Unit to CUNY upon its completion and, in either case, including (1) the conveyance to FC Owner of up to 566,827 zoning square feet of floor area development rights appurtenant to both the Project Site and the New York City College of Technology Main Campus, for use in the portions of the Building other than the Academic Unit, (2) payment of the Development Rights Purchase Price from FC Owner to CUNY (and/or DASNY on behalf of CUNY), (3) payment of the Academic Unit Purchase Price from CUNY (and/or DASNY, on behalf of CUNY) to FC Owner during the construction period; (ii) a development agreement providing for, among other things, the respective responsibilities of Developer, CUNY and DASNY with respect to the design, financing and construction of the Project, including the Academic Unit Work, and (iii) a Declaration of Condominium, Condominium By-Laws and related Unit purchase and sale agreements creating the Units and governing condominium operations, and providing for the conveyance of the Academic Unit with its appurtenant common interest to DASNY for the benefit of CUNY upon completion of construction, and the Residential Condominium Units with their appurtenant common interests to or at the direction of Developer and/or FC Owner.

Op-ed in Metro: The Unreality of Atlantic Yards

I have an op-ed in the free daily tabloid Metro NY today, headlined The Unreality of Atlantic Yards:
Before we can debate a major project like Atlantic Yards, we must get the facts straight. Regarding some key aspects of the development — its size and the cost or benefit to the public — too many people are in the dark.

Atlantic Yards, slated to include a basketball arena and 16 mostly residential towers, would be the largest project in Brooklyn’s history and likely the country’s densest residential community. There’s an argument for high-rise construction near Brooklyn’s biggest transit hub, but overdevelopment could produce ruinous traffic and overcrowded schools. Developer Forest City Ratner moved tactically; after announcing Atlantic Yards in December 2003, FCR last year increased the project’s size by 14 percent. This year the developer twice announced small reductions, bringing the project back to square one — an 8 million-square-foot project that would require the Empire State Development Corporation, a state authority, to override city zoning. Still, gubernatorial shoo-in Eliot Spitzer, on whose watch the project would be constructed, opined that the latest cut was sufficient. Spitzer’s interpretation undoubtedly stems from media reports that announced a recent 8 percent reduction without acknowledging the project’s original size. The Municipal Art Society and other critics say that Atlantic Yards should be truncated by a third, or a half. Even the latter might strain Brooklyn’s infrastructure and overwhelm adjacent neighborhoods.

A larger failure regards the ESDC’s claim that Atlantic Yards would bring $1.4 billion in new taxes to the city and state. For three months, the agency refused to produce its analysis, even denying Freedom of Information Law requests. However, after activists, journalists and Brooklyn Assemblyman Jim Brennan pressed the agency, the ESDC provided a seven-page memo. It wasn’t convincing. For example, while it calculated about $500 million in subsidies and tax exemptions, the agency omitted hundreds of millions more in public spending for such things as public utility relocation, schools, affordable housing and police and fire service. The ESDC says it never calculates such public costs in its models. Still, the city’s Independent Budget Office included most of those costs in its own analysis of Atlantic Yards. So did a report commissioned by the developer.

A poll released by Crain’s New York Business last month compounded the confusion. Those polled were told that “the project will provide” 2,250 affordable apartments, but weren’t informed that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, few questioned this “benefit,” even though such subsidies might be better deployed elsewhere. Based on the answer to such poorly worded questions, some 60 percent of respondents said they supported Atlantic Yards. Indeed, after a lawsuit against the use of eminent domain for Atlantic Yards was filed last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg defended the project, claiming that Atlantic Yards was “overwhelmingly favored” by Brooklynites and city residents.

We don’t know the Atlantic Yards bottom line. We don’t have a fair sense of public opinion. We do know the project hasn’t been fundamentally reduced in size. And we know that too many public officials are either underinformed or play fast and loose with the facts.

Three Men in a Room: our dysfunctional state government--and how to change it

The Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), which requires unanimity from its three controlling members—Governor George Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno—is just a symptom of the dysfunctionality of our state government, a dysfunctionality that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg chose to highlight recently in his condemnation of the PACB's rejection of the Moynihan Station plan.

But the phrase “three men in a room” describes much more than the PACB, as former State Senator Seymour Lachman describes in his timely book of analysis and advocacy, Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse, coauthored by Robert Polner. Indeed, the entire legislative and governmental process is distorted by an absence of democracy. (Lachman, who calls Albany “one of the country’s most secretive and misruled statehouses,” will be a guest on WNYC radio's Brian Lehrer Show today at 10 a.m.)

Few of our elected representatives come off well. Is it no surprise that several of the officials who back the Atlantic Yards plan are among those who benefit from and support the systematic dysfunction? Or that Brooklyn Assemblyman Jim Brennan, who has tried unsuccessfully to foster transparency in the state’s budget process (and found himself on the outs with legislative leaders), has been out in front in seeking more financial details about Atlantic Yards?

The push for reform has come less from politicians than from a handful of good-government groups and the press. Given that the New York Times has editorially chastised the Legislature for a lack of transparency and for a perpetually late budget, it becomes all the more glaring that the Times has failed to fill a vacuum and editorially scrutinize the Atlantic Yards project.

Finally fed up

Lachman, a former University Dean of the City University of New York, spent nine years in the State Senate, representing southern Brooklyn (and later, part of Staten Island, after a hostile redistricting), retiring at the end of 2004 for an academic position, concluding that he "couldn’t possibly make an important difference—despite occasional successes—by working from within the system.”

The three men “hold virtually all the cards” as they determine the details of the budget, hire most of the staff, dispense committee chairmanships and membership assignments, assign offices, and “run all the services that legislators rely on, form publications to payroll.” And the leader of each house can stop a bill from moving, while legislators typically have no time to read bills they’re asked to pass—and need not be present for voting. Only five other legislatures in the country accept absentee voting, and only one is like New York’s version, in which senators can sign in and allow their party leader to vote for them.

New York’s legislators pass the smallest percentage of bills introduced in the country, which means that most bills are offered as symbol rather than substance. The legislative committees rarely hold hearings on proposed legislation; Lachman points out that, unlike with Congressional committees, those in New York State don’t have the power to move the bills to a vote of the larger legislative body. During the legislative session, the work week generally extends three days, which means that, despite full-time pay, most legislators moonlight “as attorneys, real estate brokers, or insurance executives.”

Kept in line

How do leaders keep people in line and maintain incumbency? “Member items,” basically a discretionary fund that can be used for worthy civic purposes and also to build political capital. In the Republican-controlled Senate, a minority Democrat might get $100,000 to $200,000 to distribute to local community groups and local services, Republicans sometimes get ten times more. (In the Democrat-controlled Assembly, the flip side obtains.) Those grants, which may serve civic purposes but are never evaluated, help incumbents stay in office—and when Lachman announced plans to retire, his slush fund dried up.

Lachman recounts how Bruno tried to recruit him to the Republican Party or to vote with the party by offering $2 million to $3 million in additional member items. He said no. His district was carved up, and was designed to stretch over to Staten Island.

Lachman reports how Brooklyn Senator Carl Kruger, a Democrat, campaigned for Republican Martin Golden in return for new district boundaries that protected his seat. Golden, an Irish-American Republican, beat Vincent Gentile, an Italian-American Democrat. Gentile couldn’t even get support from the Federation of Italian American Organizations, which had backed him in the past, because Bruno had pushed $2 million to Golden to offer the federation. (Golden and Kruger both support the Atlantic Yards project.)

In Albany, gerrymandering works on behalf of each party--that which controls each respective legislative body. Thus, “bipartisan,” Lachman writes, “means in effect that each party lets the other one do as it wishes I the chamber it dominates.” He calls for the obvious: an independent, nonpartisan commission to oversee redistricting. Gubernatorial frontrunner Eliot Spitzer has made the issue a priority.

Lost money for NYC

Lachman was particularly disillusioned when, in 1999, Silver, Bruno, and Senator Martin Connor (then the Senate minority leader) agreed to do away with the commuter tax, which was a small burden on suburbanites but raised $350 million to $500 million for city services and amenities that also benefited those suburbanites. The reason: to help a Democratic Senate candidate in suburban Rockland County, who ultimately lost.

Why did Connor (an Atlantic Yards supporter, representing a district partly in Brooklyn) and his successor, David Paterson, vote for the repeal? It was what the leadership wanted. Those, like Lachman, who didn’t fall in line found their perks taken away, while those who had been reluctant but came to agree got some new benefits from the legislative leaders, who control discretionary money.

Think about it. Obviously the commuter tax was spread around the city budget, but if the city had, say, another $500 million for affordable housing, politicians might not embrace projects like Atlantic Yards just because they include some affordable housing.

Shameful politicians

Lachman details falls from grace of several politicians, including Senator Guy Vellella of the Bronx/Westchester, Assemblywoman Gloria Davis of the Bronx, and an assemblyman, curiously unnamed, who resigned after a legislative ethics commission issued a report—unreleased—about his misuse of travel funds. He resigned, only to run again successfully, thanks in part to a redistricting that excluded the home of his most serious challenger.

That, of course, is Assemblyman Roger Green, an Atlantic Yards supporter who ran unsuccessfully for Congress this year. The former challenger, Hakeem Jeffries, recently won the primary election for the seat.

Public authorities

Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who served from 1959-73, created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Urban Development Corporation (now the Empire State Development Corporation, or ESDC), and “an extraordinary number of public authorities (many unaccountable to the Legislature and therefore hugely expensive).”

The genesis of the problem dates more than 75 years, when the state pioneered the use of authorities to pay for infrastructure—roads, bridges, transit—without officially burdening taxpayers. The public authority could issue tax-free bonds to pay for the projects, but the public must ultimately pay the debt. Few state agencies are monitored or audited.

State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who has called public authorities “an immense shadow government,” has done some investigation in recent years, but now he’s politically crippled by his own scandal, using state employees as drivers for his wife.

In 1975, the Urban Development Corporation nearly collapsed, due to a soft real estate market. Had the authority been financed out of general obligation debt, there could have been a public debate about its projects, Lachman writes; because it was an authority, there was no such choice. It was made a subsidiary of another authority, the ESDC.

Gubernatorial control

While the chairpersons and boards of public authorities are more responsive to the governor than in the era of Robert Moses, the longer a governor serves, the more the governor controls them, because he controls the appointments. Lachman offers an observation that likely applies to the ESDC and its posture toward the Atlantic Yards project:
At that point, there is a risk that an authority’s decisions will no longer be based on rational, dispassionate, nonpolitical assessments of the public’s interests, but on the political calculations of the person who appointed a majority of its board.

West Side Stadium

Lachman cites Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s plan for the West Side Stadium—a project announced at $1.4 billion, which escalated to $2.2 billion. (Sound familiar? The Atlantic Yards project has gone from $2.5 billion to $4.2 billion.) Despite significant citizen concern about issues like traffic congestion and skepticism about purported benefits (sound familiar?), the mayor and Pataki remained determined.

Lachman writes:
Their confidence in their ability to prevail was based, in large measure, on their belief that they could bypass both the city and state legislatures and finance the measure through the state’s public authorities. Of course this meant there would be no public referendum. Such confidence represents a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which the state’s public authorities, originally designed to act as nonpoliticized tools of the public’s interests, have become unilateral tools of politicians.

What happened with the West Side Stadium? The Jets offered $210 million for a site with development rights estimated at $923 million. Cablevision offered $400 million. TransGas offered $700 million, with some conditions. The MTA accepted the Jets offer, saying that the overall value of the bid—including an accelerated construction schedule and a pledge to use minority- and women-owned businesses as subcontractors—was higher than Cablevision’s offer. (Sound familiar?)

But the PACB, which had to sign off on state funding, said no, with both Bruno and Silver abstaining; the latter looked askance on a project that would compete with his Lower Manhattan district.

Lobbyists and contributions

New York has more registered lobbyists per legislator—18 to 1—than any state in the country. In 2005, one “minor” reform passed by the Legislature requires that lobbying of state agencies be made public instead of being kept secret—which seems like a no brainer.

Lachman cites as an example the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2005, the Legislature agreed to add 360 Furman Street on the Brooklyn waterfront to the park. Why? The development team included a former aide to Pataki and a major campaign donor. The Pataki-controlled ESDC had no objection.

While state law ostensibly caps corporate donations to state and local elections at $5000 a year, many companies have subsidiaries give money--an issue that's cropped up in the current race for Attorney General. Moreover, because there’s no central databank for local contributions around the state, many companies circumvent this by giving locally and often.

Reform moves

In 2004, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University called the legislature the country’s worst, significantly citing the absence of a real committee system to develop bills and to oversee administrative agencies. It led in 2005 to what Lachman describes as “modest” and “even regressive” reforms. More recently, Spitzer has called for a general accounting office to monitor the budget process.

Here are some of Lachman’s recommended reforms
--sweeping campaign finance reform
--term limits for legislators
--no more special budget allocations from “three men in a room”
--transparency for “member items,” which are supposed to serve community needs rather than the agenda of legislative leaders
--nonpartisan redistricting
--a permanent nonpartisan ethics commission
--a limit of at most a dozen public authorities, with the functions of the rest incorporated into the state budget, plus a nonpartisan commission to oversee the authorities
--equal resources for legislators, regardless of party
--an independent budget office.

How to get there? Spitzer has mentioned some of these things, but, to read Lachman, it can’t be done from the inside. He advocates a constitutional convention, basically to blow up the government. Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who has conducted some aggressive reviews of public authorities, has called a constitutional convention “a risk worth taking” but also suggested a set of constitutional amendments sent to the voters.

Brennan Center redux

The Brennan Center recently issued a report card:
Two years after its landmark report on the New York State Legislature, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law has concluded that the legislative process is “still broken” and remains in need of reform. In a new report, Unfinished Business: New York State Legislative Reform 2006 Update, the Brennan Center concludes that rank and file members of the state legislature, as well as the general public, are left out of the legislative process leaving all New Yorkers underserved.

Among the problems:
--Few standing committee hearings devoted to a specific piece of major legislation;
--No detailed committee reports attached to major bills;
--Next to impossible for bills to reach the chamber floor for a vote without the approval of leadership;
--Neither house voted down a single bill on the floor;
--Little floor debate on major legislation; and
--Very few conference committees to resolve differences between bills passed by the Assembly and the Senate.

Unfinished Business makes four recommendations that are critical to reforming the legislative process:
--Strengthen the committee process by creating mechanisms for rank-and-file members to force hearings and votes on bills;
--End leadership control over bills getting the floor by creating a mechanism for rank-and-file members to force floor votes;
--Institutionalize conference committees; and
--Codify fair, objective criteria for allotting resources and staff to members and committees.

Lachman says much of the same, and more.

Walking tour of proposed Atlantic Yards footprint next Saturday

I have a small walking tour business, New York Like a Native, and have been giving tours of Brooklyn neighborhoods since 2000. For the past years, the Atlantic Yards plan has intersected briefly with a couple of tours.

Given how much time I spend thinking the Atlantic Yards project, I decided to offer a tour about it. The best way to understand the controversy--including issues of scale, design, and blight--is to take a look around the proposed site and the surrounding neighborhood. (Here are some contrasting views of the site and the proposals.)

Saturday, November 4, 1:30 p.m. $15/person. (Rain date: Sunday November 12 at 1:30 p.m.)

The tour will last 2-2.5 hours. We'll meet outside Brooklyn's tallest building (for now), the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, Hanson Place at Flatbush Avenue, near the Atlantic Terminal transit hub. More info here.

Bloomberg on eminent domain: majority rules!

Mayor Mike Bloomberg is clearly a savvy businessman and, many believe, a good public official. But he's never claimed to be a constitutional lawyer, and it shows. During his weekly appearance yesterday on the WABC AM call-in show hosted by John Gambling, Bloomberg offered a grab-bag defense of eminent domain that failed to engage the issue and suggested that, if most people want a project, condemnation for it is defensible.

The first caller from the public was Daniel Goldstein, spokesman for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and a plaintiff in the eminent domain suit filed Thursday. He referenced Bloomberg's recent criticism of the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), the state body controlled by three members (Governor George Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno) that had just rejected the Moynihan Station plan.

DG: Last week on this show you called three men in a room in Albany undemocratic and unconstitutional, perhaps. And that same three men in a room will decide the fate of Atlantic Yards. And, as you know, yesterday, I and others filed an eminent domain lawsuit to protect our constitutional rights and you called us plaintiffs misguided, myopic, and selfish for trying to protect those rights. I’d like to ask you why you would call us that.

MB: Number one, Daniel, the courts, I guess, will decide whether or not the suit that you filed has any merit. That’s our system and, if the courts say you have merit, then you have recourse, and if the courts say you don’t, they’ll dismiss it. Our belief is that it is a frivolous lawsuit and there is no merit to it. But you’ll have your day in court and that’s exactly what democracy should give you.

Frivolous, meaning "not serious"? He could disagree with the lawsuit and defend the city's position without calling it frivolous.

Three men in a room

Bloomberg continued:
In terms of the three men in a room, I’m a believer in letting all of the members of the legislature vote. You do have to have some leadership, you can’t have everybody with their own bills, that’s just not the way democracy works--it’s too big, it’s not a republic, we have a democracy.

He basically reiterated his position, suggesting that the PACB is unconstitutional, but he didn't apply it to the Atlantic Yards case.

Eminent domain

Bloomberg continued, addressing eminent domain:
Eminent domain is one of those things that, it does take away some people’s rights, but there is a balance between individual rights and the rights of society. So, we for example, have laws that prohibit you from speeding, but we do it because it makes everybody safer. We have laws that let the—that force you sometimes to go to war, clearly infringing on your civil rights, if there’s ever a case—we’re sending you to fight and perhaps die, but we all agree we have to do that. We limit our freedom of speech, and there’s no greater defender of the First Amendment than me, but it is inappropriate, and it should be prohibited, from allowing somebody to stand up in a theater and, as a joke, scream fire, because people can get killed in the stampede on the way out.

Rather than discuss the draft or free speech, it would have been more apt for him to discuss the doctrine of eminent domain, which was originally designated for "public use," but which has since evolved to be for a "public purpose." Is the Atlantic Yards project a public purpose? And does the planning for the project meet the guidelines established in the Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo decision, or was Forest City Ratner a favored developer?

Bloomberg continued:
In the case of eminent domain, it is--we have to keep changing our cities, and build the infrastructure and have the jobs and the housing, and you can’t just let one person stop all of that. I’m not in favor of, when most people are against something, doing it. But, for example, the Nets development, which is what you’re talking about, Daniel, out in Brooklyn, overwhelmingly favored by people in Brooklyn and throughout the city, and I think that’s an appropriate thing for use of government powers. A handful of people, I’m sorry for them, but they will get fairly compensated, but you can’t just let any one person stop all development, and that’s when eminent domain comes in.


The value of "the jobs and the housing" is contested in the lawsuit. Does 60 percent in favor--based on a deeply deceptive Crain's poll--qualify as "overwhelmingly"? Even if a legitimate poll established "overwhelming" support for the project, would it pass muster if it didn't meet the guidelines set in Kelo? And, yes, eminent domain is supposed to deal with the "holdout" problem, but in this case are the "handful of people" trying to "stop all development" or are they trying to stop one development they believe that proceeds through undemocratic means?

Goldstein was silent, not allowed to ask a follow-up question or to interject. Apparently when the mayor speaks, his questioner is cut off.

City Planning, April 2005: "Public input on the Brooklyn stadium has not started yet"

As late as April 22, 2005, nearly a year and a half after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, a city official acknowledged that there had been no public input. The issue came up during the American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter’s 2005 Annual Conference.

According to the proceedings, Richard Barth, Executive Director, New York City Department of Planning was on a panel titled "New York Area Mega-Projects: Prospects & Priorities." He was asked:
Many of the mega-projects, such as the Brooklyn arena and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning do not appropriately consider scale, neighborhood appropriateness, integration to surrounding communities, and other quality of life issues. Why?

His response, at least regarding Atlantic Yards: Public input on the Brooklyn stadium has not started yet.

This is a summary, not a transcript. And it's not clear that public input is the same as public planning--a requirement for the use of eminent domain, according to the Kelo decision.

And, yes, the public process, such as it is, managed by the Empire State Development Corporation, to gather public comments on the project's environmental impact had not begun. But it is interesting that the many meetings that developer Forest City Ratner has touted did not qualify, in the mind of a city official, as "public input."

Some credulousness, some skepticism: two AY stories in the Times

9/5/06, p. A1, Developer Said to Cut Size of Brooklyn Project (lead story!): Facing mounting criticism of its $4.2 billion Atlantic Yards project, the developer Forest City Ratner plans to reduce the size of the complex by 6 to 8 percent, eliminating hundreds of apartments from the largest development proposal in the city, according to government officials and executives working with the developer.

10/27/06, p. B4: Suit Against Atlantic Yards Challenges Eminent Domain: In a widely anticipated legal maneuver, opponents of the Atlantic Yards project filed suit in federal court yesterday, challenging the state’s authority to use its eminent-domain powers to acquire property and make way for the $4.2 billion development near Downtown Brooklyn.

I think it's legitimate to describe the lawsuit as a "widely anticipated legal maneuver." It would also have been equally legitimate to have described the scaleback floated last month as a tactic or a maneuver.

The fifth paragraph of the 9/5/06 article stated: But both supporters and critics have expected Forest City to reduce the size and density of Atlantic Yards, which has been the focus of a series of raucous, standing-room-only public hearings, most recently on Aug. 24.

But that wasn't in the lead, or the headline. And nowhere in the front-page article was the point made that the scaleback would reduce the size of the project back to the square footage originally announced.

The next eminent domain donnybrook? AY controversy goes to court

For years, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) has complained that the process behind the Atlantic Yards project was a sham. Yesterday, the community coalition put some legal muscle behind it. Ten plaintiffs—three property owners, one commercial tenant, and six residential tenants—filed suit in federal court, calling the planned use of eminent domain unconstitutional.
(Photo of attorney Matthew Brinckerhoff by Jonathan Barkey)

In doing so, they asked that the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) and Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) halt any action to approve the project. (Developer Forest City Ratner (FCR) has predicted approval next month.)

Named as defendants are FCR and associated entities, the ESDC, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), as well as Gov. George Pataki, ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, NYCEDC officials Andrew Alper and Joshua Sirefman, and FCR’s Bruce Ratner and Jim Stuckey. All of the plaintiffs are in blocks below the MTA’s Vanderbilt Yard, including two from this block of five houses on Dean Street just east of Sixth Avenue.

At a press conference yesterday afternoon outside City Hall, plaintiffs’ lead attorney Brinckerhoff called the planned project a violation of the 2005 Supreme Court decision in the Kelo v. New London case: “This lawsuit presents a textbook example of what the Fifth Amendment expressly prohibits: the taking of one citizen’s property in order to benefit a powerful and influential private citizen,”

(His firm, Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff & Abady (ECBA), has won some significant victories challenging government action, gaining New York City to pay $4.8 million to Housing Works, after the city terminated the group’s funding in response to its criticism of the city, and obtaining $50 million settlement from the city in a class action suit representing more 60,000 people arrested for minor violations who were strip-searched. It has also helped preserve the historic High Line on the West Side, which had faced demolition.)

Kelo permitted the use of eminent domain, but it indicates that there must be a planning process—which differs from the process in Brooklyn, according to the complaint. (The opinion stated: "The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan..." Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurrence emphasized "that respondents reviewed a variety of development plans and chose a private developer from a group of applicants rather than picking out a particular transferee beforehand.") Brinckerhoff acknowledged that the Kelo decision did erode some rights, but emphasized that “the Supreme Court has always said you cannot take private property for a private benefit.” Jurisprudence has evolved to allow a broadly-defined "public purpose," however.

Added plaintiff and DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein, “When Bruce Ratner went to Governor Pataki and asked if he could take our homes and businesses, and the governor said ‘sure,’ what he did was create the lawsuit you see today.”
(Photo of Goldstein by Jonathan Barkey)

Why sue now, even before the ESDC has voted? Brinckerhoff responded, “The plantiffs have an absolute right to have claims heard in federal court. If we wait, that would be jeopardized.” While he said that the plaintiffs have enough evidence to go to trial, he predicted that, during the discovery phase, “We will find documents that support our theory that this decision was made years ago.” By filing in federal court rather than state court, the plaintiffs also seek redress in a forum that is more insulated from the local political winds.

(The judge assigned is Nicholas Garaufis, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 after serving as the Chief Counsel of the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C. and before that counsel to Queens Borough President Claire Shulman.)

Goldstein said the issue was of national importance and, indeed, DDDB offered a statement of support from the Institute of Justice (IJ), the libertarian law firm that has led the fight against eminent domain abuse. IJ attorney Dana Berliner, co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the Kelo case, pointed out that the city of New London did not have a developer in mind when it came up with the project; she told the New York Law Journal: "Kelo left open the possibility that a pure one-to-one transfer, or a condemnation that was made not according to the proper planning procedures, would not pass constitutional muster.”

Charges & responses

Specifically, the lawsuit claims that the condemnations of plaintiffs properties violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It asks not just for a stop in in the condemnations--including Freddy's Bar & Backroom at Dean Street and Sixth Avenue--but also compensatory damages from all defendants and punitive damages from all except the City of New York, as well as attorneys fees.

Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said, “This is simply a sad attempt to delay a project that is supported by over 60% of Brooklyn." Mayor Bloomberg said, "There are people that want to stop this project in Brooklyn for, I would argue, either misguided, myopic, or selfish reasons," and said the suit had "no real merit." The ESDC did not have an immediate comment.

Process & pretext

Further arguing that the project had been greased, the lawsuit details “The Sham Bid Process for the Railyards,” citing an RFP “profoundly biased” in favor of FCR, “The Patina of Public Participation,” pointing out how most people who wanted to speak at the Aug. 23 public hearing were rebuffed.
(Project outline from ESDC)

The suit charges:
Defendants have attempted to justify the taking of private property for the benefit of a private party on four main grounds: (1) the Project will result in a net economic benefit to the City and State; (2) the taking is necessary to eliminate urban blight; (3) that the Project will create significant affordable housing; and (4) the Project will create thousands of new jobs. These alleged “public benefits” are either wildly exaggerated or simply false.

The suit incorporates several of the arguments made in the ongoing political battle: that the costs of the project are not disclosed or accounted for; that the elimination of blight was never raised as a justification when the project was unveiled in 2003; that only 550 affordable units are slated for Phase I of the project; and that the claimed 15,000 construction jobs are job-years, and that most of the promised 2500 office jobs would be retained rather than new.

Whether that raises constitutional muster is another question. After reading the complaint, David Reiss, who teaches property law at Brooklyn Law School, observed that the plaintiffs face a significant challenge. Despite the criticisms of the determination of blight, courts have left much leeway for government agencies to declare blight. The strongest case for plaintiffs, he suggested, may be the accusation of a sham bid process for the railyards, “if they’re able to demonstrate it.”

As for the claim that the eminent domain action violates plaintiffs’ equal protection of the law, he told me that “courts have typically been very reluctant to find that a government action was not rational. It’s a low standard.”

ATURA & the “Takings Area

The suit claims that eminent domain is unnecessary, since major development could be achieved without taking privately-owned land. “Defendants’ decision to take plaintiffs’ properties serves only one purpose: to allow Ratner to build a Project of unprecedented size and thus to reap a profit that defendants, tellingly, have thus far refused to disclose,” the suit states.

The lawsuit makes a distinction between parts of the project within ATURA, the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, designated in 1968, and the privately-owned land in the “Takings Area,” which is not part of ATURA. (In the map at right, anything in red (including a grayish red, but not the gray alone) is within ATURA. The blue-and-red striped areas between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street are within both ATURA and the Atlantic Yards footprint. The blocks in solid blue, which include the plaintiffs' properties and homes on Pacific and Dean streets, are within the Atlantic Yards footprint but not ATURA.)

The lawsuit notes that ATURA has never been expanded to include the Takings Area, nor has the area been designated as blighted or designated for redevelopment. Rather, “the Takings Area rests smack in the middle of some of the most valuable real estate in Brooklyn.” Thus, the suit says, any stagnation in the area is “the result of the Project itself.”

While ATURA could easily be redeveloped without the Takings Area, as the suit alleges, it would be much harder to do so and find space for a basketball arena. And that’s what was offered to the city--and the city wanted it. As former NYCEDC president Alper said at a 5/4/04 meeting of the City Council Economic Development Committee:
This particular project came to us. We were not out soliciting, we were developing a Downtown Brooklyn Plan, but we were not out soliciting a professional sports franchise for Downtown Brooklyn. The developer came to us with what we thought was actually a very clever plan. It is not only bringing a sports team back to Brooklyn, but to do it in a way that provided dramatic economic development catalyst in terms of housing, retail, commercial jobs, construction jobs, permanent jobs. So, they came to us, we did not come to them. And it is not really up to us then to go out and find to try to a better deal.

On the Brian Lehrer Show last July, FCR’s Stuckey said:
This area has been considered blighted since 1968 when the first Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Plan was adopted. About 60, 65% of the area fell within that urban renewal area and was considered to be a blighted area. Those findings when the Downtown Brooklyn plan was approved two years ago were reaffirmed.

Plaintiffs

One plaintiff is the company that runs Freddy’s. Manager Donald O’Finn, a video artist whose works show at the bar, said that “we believe the project is not rationally related to a legitimate public purpose.” He described the bar’s many honors and accolades: “Freddy’s is far more than a business; it’s a beloved institution.”
(O'Finn photo by Jonathan Barkey.)

Another plaintiff, David Sheets, has lived for nine-years in a rent-stabilized SRO building on Dean Street. While he didn’t speak at the formal part of the press conference, Sheets—a paralegal of modest means but firm convictions—said afterward, "We read about this in the paper. No one ever had any contact with us [before the project announcement]."

As for joining the lawsuit, he said, “I can’t not. I have to see myself in the mirror every morning. We are being forced out of our homes, either insidiously or directly, to make room for a basketball franchise that does not have legal approval to operate in the state of New York...for a project that has not even been designed." Moreover, he said, no one has signed off on the finances, pointing to Assemblyman Jim Brennan's struggle to gain documents about the development's profit projections.”

Sheets and five other rental plaintiffs, representing households with a total of 24 people, are represented by South Brooklyn Legal Services (SBLS). “There’s no guarantee that they’d get what they have now,” said SBLS attorney Jane Landry-Reyes. “Moreover, they don’t want to move from their homes.” (One of those plaintiffs is Maria Gonzalez, pictured at right, who has lived in her Pacific Street building for 33 years. Photo by Dan Sagarin.)

While Forest City said that renters had been offered space in the project at comparable rent and interim rental assistance, attorneys from SBLS said the contracts lasted only three years—not enough time to fully protect them. Moreover, said the lawsuit, the use of “friendly condemnations”--the ESDC will condemn buldings that FCR owns--allows the developer to override state laws that require landlords who are demolishing buildings with rent-regulated tenants to “obtain approval from the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal and must either offer replacement housing at the same rent, a stipend to cover the anticipated difference in rents for a six year period, or some combination of those two options.” (A state lawsuit from other tenants is anticipated, as well.)

Politics and strategy

City Council Member Letitia James challenged the legitimacy of the project, counting out justifications for the project and repeating, “It was a lie then, and it’s a lie now.” She added, “We could do it right. This project could be subject to community review.”
(Photo by Jonathan Barkey)

James pointed out that apartments have been selling for $1 million in the neighborhoods. “But anyone definition, that’s not blight. The neighborhood is not blighted.” Also present were State Senator Velmanette Montgomery; Chris Owens, unsuccessful candidate for the 11th Congressional District (and representing his father, retiring Rep. Major Owens); and Bill Batson, Community Board 8 Atlantic Yards committee co-chair and unsuccessful candidate for the 57th Assembly District.

How much money has DDDB raised? Goldstein deflected the question, saying that the group had raised more than $100,000 in its recent walkathon, and that the national attention from the lawsuit will draw more support. “We have pledge commitments of tens of thousands [of dollars],” said DDDB volunteer attorney Adam Perlmutter.

FCR's full response

Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said in a statement, "For over three years we have tried everything in our power to negotiate fair and beneficial transactions for everyone living in the footprint. We have been able to do so with a vast majority of residents and business owners. However, a handful of people have either refused to speak with us or, for whatever reason, we have been unable to reach an agreement with others. It is disappointing they have decided to take this action, but it is not unexpected. The opposition has said repeatedly that its plan is to file as many lawsuits as possible in order to try and delay a project that will provide over 2,200 units of affordable housing, create over 15,000 jobs and generate over $1.4 billion in new net tax revenue for the city and the state. This is simply a sad attempt to delay a project that is supported by over 60% of Brooklyn."

In other words, constitutional law by plebiscite?

It's unclear how closely the court can or will look at the contested issues of jobs, housing, and tax revenue. The lawsuit, however, may point other organizations and media outlets to look at those issues more closely.

Eminent domain lawsuit coming today; another suit also in the works

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) will announce its expected eminent domain lawsuit, involving property owners and tenants, at a 1 pm press conference today at City Hall.

How much will the suit rely on the contested Kelo decision?

A second suit

Not part of this lawsuit, but expected to be part of another, are 15 rent-stabilized tenants in two buildings in the proposed project footprint, represented by attorney George Locker. He told me, "I will be raising exclusively state claims, in a separate plenary lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court after issuance of the Final Environmental Impact Statement." That could be in November.

Locker added, "I fully support the DDDB litigation and believe that they will prevail on their Federal claims, which will be applicable to my clients, as my claims will be applicable to theirs." Locker believes that the state and developer are using eminent domain to circumvent state law, which otherwise would require a series of hearings before demolishing buildings containing rent-regulated tenants.

New location & condo numbers, old photos & claims from FCR

There's not too much new in the Atlantic Yards Project Briefing handed out by Forest City Ratner representatives to some Prospect Heights residents at a meeting Monday night--the developer's confident schedule of a November approval was probably the most dramatic.

Still, the document remains intriguing, especially since the developer persists in claiming $6.1 billion in tax revenues for the project--a highly dubious figure--and showing pictures of demolished buildings under "Existing Conditions." (We get the backlot building at 463 Dean Street and the Underberg Building (twice), though they were torn down in May. At least the developer has found a current photo of 636 Pacific Street, which had previously be portrayed pre-renovation. The photo below is from Forgotten NY, not FCR.)

And, curiously enough, the project location is described as "close proximity to Downtown Brooklyn," which differs from the longstanding description of "A Vision for Downtown Brooklyn."

The New York Times in April published a megacorrection to clarify that the project would be near Downtown Brooklyn rather than in it. The importance of the distinction is that Downtown Brooklyn has been rezoned for higher-density development but Prospect Heights has not been rezoned; the Empire State Development Corporation must override city zoning.

Condos, affordable housing, & jobs

There are some specifics: FCR now plans 6430 units, including 1930 condos. In June 2005, the developer announced 2800 condos, cut that number to 2360 in March, and cut it again. (Here's the housing sequence.) Given that each cut means a loss of several hundred million dollars in revenue--assuming that the condos could be marketed for, say, an average of $1 million each--that suggests that the developer has built a lot of slack into its budget projection, which this summer was estimated by a New York magazine source as leading to a $1 billion profit.

There's a lot in the briefing about the affordable housing crisis, and the developer's plan for 2250 affordable units, including the number of units available for five income "bands." What's not said is that the average rent for the "affordable" units would be $1542.

The briefing also states that "approximately 50% of all affordable apartments will be 2- and 3-bedroom units." That's not true. Though half of the space assigned to affordable apartments would be for two- and three-bedroom units, given their size, there would be fewer of them than one-bedroom units and studios.

Forest City Ratner continues to claim 15,000 construction jobs, which actually would be an average of 1500 jobs a year over ten years.

ESDC says FCR's timetable isn't accurate; still, Nov. 2 may be Final EIS deadline

Despite Forest City Ratner's dissemination of a timeline that predicts two board meeetings of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to approve the Atlantic Yards project, the ESDC says that's not accurate.

Spokeswoman Jessica Copen contacted me to say, "We haven't scheduled any special meetings for November. We're working towards finalizing the Final Environmental Impact Statement as soon as possible, within the statutory timeframe."

State law, however, does suggest that the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) may be finished soon. It states:
(5) Except as provided in subparagraph (i) of this paragraph, the lead agency must prepare or cause to be prepared and must file a final EIS, within 45 calendar days after the close of any hearing or within 60 calendar days after the filing of the draft EIS, whichever occurs later.

The Atlantic Yards public hearing was August 23. The second of the two Atlantic Yards community forums was September 18. The 45-day window after the hearing ended October 7. The 45-day window after the second forum ends November 2. Alternatively, if the "hearing" is considered the end of the September 29 comment period, then the 45-day window would end November 13.

However, state law does allow for delays. It states:
The last date for preparation and filing of the final EIS may be extended:
(a) if it is determined that additional time is necessary to prepare the statement adequately; or
(b) if problems with the proposed action requiring material reconsideration or modification have been identified.

FOIL follies II: Brennan's request for business plan rejected

This is the second of four articles on Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. The first concerned the Department of City Planning.

Yes, the Empire State Development Corporation finally released a memo attempting to back up its prediction that the Atlantic Yards Project would generate $1.4 billion in new city and state taxes.

But that wasn’t what Brooklyn Assemblyman Jim Brennan really asked for. Indeed, his FOIL request for the project’s “business plan”—the crucial estimate of overall costs and revenues—was rebuffed by the ESDC. Now he’s appealing that rejection.

Brennan had previously sponsored an unsuccessful bill to decrease the size of the project by 34% while adding affordable housing subsidies. “The purpose of my request is to enable the public to evaluate the relationship between the size of the project and the arena and the affordable housing,” he told me, noting that project proponents have justified the scale of the project because of the affordable housing.

Brennan would like to see a larger amount of affordable housing be guaranteed in the first phase of the project—currently, plans are for 550 of 2250 promised units--and a contractual commitment among the city, state, and developer Forest City Ratner.

Public disclosure

“So that is a critical public question: how much money do they think they’re going to make on their market-rate housing, and how much money do they think the arena is going to make,” he said. “How much money does the affordable housing need and where are they going to get it? Without that information, the public is shortchanged.”

(Examining the plan before a recent 8 percent reduction in square footage, New York Magazine estimated Ratner's profits at $1 billion.)

“The most significant thing that the ESDC is going to do, aside from eminent domain, is the zoning override, and the override affects several hundred thousand people,” Brennan said. “If it turns out that they only need half as much square feet of space in order to assure that the arena doesn’t go bust, or if the affordable housing doesn’t need money from market aspects of the project, then that is information that the public should have.”

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) had in September 2005 requested such a document of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), noting that the agency, in its Request For Proposals for the Vanderbilt Yard required that pro forma cash-flow statements, with documentation of fiscal assumptions for a 20-year period, be included as part of the bid. However, the MTA did not comply.

ESDC's rationale

Not all agency documents are subject to disclosure. Brennan said that the agency stated that, according to the law, it may deny access to records or portions thereof that "are inter-agency or intra-agency materials which are not... statistical or factual tabulations or data."

In other words, if they are statistical or factual dabulations or data, they should be disclosed. The ESDC's rationale, Brennan said, must be that the business plan is not a statistical or factual tabulation. He believes that it is.

The speedy FEIS? Ratner anticipates AY approval in a matter of weeks

Consultants at AKRF working on the Atlantic Yards Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) must be working overtime. Though the comment period on the Draft EIS ended on September 29, with lengthy submissions on the final day, developer Forest City Ratner (FCR) anticipates that the Final EIS will be certified by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) during the first week in November.

Then, according to the timeline handed out to Prospect Heights residents by FCR officials at a community meeting Monday, ten days later the ESDC will hold a special meeting to approve the EIS and eminent domain findings, and to approve the General Project Plan (GPP).

[Update: the ESDC says the timetable's not accurate.]

Note the certainty expressed that the agency will approve the project, and that the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) is expected to approve it. Do the findings in the FEIS make any difference?

Who's in charge here?

The ESDC hasn't told us this timeline. There's no mention of such meetings on the agency web site, on the Borough President's web site, or on the mayor's web site. Nor has the developer announced it on AtlanticYards.com.

I know about this only because some project opponents who live near the church where the meeting was held got wind of the gathering and decided to attend--and forwarded me this graphic.

What's required, what's not

Note that the Final EIS is a disclosure document, not a mitigation document. It must disclose the environmental impacts of the project, and potential mitigations, but the ESDC board--as it undoubtedly will do--can simply decide that the benefits of the project outweigh any potential costs.

Also note that this is where Forest City Ratner and the state can make additional tweaks to the project. Might the GPP include another small reduction in the project size? Might the developer respond to criticism of the project plan by making the publicly accessible (but privately managed) open space somewhat more like public parks? Or revamping the transportation management plan?

FOIL follies I: City Planning's response a month overdue

This is the first of four articles on Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.

On July 26, I filed FOIL requests for Atlantic Yards-related documents with three city agencies and the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). The New York City Housing Development Corporation was the first to provide documents. The ESDC, after first ignoring my request, finally acknowledged it, then denied it, had it questioned, then reversed itself.

The Department of City Planning (DCP) has been dragging its feet. Though my request arrived the next day, and state law says that my request should've been acknowledged within five business days, the agency's response was issued on August 15, some 13 business days later.

The agency promised it would respond to my request within 30 business days. That would've been Sept. 27--four weeks ago. Earlier this month, I followed up with the department but received no response.

DCP involvement deserves scrutiny. After all, it was DCP that "recommended" an 8% reduction in the project's size last month--a cut that had already been floated in the press, and the developer quickly accepted. After all, it would return the project back to square one in terms of square footage.

"A lot of this was precooked," an executive who works with Developer Forest City Ratner told the Times. If so, wouldn't it be worth finding out more about the ingredients?

The affordability solution: build bigger?

Harvard economist (and fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute) Edward Glaeser has a piece in the New York Sun today about how to create more affordable apartments. His solution: more construction and less regulation.

Glaeser writes:
There are a host of regulatory barriers to construction. The brawl in Brooklyn over shortening the Atlantic Yards tower shows how effective community groups can be in limiting height and the supply of homes. As these community groups have grown since the 1970s, the heights of new residential buildings in Manhattan have plummeted.

First, the main tower--Frank Gehry's 620-foot "Miss Brooklyn"--has not been shortened, though even Borough President Marty Markowitz, a project supporter, wants it reduced. Second, it's 16 towers, not just one. Third, and most importantly, the main reason community groups are arguing about height and density is because this project is not subject to city zoning, as it's proceeding under the auspices of the Empire State Development Corporation.

The Hudson Yards process

Here are the paragraphs from the Hudson Yards press release mentioned by the commenter below:
Under the agreement, the Hudson Yards Development Corporation (HYDC), a City-created local development corporation, will work with a variety of stakeholders – including community groups and the public – to prepare within six months a statement of planning and design guidelines for the Western Rail Yards, located between 11th and 12th Avenues and between 30th and 33rd Streets. The guidelines will include specifics on key elements of development such as permissible uses and densities. Guidelines already exist for the Eastern Rail Yards, located between 10th and 11th Avenues and between 30th and 33rd Streets, as a result of the Hudson Yards rezoning approved by the City Council in January of 2005.

The MTA will prepare and issue a request-for-proposals (RFP) reflecting these guidelines within two months after their completion. The MTA will complete the evaluation of responses within three months after the release of the RFP, for either or both of the Eastern Rail Yards and the Western Rail Yards. A selection committee, the majority of which will be representatives of the MTA and which will include two representatives chosen by the City, will then select winning responses within 45 days. Any disposition (sale or lease) will be subject to the approval of the MTA Board. In addition, the MTA has agreed that the development on the Western Rail Yards envisioned by the City-MTA agreement will be subject to the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) including appropriate environmental review.

Tish James, DDDB welcome Bloomberg's PACB comments

Yesterday I wrote about how Mayor Mike Bloomberg's comments criticizing the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) as undemocratic raised the question about whether he'd criticize the process regarding approval of the Atlantic Yards project.

After all, the PACB would have to approve the project after it passes the board of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), itself another agency insulated from the democratic process.

Yesterday City Council Member Letitia James, who represents Prospect Heights and environs, including the area slated for the Atlantic Yards project, issued a statement:
I agree fully that the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) is not a good
example of representative democracy. "Three men in a room" should not have control over development in our city- not at Moynihan Station and not at Atlantic Yards.

The mayor suggested someone might want to "look at" the constitutionality of the PACB. There are many in this community, including myself, who have been doing just that. Of the numerous lawsuits that will be filed in relation to Atlantic Yards, one may very well deal with this undemocratic process, and the near total lack of citizen input.

DDDB's comments

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) issued a statement, as well.

DDDB said:
Mayor Bloomberg is absolutely correct: three-men-in-a-room control over Ratner’s ‘Atlantic Yards,’ and other enormous development projects in New York City, is clearly undemocratic and, as he suggests, may be unconstitutional. We’ve been saying that for the past three years,” said Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) spokesman Daniel Goldstein. “We sure hope that the Mayor is not suggesting that he accepts and abets this undemocratic process when it suits his goals, and rejects it when it doesn’t. That would be Machiavellian. Indeed we will be ‘looking at that,’ as the Mayor urges, over the coming months.”

In 2005 Mayor Bloomberg signed over the city’s chartered right to oversight and review of Forest City Ratner’s 8.8 million square foot “Atlantic Yards” development proposal. This decision by the Mayor gave complete control of the largest mixed-use development proposal in the history of New York City to the unaccountable and unelected ESDC and the “undemocratic” (his words) PACB. The agreed to state override took control of the project out of the hands of three community boards, the Brooklyn Borough President, City Planning Commission and the entire City Council. None of those bodies have any official role in the project, and the override of the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) bypasses the City Council’s vote on such projects. Instead, the ESDC and the PACB are the only entities that have any official role in determining the fate of the “Atlantic Yards” proposal.

Mayor blasts “three men in a room” as undemocratic; does that apply to AY?

After the Atlantic Yards project receives an (almost inevitable) approval from the board of the Empire State Development Corporation, it still must receive a unanimous vote from the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB)—which is controlled by Gov. George Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

Silver killed the West Side Stadium, he’s being pressured to modify or kill the Atlantic Yards plan, and just this week stymied the city’s plan to renovate the Farley Post Office into Moynihan Station.

That ticked off Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who said Friday on his weekly WABC-AM radio appearance:
Why is there a structure at the state level where three individuals basically have a veto over everything? This PC, PSA, whatever the board is that approves it. And I'm not sure why that's constitutional. Maybe somebody wants to look at that. I don’t happen to think that it’s good democracy to give the governor, the speaker of the assembly, and the majority leader in the senate—no matter who they are, whether they agree with me or not—that’s not representative democracy, that’s not letting everybody have a say, because in fact, it isn’t everybody.

Host John Gambling suggested that a two out of three vote might be an improvement. Bloomberg responded:
I suppose that would be better… You can argue the governor is elected by the whole state, but then the majority leader and the speaker are representing really only their own districts, and that’s not what I think we should have.

But if the PACB passes the Atlantic Yards plan, would Bloomberg appreciate it if project critics question the process? And if he's so concerned about process, how can he countenance any project that is supervised by a state authority and bypasses the City Council, which means local elected officials don’t get a voice?

Maybe someone will ask Bloomberg when he reappears on Gambling’s show next Friday.

Three men in a room

Silver's spokeswoman Eileen Larrabee told the Daily News, in an article Saturday headlined Mike rips tiny, obscure panel, "The speaker gets input from all of his colleagues... He was acting in the interest of his conference.”

Well, Silver does listen to fellow Assemblymembers, but that doesn’t make it democratic.

Indeed, a new book by former State Senator Seymour Lachman, Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse, points out how the trio operates undemocratically. According to the publisher’s description:
Three Men in a Room is an insider’s exposé of how one of the country’s largest and most powerful governments—with the fourth-largest budget, behind only the federal government’s, California’s, and Texas’s—has become a model of inefficient and undemocratic governance. Seymour Lachman ran the New York City Board of Education, taught political science, and was then elected to New York’s legislature. What he found when he arrived in the halls of the state senate was a Potemkin village of government where legislators vote on bills they haven’t read during legislative sessions they haven’t attended.

Bloomberg on the press

Host Gambling was talking to Bloomberg about the possibility of getting the City Charter passed to enable nonpartisan elections, and also the recent charges against labor leader and Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin. “So we’re sort of stuck with what we have?” Gambling asked.

Bloomberg: Well, we are unless we say “We’re not going to take it anymore,” and maybe somebody else will take on the mantra of nonpartisan elections. Maybe the press will do a better job of investigating. Well, when you read about these elected officials that abuse the public trust and break the law--a lot of this stuff if you really had been a good investigative reporter you might have come up with yourself. You don’t see that kind of journalism as much as I think you should.

Bloomberg on development

Talk turned to the new plan to build 5000 units of subsidized middle-income housing on 24 acres at the Queens West site—formerly planned for the Olympics. Bloomberg observed:
As [Deputy Mayor] Dan [Doctoroff] pointed out yesterday, with the exception of the [West Side] Stadium, which I always thought was a horrendous loss for the city… with the exception of that, almost every single project that was part of the Olympic bid we’ve gotten going. This was one of the last big ones.

Add to that Atlantic Yards and the Brooklyn arena.

Bloomberg on campaign contributions

Rich candidates, the mayor said, often lose:
The real advantage goes to incumbents, it doesn’t go to rich people… Incumbents find it much easier to raise money, because everybody says ‘They’re likely to win, therefore I’m going to buy some influence.’ Most people, when they give money, at least the larger donors, probably do think they’re getting influence. It’s not an accident that when you go and look at who gives money to a campaign, it’s people who are doing business that comes before that legislative body. It’s called “pay to pay” and I’ve always thought it was an outrage.

Instead of the Times's railyard photo, consider some alternatives

I wrote yesterday how the photograph (right) the Times used to illustrate its Atlantic Yards City section cover story failed to depict the proposed site. What could the Times have done differently?

Well, the newspaper could've taken a cue from the 5/26/05 presentation by Forest City Ratner to the City Council, which at least outlined the then-21-acre site. The two slides with text below are taken from that presentation. (Since then, another acre has been added at the west end, crossing Flatbush Avenue.) Forest City Ratner's descriptions are, of course, contestable, but at least their graphic shows the outline of the site, including the public streets that would be demapped.

The Times photo was apparently taken looking west from the Newswalk, the tallest building in the wedge cut out of the footprint, between 6th and Carlton avenues and Pacific and Dean Streets.

The building is minuscule compared to the proposed project. Check the Newswalk building at left-center near the top in the graphic (right). The rendering was produced by the Environmental Simulation Center for the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (and subsequently adapted to emphasize Newswalk).

The simulation center produced massing models, from four different perspectives, of not just the Atlantic Yards plan but three alternatives. At the bottom, below the two Forest City Ratner slides, is another rendering by the simulation center. Note that a few buildings have since been cut in height.

NIMBY or YIMBY: behind the Times's curious framework (and photo)

Today's New York Times City Section tries to offer voices from the "neighborhood" regarding the Atlantic Yards plan, a sort of gentle distillation of some of the issues raised--and a few not quite raised--during the public comment period that ended Sept. 29. The article is headlined On the Block, but more crucially, the deck in the print edition states: Not in my backyard, yes in my backyard: Neighbors speak out on the Ratner plan.

But it depends on how you define "neighbors"--and backyards. Of the nine people interviewed, those supportive or hopeful are three people from Crown Heights--a single neighborhood to the east--plus a real estate investor (a junior version of Bruce Ratner?) who may or may not live in Brooklyn. Those opposed or concerned are four people from Fort Greene and one from Park Slope, with no representation from the immediate neighborhood: Prospect Heights. (Fort Greene and Park Slope are indeed nearby.)

The project would be located in the western tip of the neighborhood--plus one piece of land (Site 5) across Flatbush Avenue in Park Slope. (Graphic is from the Times's 12/18/05 Real Estate section article on Prospect Heights.) Crown Heights is to the east of Prospect Heights, past Washington Avenue, and Boerum Hill just a block to the southwest. Park Slope is to the south. Clinton Hill is just to the east of Fort Greene.

Worse, the photo and caption continue a parade of misleading media portrayals. The caption states: STREET-CORNER VIEW: Nine neighbors, from a merchant to a mother to a Nets fan, all see Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards plan through lenses colored by their own lives. (Accompanying the front-page photo are headshots of people who get larger portraits on the jump page, along with their quotes.)

The photo provides a misleading perspective on the proposed footprint. The photo focuses on the western segment of the Vanderbilt Yard, which itself would be about 38 percent of the 22-acre project. Atlantic Avenue and the residences and malls north of it are visible in the photo, while there’s no indication that the buildings on Pacific Street, in the left of the photo, would be demolished for the project. And there's no indication that any buildings further to the south, on Dean Street, would be demolished as well, nor what streets would be demapped for the project.

The photo perpetuates the myth that the project would be built over an "open railyard." And the Times has still failed to show any renderings of the proposal in neighborhood context. Given that this photo was likely taken from the top of the Newswalk condos (maybe 130 feet up), and people are concerned about shadows, shouldn't the Times have shown the scale of buildings 400, 500, and 620 feet tall?

Scrupulous balance?

The intro to the piece attempts scrupulous balance:
The plan is colossal — 16 high-rise buildings and an 18,000-seat basketball arena on 22 acres near the borough’s busy downtown — and fans and opponents have matched its magnitude with their own statistics. The developer, Forest City Ratner, which is also the development partner of The New York Times Company for its new headquarters in Midtown, says that the $4.2 billion project will bring 4,000 permanent jobs, billions of dollars in tax revenue and more than 6,000 units of housing. Opponents counter that the plan will corral $2 billion in public money and tax breaks, crowd 15,000 new residents into the area and clog local streets with thousands more cars.

Why can't the Times try to sort out the fiscal claims? Would there really be "billions" in tax revenue, or $2 billion in public costs? At some point this can't simply be a "he said, she said" debate.

As for crowding, why can't the Times simply acknowledge that this likely would be the densest residential community in the country--or compare it to other large projects in the city? Why is it the "opponents" who have to establish basic facts?

As for the clogging of local streets, isn't that what the state acknowledged in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement? And isn't that what local community boards--highly concerned analysts more than opponents--have predicted? (The Times hasn't reported actions by the community boards, who also have questioned the process behind the project.)

Those quoted

The intro continues:
Ever since the idea was floated in 2003, the sides have also framed their appeals broadly, citing big-picture concerns about urban policy and socioeconomic justice.

Less noticed amid the large numbers and loud clamor is the sound of the street: the skepticism and dread, or hope and excitement, of people who live and work near Atlantic Yards.

But that sound is there, on the neighborhood’s sidewalks and stoops, in its stores and coffee shops, in its kitchens and parlors. There is the Nets fan dreaming of walking to home games. The mother worried about steering her stroller across an even busier Flatbush Avenue. The teacher hoping that one apartment in the tall towers has her name on it. And the gardener fretting over the shade thrown by those same towers.


This is a false dichotomy, the big picture vs. the sound of the street. Many who have experience on the street, at public events and private discussions, have found themselves learning about the big picture. Indeed, many of those quoted by the Times are pointing to elements of that big picture.

In essence, it's jobs, housing, and hoops (plus profit) vs. shadows, traffic, displacement, and neighborhood character--often what was argued during the DEIS public hearing and community meetings.

Nine neighbors

The intro continues:
Nine neighbors all see Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards plan through lenses colored by their own lives.

If they're neighbors, the geographic distribution, as noted, is a bit curious.

Kelly Burwell, the basketball fan, is from Crown Heights and wants to be able to walk to an arena.

Audrey Doyle, the homemaker, is from Fort Greene and is concerned about gentrification and racial balance.

Christopher Morris, the investor, has purchased property “near the stadium” with the expectation that values will rise. (The Times doesn't say, but he's apparently part of the Clarett Group, which is building a luxury residential tower in Fort Greene and plans to demolish a Civil War-era mansion in Clinton Hill for a new development. The Landmarks Commission is taking a look.)

Mildred Davis, the retiree
is concerned about being pushed out of the neighborhood and her Mitchell-Lama building in Fort Greene.

Ludlow Beckett, the merchant, has a store in Fort Greene and concerned about people being able to drive to his store.

Jon Crow, the gardener, is from Park Slope and is concerned about the effect of shadows on his community garden.

Mildred Coleman, the apartment seeker, is from Crown Heights and said, "I’ve heard they’re supposed to build this complex that gives you a laundry room, places to exercise, places to shop."

Sarah Caylor, the mother, lives in Fort Greene and is concerned about shadows and traffic.

Brian Saunders, the business hopeful, is from Crown Heights and hopes for assistance in opening a small business in the footprint.

A closer look

So there are four people from/in Fort Greene, three from Crown Heights, one from Park Slope, and one whose location is unclear. Those closer are all worried about the project, but those from Crown Heights, which is farther away, see opportunity.

It's curious that there are three people from Crown Heights, none from Prospect Heights, and only one from Park Slope, which is much closer. Missing are anyone from Boerum Hill, which is also closer than Crown Heights, and Clinton Hill, which is as close. A broader geographic distribution probably would have changed the racial distribution: seven black, two white.

And, most of all, missing are the voices of the majority of potential new residents: wealthy people paying for market-rate housing.

DDDB walkathon raises more than $100,000

The Walk Don't Destroy 2 walkathon fundraiser for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) yesterday raised more than $100,000 toward legal battles over the Atlantic Yards plan. The event at Prospect Park generated nearly double the amount raised at the first walkathon last November. Organizers said that some 1100 people contributed, with more than 300 participants.

That money should (presumably) help build a legal fund sufficient to get fights against eminent domain and perhaps other issues off the ground. But lawyers are expensive, so fundraising undoubtedly will continue.

I missed the walkathon, so when I arrived at the corner of 9th Street and Eighth Avenue--a block from the park bandshell--many people in yellow DDDB t-shirts were making their way down the block to catch trains, walk home, or go to a restaurant. So I missed the person who dressed up as a Brooklyn bride--in a wedding dress--a commentary on Frank Gehry's planned "Miss Brooklyn" tower. A crew from the Castle Coalition, which takes a hard-line view against eminent domain abuse, showed up with t-shirts saying "Blight me."


(Top photos by Amy Greer. Castle crew photo by Daniel Goldstein.)

One participant's nominee for the best sign: "Best Block in NYC Opposes Worst Proposed Development in NYC."

Concert

There were maybe 70 people left listening to concert headliner John Wesley Harding, a British-born folkie who lives in Fort Greene and tends to play Joe's Pub when he's in town.

(This mural was designed by Eduardo Alexander Rabel for DDDB. Photo by Jonathan Barkey)

Harding's got excellent originals, but the crowd's favorite song was probably his cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," which begins:
They paved paradise, they put up a parking lot.

Mitchell's final stanza begins:
Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi took away my old man.

Bob Dylan adapted it to:
Late last night I heard my screen door slam
A big yellow bulldozer took away the house and the land.

It's hard to call the proposed Atlantic Yards footprint "paradise," though it includes some well-preserved buildings, others that have been substantially spruced up, and others that could be rehabilitated despite claims of blight. As for the "parking lot," well, there would be three large interim surface parking lots.

"Gentrification subsidy": proposed 421-a reform seems tentative

A city task force has issued recommendations to modify the 421-a tax break in order to generate at least $200 million for affordable housing. The question, however, is whether the changes endorsed by Mayor Mike Bloomberg go far enough, since the tax break would still support luxury construction in neighborhoods like Park Slope and Fort Greene and Prospect Heights without requiring affordable housing.

A study issued earlier this year by calculated that $320 million in subsidies was unnecessary.

Currently, developers who get tax breaks in the 421-a exclusion zone--Manhattan from 14th Street to 96th Street and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront--must include at least 20 percent affordable housing. The program would expand to parts of Harlem, Lower Manhattan, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, and parts of the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront.

In other words, there would be no requirement to build affordable housing on the non-railyard blocks of the proposed Atlantic Yards site. Note that the alternative bid for the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard, from the Extell Development Co., proposed about 30 percent affordable housing, slightly less than the percentage now proposed in the AY project.

I've called AY an example of a privately negotiated affordable housing bonus, because the deal negotiated by developer Forest City Ratner and the community group ACORN is cited as justification for building an out of scale project.

Similarly, should Forest City Ratner proceed with plans to build three towers at the Atlantic Center mall, it would not have to include affordable housing.

Criticism from advocates

Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development and a task force member, told told the Times Oct. 11:
“Unless the exclusion zone is significantly expanded beyond what’s proposed,” he said, “I think this reform will not be anywhere near sufficient. The proposed expansion would still provide extensive tax breaks for million-dollar condos from Harlem to Park Slope, from Forest Hills to Riverdale, with no affordability requirements. It would remain an expensive gentrification subsidy.”

Julie Miles, executive director of the Housing Here and Now coalition said, according to the New York Observer, that the task force didn't go far enough but simply tweaked the program. Housing advocates think there should be no tax breaks without the requirement of affordable housing. Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez, according to the Brooklyn Downtown Star, has introduced a bill that would require any recipient of the tax break to set aside 30 percent of the units as affordable.


In an editorial Oct. 15 headlined Ending a Housing Giveaway, the Times offered a gentle criticism:
The plan, which the mayor endorsed, could and should be bolder, but it’s a good starting point for rethinking the program, known as 421-a.

The 421-a tax break dates back to 1971, when the city needed to jump-start housing construction. It's helped build more than 110,000 apartments. By now, however, everyone agrees that reform is overdue.

Some prices going down?

The New York Observer's coverage of the task force conference call quoted city housing commissioner Shaun Donovan as saying that condo prices "would potentially go down to some degree" in neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO, where the tax abatements have inflated the value of the apartments. How much? Perhaps $20,000 to $105,000.

WNYC discussion

The Oct. 17 Brian Lehrer show Tuesday featured a discussion of housing among Steven Spinola, president, Real Estate Board of New York, Bernie Carr, executive director of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, and Lander.

Carr pointed out that the city is doing more than the state, since most of the resources of the city's Housing Development Corporation go to affordable housing, while only, in 2004, only 22 percent of the state Housing Finance Agency’s bond proceeds went to affordable housing.

Lehrer asked Spinola: When we have these debates these days over requiring affordable housing creation when developers get approval for luxury development, the Atlantic Yards proposal in Brooklyn is a prime example of that, where there was a negotiation, and it was agreed they were going to propose X units of affordable housing to go along with Y units of luxury housing. Is that the basic template for the future, in your opinion, or is there something wrong with that?

(Note that Atlantic Yards is not a prime example, since it was negotiated privately rather than via a City Council rezoning.)

Spinola: There’s nothing wrong with providing an incentive to a developer in return for a commitment to build affordable housing. The question is: what is that incentive, and, second, what does it cost to build affordable housing? I’m not going to get into the details of Atlantic Yards, but there is an understanding that they’re going to build 20/30/50, 20 percent low-income, 30 percent affordable, and 50 percent luxury, but the City of New York is putting substantial dollars into the Atlantic Terminal project in order to make that happen.

How much does it cost?

Spinola continued: There’s no secret as to what it costs to build a unit of housing in the city of New York. Depending on the geographic area, land costs may vary, but it’s going to cost somewhere, probably between 450 to 700,000 dollars to build, in a mid-rise, high rise structure, a unit of housing. Well, if you can’t charge the rent to cover that, or charge the sale prices to cover that, well, the money has to come from somewhere, and that’s where the city has been aggressive… in providing the programs to do that. But let’s not pretend you can build market rate housing throughout the five boroughs of the city of New York, and that will subsidize affordable housing. The numbers don’t make sense.

Note that Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff recently said that moderate- and middle-income affordable units could be built for $54,000.

Carr: Atlantic Yards is a good example, my understanding is there going to be substantial government subsidy going into Atlantic Yards to build the affordable housing. And you guys can tell me if I’m wrong about that.

Spinola: You’re absolutely right.

What's affordable?

A caller asked: Everybody keeps talking about affordable housing. I’m 25, I’ve kind of been priced out of the city. I don’t exactly know what affordable housing means. I’m not low-income by any means. But I can’t seem to make enough money, and I know a lot of people who can’t. It’s either really high end luxury or splitting a one bedroom into two or three.

Carr: There isn’t a specific definition. There’s a whole range of different programs and subsidiy programs, all of them have different income and family size guidelines. Generally they’re all pegged to the Area Median Income, some are for people who make in the 30s and 40s. There are other programs, homeowner programs, for families, couples that may make 100,000 between them. The problem is there’s just so little. When one of our developers does a project with 100 apartments, all of which probably would be affordable to the caller, they’ll get 4-5000 applications. The affordable housing that we build--the demand so far exceeds the supply.

A caller called in to question the rent-stabilization laws. She observed: The few people I knew who have rent-stabilizied apts earn well over $100,000 a year and have vacation homes.

What's the solution?

Spinola: The answer happens to be more money. We should be looking for a dedicated fund, maybe we can tie it to certain taxes that are generated from luxury houisng… and turn to Bernie’s group and say, you’re the best people to build affordable housing, here’s the incentive, here’s the minimum you need, go and do it. But the answer is going to require more dollars, it needs to come from the state and city government. The federal government seems to have abandoned the issue of housing. It would be nice if they got back into the business.

Spinola said the Real Estate Board initially proposed the subsidy that requires 20 percent affordable housing in the "exclusion zone." He said it shouldn't be mandatory: That program is working. If you move that, say, let’s move it to Bensonhurst, let’s move to Park Slope, is the rent in the market rate unit enough to subsidize it?

Lander was skeptical: Instead, we’re giving developers a tax incentive just to build million dollar [apartments] in Park Slope… I think the city’s own analysis suggests that in an awful lot more neighborhoods it [an extension of the affordable housing requirement] would work. Let’s not give a tax break for luxury housing in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Home ownership

Lehrer asked about affordable home ownership programs.

Carr: There always have been affordable home ownership programs…. They’re a lot of what turned around the South Bronx and areas of Brooklyn. But the biggest program we’re having… we had this vast resource of vacant city land, we’re almost out of vacant city land, land prices are very high. It makes affordable home ownership a lot more difficult.

Spinola: That’s really what’s happening in the boroughs, what’s going on is you’re seeing condos or one or two family homes being built, they are market-rate driven and they are reasonably priced, and I think that’s going to be part of the city’s future.

Reasonably priced? It depends on your perspective. But that's why ACORN negotiated for 600 to 1000 affordable homeownership units as part of the Atlantic Yards project. When they might be delivered, and to what income brackets, remains unclear.

Task force recommendations

According to the mayoral press release, the task force recommendations include:
Expanding the 421-a geographic exclusion area (GEA). The current exclusion zone, the area where developments are required to provide affordable housing in exchange for 421-a tax benefits, includes Manhattan from 14th Street to 96th Street and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront in Brooklyn. The expanded area would include neighborhoods with substantially high real estate values and significant zoning density: parts of Harlem, Lower Manhattan, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, and segments of the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront.

Granting twenty-five years of benefits only to developments that provide affordable housing. The reformed 421-a would allow only developments that provide affordable housing the maximum duration of benefits. Other developments would receive the standard fifteen-year 421-a tax benefits.

Setting a limit on the total amount of 421-a tax benefits that any market rate unit may receive. Only the first $100,000 of an apartment's assessed value would receive the 421-a tax exemption, currently there is no limit. Projects providing affordable housing on-site would not be subject to the cap, helping to increase the incentives to provide affordable housing.

Reserving 421-a tax benefits for projects with a minimum of six units. This is an increase from the current minimum of three units. Properties with fewer units are already tax advantaged because they are assessed at lower rates than are larger developments.

Abolishing the existing negotiable certificates program. This program allows developers in the geographic exclusion area to receive 421-a benefits in return for purchasing certificates sold by developers of affordable housing outside the exclusion zone.

Eliminating the certificate program would require market-rate developers in the GEA to pay full taxes unless providing affordable housing on-site. The result would increase tax revenue -- to be used for a dedicated affordable housing fund that could be insulated from the appropriations process -- and to encourage development of on-site affordable housing within the GEA.

Reviewing methods and practices for assessing residential projects.

Atlantic Yards housing subsidies: how much?

From today's Times, an article headlined City Plans Middle-Income Project on Queens Waterfront:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced plans yesterday to buy 24 acres of Queens waterfront property for a towering development, which would be the largest middle-income housing complex built in New York City in more than 30 years.
Under the proposal, the city would bring as many 5,000 new rental units to a largely industrial area of Long Island City, where chic restaurants are just beginning to appear amid low-slung factories and three-family homes.
The new apartments, Mr. Bloomberg said, would be for families of four earning between $60,000 and $145,000 a year, who would pay $1,200 to $2,500 a month in rent.

This would be a lot more than the 2250 affordable rental units promised for the Atlantic Yards project, which would have more than 6000 total units. However, about half of those rental units would be available to families earning under $60,000.

Cost per unit

The Times reported that the new project would be more cost-effective at producing affordable housing than preserving Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village:
Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff had said it was a matter of efficient use of public dollars: preserving the historic units would have cost about $107,000 per unit. In contrast, he said yesterday, the units in the new Queens development would be built for about $54,000 each in city funds.
“So we can get two units here for every one there,” he said at the press conference announcing the deal, “plus we get a major increase in the housing stock.”

So, would the affordable units at the Atlantic Yards project cost $54,000 per unit? $107,000? Somewhere in between? Of course the numbers would have to be adjusted because of the range of incomes promised for Atlantic Yards. Still, it's time to look more closely.

The ESDC acknowledges some costs, Times offers some skepticism, story downplayed

More than a day after the Empire State Development Corporation released a sketchy fiscal impact analysis for the Atlantic Yards project, the agency offered some backup calculations--which do allow for nearly $500 million in costs, but still fail to fully account for all costs, including housing subsidies.

The New York Times, in an article headlined Study Shows Data for Claim of Atlantic Yards’ Benefits, offered the agency's explanation:
Because it is hard to determine how many residential tenants of the project would be new to New York, the analysis excludes them as a source of new revenue, as well as the cost for possible increases in municipal services they might require.

Unmentioned by the Times is that the Independent Budget Office and Forest City Ratner's own consultant, Andrew Zimbalist, tried to calculate such costs. The Times did point out that the ESDC had done an about-face after Chairman Charles Gargano had told Channel 13 that the document wouldn't be released.

The Times added:
Perhaps more significantly, the study also excludes public subsidies for the project’s planned 2,250 units of housing priced below market rates. Those subsidies are still under negotiation, but could substantially increase the public cost of the project.

Indeed, if the subsidies for the units amount to $100,000 each--less than the $107,000 figure mentioned by Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff regarding the prservation of middle-income (as opposed to more expensive low-income) affordable housing--the total would be $225 million. So we might estimate a number significantly higher than $225 million, unless it's cheaper to produce the range of affordable housing promised for Atlantic Yards than to preserve middle-income Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The city says it would cost $54,000 for new middle-income rentals in Queens.

Note, however, that this story appears on p. 4 of the Metro Section and the bland headline doesn't portray the skimpiness of the ESDC claim. By contrast, a rumored six to eight percent reduction in the project's size was the newspaper's lead story on Sept. 5.

Brennan unconvinced

Assemblyman Jim Brennan, who had asked for the document as well as other financial disclosure, called it "a skeleton projection of state and local tax revenue." The Times reported:
We don’t how much money the arena’s going to make,” Mr. Brennan said. “We don’t know how much the private rental housing is going to make. We don’t know how much the luxury housing and commercial property will make. Therefore, we do not know whether the arena or the affordable housing are independently economically viable. If they are, or if they only need minimal subsidy, then there is no rationale for the size.”

What's missing

I asked ESDC spokeswoman Jessica Copen why some costs were missing. She responded:
We did not estimate the increase costs in municipal services (sanitation, traffic, transportation, cops, schools, water, etc). These are certainly costs, but we have not used estimates for these in any of our impact analyses.

You need to understand that this is our model and may vary from other economic benefit analyses. We use this model consistently to evaluate all our projects. No one model is perfect or all inclusive.

More ESDC data

Shortly after I got the document on Wednesday, I queried Copen for more details, which were provided at 6 pm Thursday. Therefore my first post called it a fiscal benefit analysis, since the document released didn't acknowledge any costs. Neil deMause, in the Village Voice's Power Plays blog, under the headline Secrets of the Ratner Plan Revealed! (Not), also pointed to the omission of costs.

How did the agency reach a $1.4 billion net revenue calculation? Copen responded by citing both the document released as well as other ESDC documents. (This data was released to the Times yesterday, as well.) Some $845.5 million includes the fiscal benefits of operations and construction activity for New York City and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The $1.1 billion is net revenue to the city and state from the General Project plan. Total: $1.9 billion.

Fiscal cost for the project for NYC + NYS:

NYS sales tax exemption $20.0 million
NYC sales tax exemption $20.0 million
MTA sales tax exemption $ 1.9 million

NYS mortgage recording tax exemption $ 17.8 million
NYC mortgage recording tax exemption $181.4 million

Bond Financing
NYS $138.3 million
NYC $113.5 million

Total NYS $176.1 million
Total NYC $316.7 million

Total: nearly $493 million (a figure cited in July by the Bond Buyer)

Subtract that from $1.9 billion and you get $1.4 billion. However, as noted, that leaves out all sorts of costs for schools, sanitation, and public safety--not to mention other subsidies.

Does this leave out $200 million in direct subsidies from the city and state, as I had earlier suspected? No. Copen explained that "the bond financing of $251.8 million includes the direct cost of $200 million as the bond principal. The rest is interest payments and taxes foregone. All count as fiscal cost to NYS and NYC."

Bonds? "The $200 million will go into the project as a cash contribution--however, the State and City may issue bonds to come up with the funds," Copen added.

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods analysis, for example, cited the non-competitive bid for the railyard rights, "extraordinary infrastructure costs,” public utility relocation, and affordable housing subsidies, among other things.

Spitzer backs Atlantic Yards, calls 8% cutback "appropriate"

Gubernatorial frontrunner Eliot Spitzer yesterday said that he considers the promised 8% reduction in the Atlantic Yards project a "reasonable compromise," thus suggesting he has no idea that the cutback would bring the project back to the square footage originally proposed.

Then again, if he relies on the New York Times, he doesn't know better. The newspaper last month published a front-page scoop--the lead story of the day--about the planned cutback without pointing out that the move would essentially return Atlantic Yards to square one. (That square footage would be over one additional acre.) Follow-up clarifications were buried.

Spitzer made his comments during an interview on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.

ESDC performance

Lehrer raised the issue of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the state agency that manages major projects, including Atlantic Yards..

BL: On development in general, you said Governor Pataki’s’ ESDC has spent too much money on the wrong things and not enough on the right things.

Spitzer said that the city real estate market is booming, and that the redevelopment of Madison Square Garden and Moynihan Station is "conceptually a wonderful project." He continued:
The market itself will move those projects, and should, and we should move them as quickly as we can, so we can continue moving to the marketplace thousands and thousands of units.… where there has been a void has been in the area of affordable housing. Mike Bloomberg has done more than anybody else in recent memory. Ed Koch was quite good in this regard... The state has not done what it could. We have large pieces of property, we have capital at our disposal, we have zoning opportunities, in terms of state-owned property, carrots and sticks. Those are the policy tools we have, if we want to relieve the affordable housing crisis. Long term, the only way to do it is to add units, hundreds of thousands of units.

Note that the affordable housing in the Atlantic Yards project derives from a separate negotiation between the advocacy group ACORN and the developer, Forest City Ratner. In fact, the ESDC overrides city zoning, and the city has not rezoned the area to stimulate affordable housing.

Moynihan Station

Before the Moynihan Station project was officially stalled later in the day, Lehrer brought up the project.

BL: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is holding up the Moynihan Station project. Is he doing the right thing?

ES: I don’t know enough…The problem I think, right now, they’re trying to rush through things that may not be fully baked. The concept of the development is great… The financing of that is still unclear. We’re talking about a major infrastructure investment. Who pays for it? Where does the money come from? It’s a bit unclear as of yet how those pieces get filled in. It should happen, it should happen quickly. I don’t know whether the specific proposal before the PACB is right, wrong, or indifferent. I’ve not been part of the discussion.

The PACB is the Public Authorities Control Board, the three-member body, controlled by Gov. Pataki, Assembly Speaker Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, which must sign off on state-funded projects, including Atlantic Yards. It's interesting that Spitzer considers the financing of the station project "unclear," while he hasn't noticed the ESDC's flimsy economic analysis regarding Atlantic Yards. (Neither has Silver.)

Atlantic Yards

BL: And what about Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn? Are you for it as it is? And do you think the Pataki administration should delay approval until after the election?

ES: I’m for it, and I know this riles a fair number of people. Again, I was not involved in the process, and I don’t say that to hedge. I know there are people who feel very fervently that it was too big, and it was just scaled back, by 8 percent, I believe. Without having been involved in the process, that seems to me to be an appropriate compromise.

Exactly why is Spitzer calling it "appropriate" without knowing much about it?

It is a major development in downtown Brooklyn that will help—first, I think getting the Nets there, the stadium, is good for Brooklyn. It will get many units of affordable housing. That is great. It will get commercial space. All of it suggests that this is a very good project with some exciting architecture. I’m not the esthete, I’m not going to pass judgment about good or bad architecture, but I see the pictures and I say, “Hey, wow, that’s pretty cool looking--it’s different.” It seems like a good project.

Affordable housing, commercial space, and "exciting architecture" must be considered in context. Shouldn't the criticisms from citizens' groups and community boards about the project's environmental impact also generate concern?

BL: You don’t think it’s out of scale for the neighborhood?

ES: Certainly those who are living adjacent to it have been saying that, and they’ve been saying it with great energy, and I respect that view. What happened recently with the 8 percent reduction seemed like a reasonable compromise. So that’s why I think: Let’s move forward.

If planner Ron Shiffman thinks Spitzer might call a timeout on megadevelopment project, the presumptive next governor has a lot more to learn. Heck, even the BrooklynSpeaks, which aims to change the project more than to stop it, has a long way to go in informing Spitzer about the density, the provision of open space, and the lack of democratic process.

ESDC releases fiscal "impact analysis," but it only acknowledges benefits

Can we trust the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) fiscal impact analysis regarding Atlantic Yards? Nope.

For three months, the agency had refused to release the document behind the claim, in the General Project Plan, that the AY project "will generate $1.4 billion in net tax revenues in excess of the public contribution to the Project." In a WNYC TV segment broadcast earlier this month, Chairman Charles Gargano reiterated the refusal.

Today, after queries from the press, Atlantic Yards opponents, and Assemblyman Jim Brennan, the ESDC released the seven-page document.

It's deeply unconvincing. Despite the phrase "public contribution" noted above, there's no reference to public contributions or public costs. In other words, it's a fiscal benefit analysis, not an impact analysis.

[Update: though they're not in the document, some costs are acknowledged by the ESDC.]

The New York City Economic Development Corporation did the same thing, toting up benefits but not costs, while the Independent Budget Office and Andrew Zimbalist, the consultant hired by Forest City Ratner, made some attempt to acknowledge costs, even though they didn't go far enough.

A closer look

Moreover, it's not at all clear how the agency came up with the $1.4 billion figure, since neither the total tax revenues for the city and state under the General Project Plan (above, in graphic) or the Alternative Plan reach that sum.

It's possible that the $1.4 billion is reached by adding the totals ($1.945.5 billion for the General Project Plan) and then subtracting $200 million in city/state contributions and then some other tax breaks. But it's also clear that significant public costs--sanitation, schools, public safety--weren't included.

[Update: the direct subsidies are not included.]

In other words, we need a more honest accounting.

Moreover, the chart shows even more clearly that the Alternative Plan, which would have more than 1 million more square feet of office space (and thus more than 1000 fewer residential units), would create many more jobs and thus more than double the revenues.

So why is Forest City Ratner planning on building more condos and less office space? Probably because the former are more lucrative. But if a real fiscal impact analysis showed that the benefits would be much, much smaller--because of the additional costs yet unaccounted for--wouldn't that point to the Alternative Plan?

To the ESDC's credit, it should be noted that the agency acknowledges a 7% vacancy rate in the office space, just as did the NYCEDC. In the FCR-sponsored study, Zimbalist calculated no vacancy rate, assuming that office space directly translated into jobs--and Forest City Ratner repeated that.

(Note that there's a typo regarding the amount of residential space under the Alternative Plan. It should be at least 1 million square feet less. Also note that the memo is from Program Research Specialist Kathy Kazanas to Senior Vice President Ann Hulka.)

Advisory opinion

Coincidentally, less than an hour after the ESDC released the fiscal impact analysis, I got a copy of an advisory opinion from the state Committee on Open Government. I had forwarded the committee my previous correspondence with the ESDC.

The opinion stated, in part:
It is our position that ESDC is not permitted to deny access to the entire analysis and/or to any statistical documentation which would substantiate the figures presented in Section G of the Project Plan. In this regard, we offer the following comments.

First, irrespective of whether ESDC has "prepared" the record "for release to the public", the record is kept by ESDC in its capacity as a governmental entity. Consequently, we believe that any such documents would fall within the scope of the Freedom of Information Law.

Second, as a general matter, the Freedom of Information Law is based upon a presumption of access. Stated differently, all records of an agency are available, except to the extent that records or portions thereof fall within one or more grounds for denial...

Finally, and with respect to the ESDC's lack of adherence to the statutory time frames by which it is required to respond to requests and appeals, as noted in the September 29, 2006 article, the Freedom of Information Law provides direction concerning the time and manner in which agencies must respond to requests...

The Shiffman solution: a timeout for megadevelopment projects

A recently broadcast CUNY Forum TV program, Megadevelopment in New York City, featured some lively discussion about major projects like Atlantic Yards and Columbia University's expansion in Manhattanville.

Notably, pointing to the advent of a new governor, longtime community planner Ron Shiffman called for a timeout on megaprojects like Atlantic Yards so they don't get snagged in an eminent domain battle but rather emerge from a truly public process.

"New York City is expanding in population," acknowledged Shiffman, who formerly headed the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED) and now teaches at Pratt. "We’re going to need higher density development. But we should do it in a way that we don’t overwhelm the local physical social and economic infrastructure. The only way to do it well is by engaging the people who live in the area, as well as citywide interests."

State control

Council Member Melinda Katz of Queens, who chairs the Land Use Committee, acknowledged that it was "frustrating" that several major projects, including Battery Park City and Ground Zero, are "outside of our scope" because they're managed by the state. "We do hope that the state does it well."

Shiffman, a former member of the City Planning Commission, pointed out that the plan in place for Battery Park City (BPC) was the third plan, as two previous versions were rejected after public discourse.

He cited an enormous development--more than 300 acres--in Hamburg, Germany that has tried to draw on the example of BPC and other projects. "The first thing they did was engage the public in a discussion about the principles of what they want developed," he said. After that, the plan would go to the city council, go through a competition, then back to the council before the site would be subdivided and put up for bid.

Comparison to AY

Shiffman constrasted Hamburg's effort with two projects at home. “What we’re seeing at Atlantic Yards, and at Columbia today, is the public facilitating a private development without any prediscussion as to what would benefit the public as a whole, what social infrastructure, environmental infrastructure, and economic infrastructure we should be turning over to the city," said Shiffman, who has joined the advisory board of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. "It’s basically how to facilitate the goals of the private developer.”

Affordable housing

Host Bob Liff, senior VP of George Arzt Communications and a former journalist, pointed out how the Bloomberg administration now relies on market forces rather than city projects to jump-start affordable housing.

Katz called it "a balancing act." Depending on the financials, the housing could be affordable for people making 125% of the Area Median Income (AMI) or 60% of AMI. "You have to give incentives [to builders]," said Katz, who allowed that "anybody working for minimum wage" should be able to afford to live in the city.

(The minimum wage in New York is $6.75, which means $14,040 annually at 40 hours/week. That's only 20% of AMI.)

Shiffman pointed out that London and Munich have made affordable housing mandatory. If New York did so, it could produce "the subsidies for this city to truly grow in an equitable way."

Katz noted that, as the city does rezonings, "Everything becomes a precedent," so there's pressure to lower the eligible AMI and increase the percentage of affordable housing.

Shiffman praised the council and the mayor for requiring that affordable housing be permanent. "It’s not what we did stupidly when I was younger and thought that 30 years would never come," he said. "All of sudden, those subsidies expire. We can’t do that any longer. I think, in their wisdom, that’s what they did. They still haven’t made it mandatory, it’s just a goal.”

Note that the Atlantic Yards affordable housing would last 30 years.

Eminent domain

The panelists tackled the issue of eminent domain. Negotiation, said Katz is the best way. James Gill, Chairman of the Battery Park City Authority, commented, "Eminent domain seems to be getting a little out of hand. To me, it’s something you go to as a last resort."

Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, Chairman of Community Board 9 in Manhattan, where Columbia plans to expand, was emphatic. "Eminent domain, when you take private property to give it to a private developer, is nothing but thievery," he said. "If the government takes a piece of property to build a hospital or to build a school, that is the proper use of eminent domain."

Katz observed, "There’s going to be more and more court cases. No one wants be the test case."

The Shiffman solution

Shiffman offered a solution. "The next governor… is going to have to govern when all of these projects will come to fruition. He will either be getting the acclaim for the success of it or have to reap the burden of the failure of these projects. The gubernatorial candidates should call for a timeout on these large scale development projects and find a way to facilitate a public process that enables them to go ahead after public review… and really carefully look at how eminent domain is used in the future, so it meets the Kelo requirement, that there be preplanning, not planning after the fact, such as Atlantic Yards, but preplanning, and that there be the dispersal of the property if it’s taken, solely for a public purpose, and not for one developer.”

His reading to the Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo eminent domain decision tracks that of some Atlantic Yards critics and opponents; while the court upheld the use of eminent domain in New London, CT, it did so only because it was preceded by an open planning process. (However, it's likely that an eminent domain lawsuit will be filed, if not resolved, before the next governor takes office.)

Liff played devil's advocate. After all, he said, such projects do produce public benefits via property taxes.

Shiffman didn't buy it. “That has to occur after a public discourse… and to make sure that the beneficiary is not a single developer," he said, suggesting that the process involving developer Forest City Ratner and the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) violates "my reading of Kelo… It has to be used very surgically.”

Time for new boards

There's aother argument for Shiffman's solution. The new governor, almost assuredly Democratic nominee Eliot Spitzer, will want to replace board members appointed by outgoing Republican Gov. George Pataki, including those on the ESDC.

As the New York Observer reports in an article this week headlined Spitzer Readies Long Knives For Pataki’s Appointees:
It is not just Peter Kalikow, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whom Mr. Spitzer will call upon to step down, but the rank-and-file members of numerous boards that set policy, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Empire State Development Corporation and the Thruway Authority.
...Certainly, appointees like Mr. Kalikow won’t be inclined to make this any easier for Mr. Spitzer, who has angered Pataki loyalists with relentless, sometimes personal criticism of the Governor and the people who serve him. At an upstate appearance in September, for instance, the Democrat said that he would replace Charles Gargano, the chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, with someone “who knows where money needs to be spent, and not just hanging out in Manhattan, going to cocktail parties with celebrities.

Robert Moses redux?

A student questioner suggested that the use of eminent domain echoed that Robert Moses, in his mid-century effort to rebuild the city via various authorities, with little oversight. (CUNY Forum is a monthly town meeting that brings prominent New Yorkers together with faculty and students of the Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in Government and Public Affairs.)

Shiffman commented, "I think what’s happening is we’re slipping into a belief that if we have authorities we can overcome local regulatory devices. I think that’s a big, fundamental mistake. The importance of UDC [Urban Development Corporation] and the EDC [Economic Development Corporation] in the case of Battery Park City is to facilitate development once there’s common agreement on a set of goals. To override local goals and local desires and to use the power of eminent domain I think in the long run is going to come back and haunt development in the city."

The MTA & AY

A member of the audience asked why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority sold rights to the Vanderbilt Yard in Brooklyn for "a small fraction of appraised value."

Shiffman responded, "Because there really isn’t a planning process… We’re not only disposing of it at a below-market cost, we’re also not reaping the kind of public benefits we should be reaping"

Given that they are public land, the Vanderbilt Yard and the Sunnyside Yards in Queens demand "a common set of ideals and goals," Shiffman asserted. He added that the Atlantic Yards project, with the currently projected population, would actually lead to a decrease in the amount of open space per capita.

He offered an alternative path to affordable housing rather than the privately negotiated Community Benefits Agreement. "We have to make sure that it isn’t only the advocacy efforts of a group like ACORN that fight for inclusionary housing, but that the affordability be mandated upfront, if it’s public land," he said. "Then, after all of those are taken into consideration, when we can weigh the public benefit, then we can determine what the true price should be. If you break it up into small parcels, and allow it to be bid out…then you get a true public-private partnership, not the kind of development that we have today."

BPC examples

At one point, Gill suggested one solution to the city's shrinking space for development: more landfill adding to Battery Park City. "You could do whatever you wanted with that 50 acres," he said.

He added, "Properties like Battery Park City belong to the public, not simply the people who live there… We go out of way to indicate that people are welcome to use our parks and our gardens… that’s the way it ought to be."

Where to go?

One student asked a basic but poignant question: "Where do all the residents go, after they’re priced out? Does the city have a plan?"

Katz handled it a bit uneasily. "We are trying to create as much affordable housing as we can," she said.

But the question remains: if rents continue rising in working-class districts, and the pool of affordable housing doesn't commensurately, where will people go? How will reform of the city's 421-a tax break play out?

"Brutally weird": Errol Louis on CBGB, AY, and the homeless

In the Daily News, columnist Errol Louis has to write tight, sometimes simplistically so. He just doesn't have much space. In his "Commerce and Community" column in the twice-monthly Our Time Press, he's got more column inches, but he usually breaks up his effort into two or even three items.

Louis devotes his latest Our Time Press column (reproduced below, in full) to Atlantic Yards. That allows him to stretch stylistically before he resolves his chords, as always, into a familiar Atlantic Yards song. But he still doesn't bother with much research.

It's quite a performance, notably his mangling of history and his casual dismissal of the question of subsidies. It sure makes you wonder: this is the guy recently honored by the North Star Fund for "help[ing] us to see alternatives that are rooted in our democratic ideals"?

The problem is... hipsters?

Under the headline Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold, Louis begins by citing a speech given by novelist Jason Flores-Williams to some hipsters about the closing of the punk club CBGB, suggesting that parts almost sound as if they were written to the politically-inexperienced opponents of the Atlantic Yards project who are heading toward final defeat in the coming weeks.

[Update: Louis got another fact wrong, and I didn't notice on the first read. Flores-Williams was speaking at the closing of CBGB's Gallery, the annex next door, rather than the flagship club, which closed more recently.]

The problem, Flores-Williams concluded:
Because when you get past the hipster packaging, we’re just yuppies without the cash.

Trivial abstractions

Then Louis takes the opportunity to offer a secondhand lecture about activism:
And the writer put his finger on the heart of a problem facing many activists, including some of the Atlantic Yards opponents: "I question what economic class the subculture comes from these days…Because the first thing you learn in the lower class is that if you don’t stand up and fight, then you get beat down and shut out.

"That if you choose smug [expletive] over passion and sincerity, you get slapped and pushed around.

(The word Louis didn't feel comfortable reproducing was "bullshit.")

"That if you choose trivial abstractions over serious thought and action, then you get marginalized and railroaded.

"Fantasize and identify more with cool magazines and the elitist art world than you do the evicted and dispossessed, then you yourself will be evicted and dispossessed!"

All too true.

All too true? Is Louis saying that the numerous citizens--and three community boards--who did their civic duty by responding to the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement and General Project Plan were choosing trivial abstractions and smug bullshit?

Here's a trivial abstraction from the not-so-hip Park Slope Civic Council: rather than create a neighborhood, the “high-density enclave” of Atlantic Yards would be “a new urban form… more likely analogous to a spaceship landing in a field.”

Is Louis equating the hipsters of the Lower East Side with the burghers of Brownstone Brooklyn, many of whom are not likely to be evicted but would bear the brunt of traffic and noise and overcrowded public facilities? Did he not do enough reading to recognize that the dispossessed are likely to be the people he claims to champion?

The homeless debate

Louis continues:
It reminded me of the many activists who fought so hard to keep a homeless shelter for women and children from being opened on Dean Street in Prospect Heights in 2002-2003. The very same people who were bent on chasing out the most needy and vulnerable people in our midst – women and children – swiftly re-mobilized the moment the Atlantic Yards Project was announced. But now they themselves were in danger of being told to move along.

Either his memory is lousy or he's willfully misrepresenting the facts. It took me a few moments in the clip file to learn that the issue wasn't antipathy toward the homeless, it was concern about how a city agency could slip such a facility into the community without telling anyone. Borough President Marty Markowitz and State Assemblyman Roger Green--both of them now Atlantic Yards champions--were against it. So was the late City Council Member James Davis.

Davis told WNYC:
The community has the right to be a part of the process. You just don’t come in with a city-financed business into a block where people are city taxpayers and ignore their concerns. It just doesn’t work that way. Everyone has a right – especially when there’s city dollars involved – to be a part of the process.

Sound familiar?

Louis was Davis's friend. He should remember. Louis even covered the issue in the 10/10/02 New York Sun. (He misspelled Prospect Heights Action Coalition spokesperson Patti Hagan's last name as "Haagen.") Coverage of such unregulated "handshake hotels" won WNYC radio reporters several awards.

And guess what? The shady operators of the homeless shelter in Prospect Heights got snagged by the state last November. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced a $790,000 settlement with three former officials of Praxis Housing Initiative. The settlement funds were returned to Praxis. Former Executive Director Gordon Duggins and President G. Sterling Zinsmeyer were found to have used Praxis funds to create and manage separate and competing for-profit homeless shelters.

Back to AY

Louis writes a few paragraphs about other struggles in Central Brooklyn, then observes:
When the Atlantic Yards issue came along, people naturally looked to the same folks who had spent long years volunteering their time and treasure registering voters, organizing meetings, supporting insurgent political candidates and otherwise trying by any and all means to improve our community.
It is that credibility of those genuine grass-roots leaders, most of whom support the $4.2 billion project, that have convinced a majority of residents to support Atlantic Yards — not any studies about shadows or the exact dollar value of tax subsidies going to the developer. Those abstract arguments carry little weight because ordinary people have figured out, the hard way, whom they can trust in Central Brooklyn, and it turns out not to be a handful of recently-arrived "yuppies without the cash" who are now angry about being displaced.

Louis didn't attend the Atlantic Yards public hearing or community forums, so he didn't notice that the people testifying for the project were mainly from groups that stand to gain financially. Then again, he already wrote a column in which he overlooked the ties of project supporters to the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement.

Shadows would put parks in the dark and preclude solar energy. An assessment of subsidies might help us figure out whether Atlantic Yards is a good deal. Louis calls them "abstract arguments." (Could they even be, in the words of Flores-Williams, "trivial abstractions"?)

Note that, despite Louis's effort to connect struggles in Central Brooklyn with support for the Atlantic Yards project, his view is hardly universal. Our Time Press co-founder Bernice Elizabeth Green called the Atlantic Yards design "a crude joke" and warned that gentrification (as we see it, displacement posing as revitalization-diversity-refinement -- an active discussion throughout the neighborhood) will overflow border-street levees and rush the neighborhoods Tsunami-like.

Brutally weird

Louis concludes:
In the end, opponents must somehow find an answer the question posed by Flores-Williams: "What have you done to make anyone give a [expletive] that you lost your apartment to a stockbroker?"

As noted, the large numbers of people expressing concern about the project--including those who are not diehard opponents and those who are--have been doing much more than expressing fear of displacement.

So Louis's choice of a quote was less relevant as some other lines in Flores-Williams's speech, lines Louis didn't cite.

Flores-Williams asks:
What's it going to take for us to engage?

The answer:
I'm talking about getting brutally weird again.

He just didn't know Errol Louis would take him up on his offer.

Playing the game

Actually, the most relevant quote remains that from August Wilson's Radio Golf:
I don't care if somebody else makes some money 'cause of a tax break. I get mine and they get theirs.

Then again, that kind of thinking led Assemblyman Richard Brodsky to say, "I call on Errol for a little more intellectual rigor."

Louis's column

Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold

Parts of a fascinating article in the current issue of Brooklyn Rail, an arts and culture magazine, almost sound as if they were written to the politically-inexperienced opponents of the Atlantic Yards project who are heading toward final defeat in the coming weeks.

At the end of September, novelist Jason Flores-Williams gave a speech to a group of dejected fans at the closing-night party for CBGB’s, a legendary musical mecca on the Bowery that is slated to be shuttered forever at the end of this month. Brooklyn Rail printed the speech.

Flores-Williams opened by saying he had hoped to summon resistance to the gentrification that threatens to ruin so much of New York City culture by rallying the troops against waves of corporations and yuppies. The writer then identified the problem with such an idea.

"There are no troops to rally," he said. "And if there were troops, we’d have to attack ourselves. Because when you get past the hipster packaging, we’re just yuppies without the cash."

Ouch. Flores-Williams wasn’t done handing out doses of cold, hard political reality, excerpted here with the profanities excised:

"You think it matters to a Dominican which version of Whitey moves into the ’hood? Why should anybody [expletive] care that you can’t afford an apartment in the city? What have you done to make anyone give a [expletive] that you lost your apartment to a stockbroker or your favorite cafe got replaced by a 7-11?"

Flores-Williams also made a point about political style that many young would-be activists should take to heart: "Oh the joy of being around a 35-year-old who acts more smug and sullen than my 12-year-old cousin! Oh the joy of hanging out with a 34-year old who talks constantly about cartoons! Oh the wonder of pretending that the world doesn’t exist outside of our little kickball scene! Oh the fabulousness of sarcasm as we step over a homeless man on our way into the book launch party!"

And the writer put his finger on the heart of a problem facing many activists, including some of the Atlantic Yards opponents: "I question what economic class the subculture comes from these days…Because the first thing you learn in the lower class is that if you don’t stand up and fight, then you get beat down and shut out.

"That if you choose smug [expletive] over passion and sincerity, you get slapped and pushed around.

"That if you choose trivial abstractions over serious thought and action, then you get marginalized and railroaded.

"Fantasize and identify more with cool magazines and the elitist art world than you do the evicted and dispossessed, then you yourself will be evicted and dispossessed!"

All too true.

It reminded me of the many activists who fought so hard to keep a homeless shelter for women and children from being opened on Dean Street in Prospect Heights in 2002-2003. The very same people who were bent on chasing out the most needy and vulnerable people in our midst – women and children – swiftly re-mobilized the moment the Atlantic Yards Project was announced. But now they themselves were in danger of being told to move along.

Many of these same opponents of Atlantic Yards sincerely believe they possess wisdom and facts that should compel the rest of us to agree with them and throw roadblocks in the way of the thousands of desperately-needed jobs and subsidized apartments the project could produce.

These opponents are missing the larger point that Central Brooklyn can only be understood by knowing the many complicated, heartbreaking battles the community has been through over the last 20 years. I’m talking about everything from the fight to block a waste incinerator from being built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to battles for affordable housing, safer streets, a rebuilt Franklin Avenue Shuttle, an end to bank redlining, and a long-running attack on a corrupt local political machine.

Anybody who remembers the rickety, graffiti-covered old Franklin Avenue Shuttle – a place where the son of a friend of mine was once robbed by a thug with a shotgun – knows what kind of chaos and danger many of us have lived through and were fortunate to have survived.

When the Atlantic Yards issue came along, people naturally looked to the same folks who had spent long years volunteering their time and treasure registering voters, organizing meetings, supporting insurgent political candidates and otherwise trying by any and all means to improve our community.

It is that credibility of those genuine grass-roots leaders, most of whom support the $4.2 billion project, that have convinced a majority of residents to support Atlantic Yards — not any studies about shadows or the exact dollar value of tax subsidies going to the developer. Those abstract arguments carry little weight because ordinary people have figured out, the hard way, whom they can trust in Central Brooklyn, and it turns out not to be a handful of recently-arrived "yuppies without the cash" who are now angry about being displaced.

A final round of lawsuits, protests and other final obstacles will take place. But in the end, opponents must somehow find an answer the question posed by Flores-Williams: "What have you done to make anyone give a [expletive] that you lost your apartment to a stockbroker?"

Belated Boyland filings show she outraised Montgomery, used same firm as Ratner

So much for the "$100 mystery campaign." Overdue campaign finance filings from 18th Senatorial District candidate Tracy Boyland, who unsuccessfully challenged incumbent (and Atlantic Yards opponent) Velmanette Montgomery, show that the former City Council member, despite a candidacy launched two months before the September primary, indeed raised more than the $100 she reported at election time.

In less than three months, Boyland outraised Montgomery, $92,177 to $91,427, relying significantly on the building industry. (Montgomery's total covers two years, and she outspent Boyland overall; see below.)

Was Boyland, in fact, the "Ratner candidate," as some charged? Not exactly, but there were some signficant intersections. As predicted by a source in the Crain's Insider, Boyland indeed used the same consulting firm--Knickerbocker SKD--that FCR uses for its deceptive Atlantic Yards mailers. (As noted, Boyland told the Brooklyn Papers that she's friends with FCR's Bruce Bender, a former top City Council aide.)

Boyland spent $37,000 on Knickerbocker SKD's services. The candidate, who made virtually no publicly scheduled campaign appearances and avoided questions from reporters and newspaper editorial boards, inundated voters with mailings and also had campaign workers put up numerous posters and hand out literature outside polling places.

Ratner ties?

Only a few contributors might be linked to Atlantic Yards or Forest City Ratner. Boyland received $2500 from Richard Lipsky, who serves as a Ratner lobbyist but also has independent interests as head of the Neighborhood Retail Alliance. She also got $500 from Dolly Williams, who runs a construction firm, owns a piece of the New Jersey Nets, and serves as the Brooklyn representative on the City Planning Commission. (Williams recused herself from the commission's recent Atlantic Yards discussion.)

[Update: Copstat Security, which gave Boyland $3100, is contracted (see p. 49 of PDF) by Forest City Ratner to work in the Atlantic Yards footprint. Copstat has numerous other clients, as well.]

Also note that a push-poll touting the Atlantic Yards project backed Boyland.

Montgomery outspent Boyland

Note that Montgomery raised that $91,427 sum over two years. Given that she already had $57,331.50 in her campaign coffers at the beginning of 2005, she wound up outspending Boyland overall: $124,871 over two years. Montgomery got significant support from a variety of unions, as well as from other Democratic candidates.

A real campaign?

After the election, the New York Times, in the Empire Zone blog, described Boyland's run as a "late, not-quite-serious, and never-quite-official challenge" and mused, "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."

Boyland, as I and other pointed out, ran her own kind of "real campaign." It's just that she didn't file her 11-day pre-primary report, due September 1, until after September 19, and her 10-day post-primary report, due September 22, until after October 5.

Contributions to Boyland

Boyland's filing shows several contributions from those associated with the construction and building maintenance industry, as well as other large contributions from entities in Brooklyn--and some murky companies. Several of those contributions may have connections to the Boyland political dynasty in the eastern sections of Brooklyn.

Among them were $3100 contributions from ABCO Maintenance, Academic Stone Setters, Colony Pest Management, Copstat Security, and H&L Electric.

Boyland got $6000 from The Carey Group, lobbyists that represent the real estate industry, among others. Boyland got a $5500 contribution from JAJ Consulting on September 25--nearly two weeks after her loss. (Anybody know more about JAJ?) She got $5000 from the Local 4 Action Fund of the IATSE, which represents theatrical stage employees, supplying the crews for television, live theater, concerts, and more, within Brooklyn and Queens. She also got $5000 from MMG Fat Free and One Stop Promotions.

Other contributions include $3500 from the Mason Tenders PAC; $3000 from G&L Consulting and also Metro Valuation Group; $2500 from Seasons Industrial Contracting, from Century Coverage Corporation, and from Harrison, Dillon, Bond & Williams (which shares the same address with Century Coverage); $2500 from Plumbers Local Union #1; $2000 from Mayer, Girgio; $1500 from developer John Catsimatidis; $1000 from R&J Brick Masonry, Lovett Silverman Construction Consultants, and from Brookdale Hospital executive David Rosen; and $500 from Danois Architects.

Blight and the Courier-Life's "visual walk"

It's not online yet, but in this week's Courier-Life chain, Stephen Witt offers a rather, uh, incomplete account of the blight fight regarding Atlantic Yards. [Update 10/17/06: here's the article.] He summarizes it as such:
DDDB and opponent bloggers and journalists contend the area is not blighted, citing published reports of how parts of Prospect Heights are being revitalized.
Meanwhile, a visual walk around the rail yard portion of the footprint reveals homeless people still in the area as well as overgrown weeds, broken glass and litter.

But what if the Courier-Life allowed its readers to actually read more about those issues, linking to some of the writings briefly referenced? (Try here, and here and here. Or a more detailed summary.)

Would readers be less impressed by the conclusions of the "visual walk" if they were reminded that litter and weeds could be cleaned up by the MTA? Or if they learned that Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), which spent a lot more time examining the proposed site footprint than did Witt, comes to different conclusions? Or forced to ponder whether the presence of homeless people should be a trigger for a blight designation? (Don't some homeless people sleep on the steps of churches?)

Homeless redux

The state's Blight Study, oddly enough, contains an 8/26/05 article by Witt regarding the presence of homeless people near the railyards. DDDB attorney Jeff Baker had responded:
For largely inexplicable reasons the Blight Study includes an August 26, 2005 article from the Brooklyn Heights [Courier] Article. Ostensibly it is included to show that some homeless people had recently moved into an area on Block 1119, Lot 7. We suspect the real purpose of including the article is to denigrate DDDB as it serves no particular purpose otherwise. However, the article does demonstrate that the presence of the homeless in that area is a recent event – only five months prior to the article and that the property is owned by the MTA who has failed to maintain and police the property. What it also demonstrates is that contrary to the allegations in the Blight Study, the area is not a high-crime area, because the individual interviewed in the article stated that he felt safer living on that lot than he does in the homeless shelter and that the crime level is not particularly high.

Authority in the blogosphere

It appears that many newspapers are not yet ready to follow the advice from Doc Searls, veteran journalist and marketing/Internet maven, on how to remain relevant. Among his suggestions:
Fourth, start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You're not the only game in town anymore, and haven't been for some time. Instead you're the biggest fish in your pond's ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit.

Fifth, start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What's Going On and What Matters Around Here. The blogosphere is thick with obsessives who write (often with more authority than anybody inside the paper) on topics like water quality, politics, road improvement, historical preservation, performing artisty and a zillion other topics. These people, these writers, are potentially huge resources for you. They are not competitors. The whole "bloggers vs. journalism" thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There's a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it's barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.

And take people beyond one person's brief "visual walk."

Park Slope Civic Council opposes AY as currently proposed

The Board of Trustees of the Park Slope Civic Council (PSCC) has agreed, nearly unanimously, that it "cannot support" Atlantic Yards project as currently proposed. In doing so, it cited an undemocratic public process, a poorly conducted environmental review, the inappropriate use of eminent domain, and the affect on the area's quality of life.

Still, the compromise statement adopted Oct. 5 allowed that PSCC could support the project if changes were made, as per the BrooklynSpeaks campaign that PSCC has already endorsed, including a "substantial reduction of the project and the creation of truly public open space," improvements in transportation and transit, a better affordable housing plan, and a "truly public process."

Close look raises concerns

The vote, 19-1, with one abstention, came after the PSCC Atlantic Yards Committee discussed its extensive and rigorous submission in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), citing numerous flaws in the document and adverse environmental impacts on the neighborhood and beyond. (I'll discuss that document, just posted, another time.)

"The closer you look at it, the more concerns you're likely to have," said PSCC President Lydia Denworth. Referring to the statement before the group, she said, "We tried to acknowledge the good things," such as jobs and affordable housing, that might come with the project.

There was some debate about the wording; while the initial draft of the statement said the project "would" provide jobs, housing, and growth, the board, acknowledging that the benefits were not guaranteed, agreed to modify that to "could."

After discussion whether to add specific details to the statement, the board agreed to add a link to PSCC's critique of the DEIS.

Compromise document

Denworth acknowledged that "this is something of a compromise document, even within the committee." Trustee Kyle Johnson observed that Community Board 6 had taken a much tougher position. "We could hardly be more polite," he said.

Others acknowledged that criticism hadn't come easy. "This is difficult for me. It's a big step," said Louise Finney, who has served as Borough President Marty Markowitz's campaign treasurer. "Marty is a friend. But we represent Park Slope."

"It's crazy not to look at the East River Bridges, the BQE and Grand Army Plaza," added Finney, chair of the Community Board 6 Transportation Committee. "I want to see the arena and housing and development, but the process is flawed. I think we've really been left no choice."

In the DDDB camp?

The one overt project supporter in the room, Bernard Graham, a Civil Court judge, took an all-or-nothing view. "I'm sensing this project would never be acceptable," he said, adding that a poll and the City Planning Commission support the project.

"We are entering the the camp of people who are opposing the project," he said, adding that "this is practically a Develop Don't Destroy [Brooklyn] analysis." (Actually, there's a large gap between BrooklynSpeaks and DDDB.)

"Don't think by shrinking this to a fraction, you're going to get an arena and affordable housing," Graham claimed. "You're going to have two-family housing built." (Graham has strong ties to the Brooklyn political mainstream, with the endorsement of State Sen. Carl Andrews and help from the Rev. Al Sharpton and also from Markowitz.)

Finney countered, "I don't feel I'm in the camp of those who are against it. I don't think we have many options."

Added Bob Braun, "It's not a black and white issue. The community and infrastructure can only support so much."

Different tactics

Denworth pointed out that she has "disagreed very publicly with [DDDB spokesman] Dan Goldstein and DDDB. There is a difference."

"Marty [Markowitz] said to me a year ago, 'Nothing will be good enough [for critics],'" Denworth recounted. She said PSCC would take its message to state Assemblymembers like Jim Brennan, who had earlier visited the meeting and discussed the AY endgame.

"The goal is to talk about what they realistically might do," Denworth said. "I think Develop Don't Destroy is going to pursue a legal recourse. I do believe this is the beginning of a different conversation about not trying to stop it but make it better." (DDDB is also lobbying.)

Eminent domain?

The PSCC statement goes beyond the BrooklynSpeaks document to criticize "inappropriate use of eminent domain." I asked Denworth to elaborate, and she responded, "The use of eminent domain troubles many of us... We question it on several levels from the use by a private developer to how they arrived at the determination of blight. We would like to see the question resolved in the courts before any construction begins."

Criticism, not opposition

In the latest PSCC newsletter, Denworth writes:
Speaking for myself, I resent the implication that anyone who questions the environmental impact of this project is racist or, on the other side, that anyone who likes the idea of an arena must be in the pocket of Forest City Ratner. It is possible (and I would even say reasonable) to want more affordable housing and still think that Atlantic Yards—as currently proposed—is too big, and that its effect on the surrounding neighborhoods will not be positive. It is also possible (and again I would say reasonable) to appreciate some of what the project could bring—affordable housing, jobs, an arena, an end to the gaping barrier of the railyards—and still think that Atlantic Yards—as currently proposed—is too big, that its effect on the surrounding neighborhoods will not be positive.

Yes, I’m repeating myself, on purpose, for emphasis. I hope that the developer and the elected officials who have been such vocal supporters of this project will put aside some of their anger at anyone who questions the project and see that we are simply voicing the real concerns of our community. Those concerns should be treated with respect. They are not unreasonable concerns—in fact, they are eminently reasonable. Their project would be far more successful if they were to heed some of our concerns and change the project accordingly.

PSCC Statement on Atlantic Yards

I. The Park Slope Civic Council cannot support the “Atlantic Yards” project as currently proposed. We take this action reluctantly because development of the Vanderbilt Railyards and new construction around Flatbush, Atlantic and Fourth Avenues represents a great opportunity for Brooklyn for the following reasons:

a. It could allow for growth and economic development.
b. It could provide badly needed affordable housing.
c. It could create jobs and help to alleviate high unemployment rates in the adjacent community.
d. It could represent an opportunity to strengthen infrastructure.
e. It could integrate neighborhoods currently divided by the railyards.
f. It could help attract a major-league professional sports franchise to Brooklyn for the first time in 50 years.

II. However, while the Park Slope Civic Council supports development over the Railyards and at Atlantic/Flatbush/Fourth Avenues, we do not support the “Atlantic Yards” project as currently proposed for the following reasons:

a. The process by which this project has been put forward has lacked both community participation and oversight by city agencies, both of which would have been addressed by ULURP, a more thorough and democratic process.
b. The environmental review process has not permitted adequate community participation. The public hearings on the project scope and the Draft Environmental Impact Statement were poorly conducted. The scope of the DEIS is insufficient. The proposed project would create too many unmitigable impacts.
c. The project will not improve quality of life. It will make it worse.
d. The project makes inappropriate use of eminent domain.

III. The Park Slope Civic Council believes that significant development can work over the Vanderbilt Railyards and should go forth, but only under the following conditions. The state, city and developer need to redesign the project under the principles promoted by BrooklynSpeaks.net, of which the Park Slope Civic Council is a co-sponsor:

a. Respect and integrate the surrounding neighborhoods. This includes, but is not limited to, a substantial reduction of the project and the creation of truly public open space.
b. A long-term transportation plan that really works. This includes implementing residential parking permits and traffic calming measures and developing a robust Brooklyn mass transit improvement plan.
c. Affordable housing that addresses community needs. A reasonable portion of that housing must be included in the first phase of the project.
d. A truly public process. That process must include consideration and integration of all major development projects and studies currently underway such as the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming and Transportation Blueprint and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Rezoning. It must also include reviews of the project so that the community can evaluate progress and commitments from the developer, city and state during construction.

Footprints or fragments, gallery show evokes a piece of Prospect Heights

So a couple of hundred people--Brooklynites, artists, friends of artists, all of the above--wandered down to the Grand Space gallery last night for the opening of Footprints: Portrait of a Brooklyn Neighborhood. (The gallery is at 778 Bergen at Grand, just east of Washington Ave.)

Brooklyn artists were asked to explore the neighborhood that would be the site of the proposed Atlantic Yards project, and the results were varied: portrait and documentary photography, abstract and representational painting, creative and crude symbols. Yes, there was a portrait of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn spokesman Daniel Goldstein, but equally striking were photographs of residents of rent-stabilized buildings, like the Santiago family (right), in a portrait by Nura Qureshi.

Qureshi comments, "These images document residents of 810/812 Pacific Street who are directly threatened by the “Atlantic Yards” redevelopment project. By narrowing my focus to this corner of the Footprint I hoped to obtain an intimate view of these families, some of whom have been here for generations, and to create their lasting portraits."

(ACORN's Bertha Lewis would say, well, don't disregard all the people who might be helped by the affordable units planned. But an artistic portrayal of the project would also have to convey that the distinction between Phase 1 and Phase 2; the latter would contain most of the affordable units and is not guaranteed.)

Unfortunately, some of the documentation available on the web site had not made it to the gallery walls for the opening, so anyone visiting would get a mostly impressionistic experience. But Youme Landowne doesn't need to explain much about those "People's Democratic Republic of Brooklyn" passports. Landowne states, "With this work I hope you will smile as you (re)claim your relationship to home and community."

"You read in the news the political and legal aspects" of the project, co-organizer Daniel Sagarin told me. "Our project is about the human element." Indeed, it's hard to fit Sagarin's portrait of longtime resident Joe Pastore with, say, the Errol Louis invective like "antidevelopment yuppies."

The blocks are transitional, but they are fragments of the Brooklyn fabric. Michael Reilly produces a harmonious vision--low-rise buildings to scale, a bit of a reimaging rather than a documentary portrait. The artists, though, can give voice. “A lot of the residents inside the footprint, when they moved or property was bought they had to sign contract that they wouldn’t talk about situation,” co-organizer Belle Benfield told the Courier-Life chain. “To me, that kind of inspired me. There’s been a void of dialogue.”

Sagarin said in that article, "“It seems clear to me after taking a really close look at some of the work of our artists, that the neighborhood does need development. It’s just sad to me that in order to get a Gehry building so much has to be given up.” Jennifer McCharren's photo of the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard, with Pacific Street buildings behind it, shows an active railyard, which, however a barrier between neighborhoods, has been deemed necessary until this project, with no effort to request proposals to redevelop it.

Katherine Gressell's fragmented view of Flatbush Avenue from behind a car windshield is subtle but powerful--on a number of levels. It's a common experience to which anyone can relate, but it also evokes the renderings by project architect Frank Gehry and the critical graphic analysis from the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods.

Aisha Cousins, who describes herself as a "closet comedienne," doesn't get points for subtlety in portraying the project footprint as a Pac-Man-like devourer of modest houses that don't exactly look like the neighborhood. (I didn't see this piece at the gallery, but she has a larger work with similar imagery.) However, her repurposing of the footprint reminds us of the arbitrariness of the outline. Why exactly is there a missing "tooth" between Pacific and Dean streets and Sixth and Carlton avenues? Well, partly because it would have been very expensive to buy out the owners of condos in the converted Newswalk building. And why doesn't the tooth take up the whole block? Well, because 100 feet is needed for parking and staging.

And what of the Underberg building, preserved in memory by Melissa Cacioppo? Was it a dangerous, decaying structure that deserved its fate to be razed, even though the state denied an inspection by an independent engineer? Was it worth preserving and rebuilding? Would more democratically-arrived at redevelopment plans involve the Underberg? And how long will its replacement, now a patch of dirt, remain as such?

Planning Chair Burden claims Jacobsian mantle, discards it for AY

Amanda Burden, chair of the City Planning Commission, knows the lessons of Jane Jacobs (below, left): the primacy of the street, the value of blocks and complexity, the importance of public participation. She said so last night, at a panel discussion at the CUNY Graduate School assessing the legacies of Jacobs and her oft-antagonist Robert Moses.

Then, just a few minutes after proudly claiming the Jacobsian mantle, Burden discarded it for reflexive defense of the Atlantic Yards plan her boss, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, has enthusiastically endorsed.

It was a moment of mental whiplash in a wide-ranging discussion that included issues of infrastructure, mixed-income housing, and even the massive challenges facing New Orleans, but turned back to Atlantic Yards as much as anything else.

(The New York Observer covered some of the revisionism regarding Jacobs and Moses. The Architectural League has the podcast from the event, which was titled, "Jacobs vs. Moses: How Stands the Debate Today?")

Honoring Jacobs

After discussing the legacies of Jacobs and Moses, Burden declared that the former’s influence is more deeply felt, as Moses “wanted little to do with the people who had lived in the city that he created. Their voices were dispensable. Their homes were dispensable. And that is why he could not conceive of the importance of neighborhoods.”
(Moses photo by Arnold Newman)

“Jacobs, on the other hand, knew that if you neglect neighborhoods, you do so at the city’s peril,” she said,

“The goal of city planners… is no longer the broad brush, the bold strokes, the big plan. Although, make no mistake about it, we have an enormous need to build thousands of units of affordable housing. We must create… jobs for a rapidly expanding population. We need to reclaim and revitalize our waterfront. And we must lay the foundations to support the growth that is to come and which we welcome. But it is just not acceptable or wise or even possible to undertake these challenges without espousing Jacobs’ principles of city diversity, of the rich details of urban life, and to build in a way that nourishes complexity.”

“That is not an easy goal,” Burden allowed, saying “We are trying to diversify the content our toolbox.”

“One legacy that Jacobs left that has a daily influence on city politics, and that is the role as a fearless civic activist. She gave community activists the confidence that they can make a difference and prevail.”

Consensus planning?

Moses’s centralized planning “is a thing of the past,” she said. “Planning today is noisy, combative, iterative, and reliant on community involvement. Any initiative that does not build consensus, that is not shaped by the… public review process, will be an inferior plan and, deservedly, will be voted down by the City Council and I.” (The Atlantic Yards plan, above, is outside the city's land use review process.)

Major challenges remain, citing pending efforts like the Second Avenue subway and others already in process like the rezoning of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront.

“Big cities need big projects,” she said, saying they are a part of growth. “But today’s big projects must have a human scale. They must be designed, from idea to construction, to fit into the city. Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still influenced by her… It is to the great credit of the mayor that we are still building and rezoning, once again, like Moses, on an unprecedented scale, but with Jane Jacobs firmly in mind, invigorated by the belief that the process matters, and that great things can be built, with a focus on the details, on the street, for the people who live in this great city.””
(Burden photo from NY Times)

Megaprojects and power

Richard Kahan, former president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation (now the Empire State Development Corporation) and chairman of the Battery Park City Authority, observed that the issue was the balance of power between the public sector, the private sector, and the civic sector, which he said included groups like the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association, and environmental groups.

Kahan challenged Burden’s assumptions. “We’re trying to have a diversity of uses, but we’re still talking about megaprojects that are hardly neighborhood scale.” He cited the World Trade Center rebuilding, Atlantic Yards, and the West Side Yards.

Kahan called them “top-down projects” but said “I don’t think they’re necessarily bad. (He did allow that he didn’t like the way the World Trade Center plan had been influenced by Larry Silverstein, who’d held a lease only briefly.)

Given the reliance on the private sector today, he said, “It’s very unclear to me where the counterbalance is, what it is, who they are.” He said he’d been thinking about Atlantic Yards, “where there’s been a noisy but certainly not very broad representative opposition.” He then cited an email he’d just received from the Municipal Art Society (MAS), “which had taken a pass on some of the important planning decisions in the past decade. But they’re back. They’re back with a coalition. They’re back with a web site. And I think it changes the nature of the conversation on Atlantic Yards dramatically.”

(Kahan obviously wasn't aware of the distinction between the BrooklynSpeaks coalition organized by the MAS and the broader criticisms raised by the longer-standing Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods and Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.)

Moses in Brooklyn

Later, urban historian Samuel Zipp, who teaches at the University of California at Irvine but used to live in Fort Greene, observed, “To the extent that we’ve all become Jacobeans… this hasn’t stopped big plans from going forward, big plans that do threaten to destroy neighborhoods…. Here is a plan that wants to knock down buildings, a kind of version of clearance. That indicates to us… that there are ways that we have not left Moses behind.”

After the talk centered around the proposals to buy out Stuyvesant Town, and preserve some measure of affordable housing, Kahan brought up Atlantic Yards. “Whatever you think of the design, the density and the open space planning,” he said, obviously referencing the MAS email, “it has addressed more aggressively than anything I’ve seen, I think, the question of economically integrated housing.”

(Actually, if he’d looked more closely at the BrooklynSpeaks site produced by MAS, not to mention harsher critics of the AY project, he’d see criticism of the affordable housing.)

Lander's criticism

“I so wish I could embrace it,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, praising the AY plan for affordable housing and union jobs. “But at some level, if you’ve read Jane Jacobs and live nearby, it’s hard to put aside those questions of traffic and density and scale and open space and urban design, which range from mediocre to awful.”

He brought up “process problems,” saying he didn’t oppose eminent domain “for the public good,” but “if you’re taking people’s homes,” it should be the job of an elected body like City Council. “The developer’s allowed to take a path in which that judgment—that the public good represented by the project is worth all the pain—is in the hands of a set of appointed people that the folks that live nearby didn’t have any opportunity to vote for.”

State review

Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York, followed up, pointing out that AY and other state-run projects were “taken out of the normal routine” for review.

Burden responded, “They are owned by the state, and they are government by a process determined by the state… Let’s face it, there is an open rail cut at the heart of Brooklyn. And that’s not good. It’s also a transportation hub, and it can handle a big project.”

(Actually, the deputy director of the Department of City Planning’s Brooklyn office said in March that he had no recollection that the city had been looking at making use of the land.)

Lander commented, “It would be the densest census tract in the U.S.” (Denser than the densest tract, but not a tract itself.) He said he wanted to see a traffic plan that would convince him that there wouldn’t be endless gridlock.

What about the arena?

“What if they did it without the arena?” Zipp asked.

Burden responded, “Brooklyn needs an arena, not just for basketball.”

“Why not put it somewhere else?” Zipp continued.

Burden responded, “It really will be catalytic… It is audacious, and it is aggressive, but you can’t leave an open railyard at the heart of Brooklyn.”

(Some people in the audience clapped. They probably weren't members of the New York Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association, which also has its doubts about Atlantic Yards. New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger also criticized the project.)

Later, Michael Fishman, who teaches urban planning at Columbia, asked if there had been a plan to put the arena on the Atlantic Center mall site. “If, from a planning perspective, the mall is what’s wrong with the site, maybe the arena fits there more appropriately?” Zipp recalled that there was one. (The suggestion was dismissed by the developer early on.)

State vs. city

Lander took off on that to say that there were a lot of ways to make a project work. “The problem is that the review process allows the developer to state the project’s goals…. The other projects have less of the benefits, fewer housing, and fewer jobs. They also have fewer of the adverse impacts. You might say, ‘I’d like to see that equation, maybe I’d like the tradeoff,’” but that’s not available under the state’s review process.

Burden again defended the absence of city review: “Because this is a site that’s owned by the state and it operates under guidelines set by the state.”

A questioner from the audience (me) piped up: “How much of the site is owned by the state?”

Burden responded: “A predominant amount.”

Predominant, perhaps, but not even a majority. The railyards—the state land—would be less than 40 percent of the 22-acre site. And unlike with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Hudson Yards in Manhattan, the city hasn't pushed for a rezoning/bidding process.

Later, the discussion turned to infrastructure. “Transportation projects are very expensive,” Burden said, adding that “leveraging that Atlantic Yards rezoning" could lead to $2 billion.” It was a slip of the tongue, since she meant the Hudson Yards rezoning and its effect on the 7 train line. In Brooklyn, there has been no rezoning.

DEIS hearing transcript, speaker list available, nuggets to be mined

For those who weren't at the Aug. 23 Draft Environmental Impact Statement hearing, the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods has posted the sign-up sheets, the speaker list, and the transcript from the Empire State Development Corporation.

It's all helpful, though it can hardly convey the atmosphere of the event.

There are lots of interesting nuggets; for example, M'balia Rubie, the teacher who said (p. 141 of PDF) she couldn't prioritize traffic and shadows over jobs and housing, signed in (p. 7 of PDF) as a member of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Association, a signatory to the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement led by the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, but she wasn't announced as such nor did she make it known.

As for the Rev. Daughtry, when he got the 20-second warning (p. 133 of PDF) you can see that he continued for quite a bit. I clocked his speech at 5:45, albeit with interruptions. After the hearing, the ESDC changed its policy at the two follow-up community forums and cut the mike for all speakers at 3 minutes.

21 years of Prospect Heights (blight?), via NYT Real Estate section

The Empire State Development Corporation says the proposed Atlantic Yards footprint is blighted:
Given the pattern of successful economic development in ATURA [Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area] north of Atlantic Avenue and general neglect on the project site, south of Atlantic Avenue, it is highly unlikely that the blighted conditions currently present will be removed without public action.

What sayeth the New York Times? Well, the Times hasn't opined on the issue, though a report in July looked at the issue with some balance. (Photo from NY Times)

For a more longitudinal sense of the change in conditions, consider four "If You're Thinking of Living In" articles from the Times's Sunday Real Estate section. The articles, from 1985, 1990, 1999, and 2006, portray a neighborhood on a fairly steady rise.

1985 coverage

(No headline beyond "If You're Thinking of Living In Prospect Heights.")

Money quote: By the reckoning of a resident jogger, Prospect Heights is just a mile into Brooklyn from the Manhattan Bridge. Yet only recently has it become a popular refuge from the high cost of living in Manhattan.
Prospect Heights has grown even more attractive as prices continue to rise in neighboring Park Slope, which began its brownstone boom late in the 1960's.

Resonant quote: The former P.S. 9, at the corner of Sterling Place and Vanderbilt Avenue, was closed in 1976 and is being maintained and upgraded by the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Corporation, using public and private money. The corporation hopes to convert ''Old 9,'' as it is called, into artists' housing and a center for social-service programs.

Note: that was not to be.

(Current photo of P.S. 9, at right, from here.)

1990 coverage

(No headline beyond "If You're Thinking of Living In Prospect Heights.")

Money quote: It is graced with richly crafted turn-of-the-century brownstones and elegant 1920's apartment buildings. Its population is a rich mixture of all races and income groups. And it is now recovering from the turbulent 70's, when many buildings were either abandoned by landlords or burned out. This is leading to tension between developers and community groups.

Resonant quote: One of the most controversial buildings is the old Public School 9, known locally as ''old nine.'' The 1895 structure was renovated last year by the Forest City-Ratner Companies, who turned it into 22 apartments, selling for $92,000 for a small one-bedroom to $504,000 for a 2,300-square-foot, three-bedroom. Although the building needed repairs when the developers took it over, it had been a city-owned community center controlled by the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Corporation.

Ms. Bowers sees the sale as a betrayal. ''We have no place to have those programs we were providing for our children and senior citizens,'' she says.

Borough President Howard Golden acknowledges that some displacement has taken place but maintains that his administration has kept this to a minimum. He said redevelopment was inevitable because the building of several large office complexes nearby is creating new jobs.

Note: it's hardly clear that the development of MetroTech, which mainly served to accommodate government agencies and New York employers that might have moved to New Jersey, created jobs that led to displacement. Rather, displacement was more likely the result of general gentrification. Among those housed at P.S. 9 were those Forest City Ratner bought out to create MetroTech.

1999 coverage

Headline: A Diverse Neighborhood Spruces Up in a Turnaround

Money quote: Two decades after an economic downturn left Prospect Heights spotted with shuttered and abandoned buildings, the neighborhood is undergoing a revival. Newcomers are renovating long-neglected brownstones and Vanderbilt Avenue, a main commercial streets, new tenants trickle in as existing merchants spruce up their facades.

Resonant quote: In another transaction, investors including Manhattan-based Shaya B. Developers Inc. bought the former Daily News printing plant on an industrial strip of Pacific Street between Carlton Avenue and Sixth Avenue and are planning a commercial development, possibly with a theater complex, and including apartments above if the proper zoning can be obtained.

Speaking of the industrial buildings in the border area on Dean and Pacific Streets Mr. McLaren said: ''It's the last large concentrated amount of square footage in brownstone Brooklyn. These are no handyman specials. You need to have sophistication in navigating city bureaucracy to make them work.''

Note: The sophisticated Boymelgreen later sold other properties, including the Ward Bakery, to the even more sophisticated Forest City Ratner at a hefty profit.

(Photo from here)

2005 coverage

Headline: A Neighborhood Comes Into Its Own

Money quote from a 12/18/05 article: But in the last few years, Prospect Heights has begun to hold its own, enticing newcomers with attractive lofts, newly constructed luxury condominiums and brownstones that are often larger and more elegant than those in the rest of Brooklyn.

Resonant quote: The old Public School 9 on Sterling Place is now a stunning apartment building converted by the Forest City Ratner Companies, and the current version of the school on Underhill Avenue is the only primary school in the neighborhood.

Note: The controversy over P.S. 9 seems to have been forgotten--or simply cut because of space constraints.

(Photo from NY Times.)

DDDB report pummels ESDC blight study

So, is the proposed Atlantic Yards site blighted? The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) says so, in a Blight Study that serves as a prelude to the exercise of eminent domain. However, many people have disputed both the colloquial and official designation, including project supporter Assemblyman Roger Green last year and Community Board 2 in its recent response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS).

Now Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) ups the ante with a 191-page submission to the ESDC, a prelude, most likely, to some of the contentions in the community group's inevitable challenge to the state's plan to use eminent domain. (It was written mainly by two members of the steering committee, Daniel Goldstein and Patti Hagan.)

ESDC chair Charles Gargano doesn't have doubts. He asserted in an interview with Ch. 13 broadcast last Friday that "there's no question in anybody's mind that drives around there or walks around there, that a lot of the site is [blighted]." He was challenged several times by show host Rafael Pi Roman, who pointed out that the neighborhood was on the upswing, with valuable residential units around the project footprint.

Even before the more elaborate recent responses, I pointed out the flaws in the crime analysis that's part of the Blight Study, as well as the arbitrary nature of choosing just 100 feet east of Sixth Avenue (right) as blighted. (DDDB includes three of my articles in its response.)

Public action needed?

The fundamental argument in the ESDC's Blight Study is that only government action can change the 22-acre proposed project site:
Given the pattern of successful economic development in ATURA [Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area] north of Atlantic Avenue and general neglect on the project site, south of Atlantic Avenue, it is highly unlikely that the blighted conditions currently present will be removed without public action.

DDDB responds that, well, others have offered to build only over the railyard, which occupies some 38% of the proposed site:
Extell Development Company’s bid to the MTA to develop the Vanderbilt Rail Yards–$50 million higher than Forest City Ratner’s–is the most tangible example that development at this location, over the rail yards, can and should happen and is economically feasible. And that such development doesn’t require phony “blight” or eminent domain. The Extell Plan and higher bid is real life evidence that there is no “blight” as this location and quite to the contrary, is valuable real estate worth a true bidding process.

ATURA refers to the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area. In the map at right, anything in red (including a grayish red, but not the gray alone) is within ATURA. The blue-and-red striped areas between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street are 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.

DDDB points out that no city agency had prepared a blight study for ATURA and that the city, which amended ATURA ten times, never extended the boundary below the railyard and never claimed that the railyard had been a “blighting influence.”

Indeed, as I reported last March, Winston Von Engel, Deputy Director of the Department of City Planning's Brooklyn office, was cordially grilled about Atlantic Yards and ATURA by Kate Suisman, aide to City Council Member Letitia James, who opposes the project.

"Just to be clear, this was a project that was initiated by the developer--is that right?" asked Suisman, whose boss is the leading public official opposed to Forest City Ratner's project.

"That's our understanding," Von Engel replied.

"Had the city been looking at making use of the land?" Suisman pressed on politely.

"Not that I can recall," Von Engel said.

In other words, there was no RFP or bidding process until after Forest City Ratner had its project championed by city leaders.

Whose redevelopment?

The Blight Study blames the blight on a common characteristic of many city neighborhoods:
However, an equally important reason for the continued blight is that the project site has historically been held under the ownership of multiple parties, and this diversity of ownership has hindered site assemblage that is necessary for redevelopment.

It all depends on how you define redevelopment. Note the distinction made by a defender of prudent eminent domain, Marc B. Mihaly of the Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center, who cites
“redevelopment” or “public-private redevelopment,” reflecting the intent of government to correct the failure of the market alone to bring an area back to life after a substantial period of economic decline. The language of the phrase “economic development” implies the dissents’ conclusion, namely a process operating simply to create new forms of economic wealth. This essay employs the more accurate terms.

First, given the current economy, a large site is hardly necessary for development. As DDDB shows, and as I've pointed out, there are new developments (right) in the block carved out of the project, between Sixth and Carlton avenues and Pacific and Dean streets.

However, a larger project would be necessary for development (redevelopment?) over the railyards, which requires a platform and (likely) the relocation of the cleaning and other functions needed by the Long Island Rail Road. Extell made a bid for that site, which is hardly piecemeal development, DDDB points out.

However, development in the site footprint has been frozen since the project was announced in December 2003, and several residential buildings and commercial spaces are now vacant. Business owners made or planned significant investments in their buildings, anticipating growth and expansion, shortly before the project announcement, according to DDDB (compilation photo of current streetscape at right).

For example, BP had a lease to build a gas station just prior to the Atlantic Yards announcement, but sold it to FCR. In December 2003, an auto repair shop owner signed a 10-year lease on 181 Flatbush Ave., and spent $250,000 to upgrade the auto repair garage. In 2003 Geb Hetep completed a $300,000 upgrade of its holistic health facility on Flatbush, since abandoned. The union hall and tristate headquarters for Local Union No.8 of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, recently went through a $300,000 renovation.

Just before FCR purchased 465 Dean, in May 2004, a mental health not-for-profit had been preparing to open offices in the building. At 487 Dean, a ground floor speech therapy clinic was a tenant for more than ten years. It moved out in 2004. Though two ophthalmologists wanted to open an eye clinic in the same space, they were scared away by FCR’s plans, according to DDDB.

And Freddy's Bar and Backroom, at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Dean, has been honored nationwide. Esquire magazine lists it as one of the best bars in America. DDDB says, "It is the kind of bar and meeting place one would not find in a truly blighted neighborhood."

Valuable properties

DDDB points out:
Brooklyn and its real estate market of 2006 is practically a different planet than Brooklyn and its real estate market of 1968 when ATURA was created. Today, every parcel in the proposed site is extremely valuable and all around the proposed site development and construction is going on at a rapid pace. ATURA no longer applies to today’s conditions as it did apply in 1968.
In the five years prior to the unveiling of AY in December 2003 three luxury condos opened for occupancy in these non-ATURA blocks south of the rail yards. These condos (Newswalk Building – 535 Dean Street, Atlantic Arts Building – 636 Pacific Street, Spalding Building – 24 Sixth Avenue) include residential units worth well over $1 million. Forest City Ratner itself paid $850 per square foot and $650 per square foot in the Atlantic Arts and Spalding condominiums.

The Atlantic Arts building is at right, above. At left is a building now occupied rent-free by Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), a signatory to the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement and prime booster of the project. DDDB points out:
In August 2005, FCR moved its “Atlantic Yards” partner into this building belying the crime statistics and blight findings in the Blight Study, as we would assume FCR would not want to put BUILD and its members at risk.

DDDB also cites a New York Times Real Estate section article on the desirability of Prospect Heights, as well as the news, in April 2005, that developer Shaya Boymelgreen, who planned to turn the former Ward Bakery (photo near bottom) into a hotel, sold two properties for $44 million to Forest City Ratner.

Blight or gentrification?

DDDB quotes ACORN executive director Bertha Lewis, who told New York magazine in August, "If we can stop one iota of gentrification, we’re gonna do it!"

DDDB comments:
Indeed it is confusing to hear one of FCR’s closest allies in support of the project suggest that the project is so necessary to stem the tide of gentrification, while the project sponsor and lead agency put out long documents describing how unsanitary, unstable, unlivable and “blighted” the proposed project site its. We’d like for the FEIS to explain this stark contradiction. We tend to agree with Ms. Lewis, the trend in Central Brooklyn is not “blight” but rather “gentrification” and increased property values and rents. Good, bad or otherwise, “blight” and “gentrification” simply do not happen simultaneously in the same location.

Let's tease that out. Lewis's indubitable point is that market-rate development, which has been occuring with greater frequency around the project site, constitutes gentrification. While city officials in other areas have negotiated to include affordable housing as part of upzonings--which allow developers to build bigger--ACORN and Forest City Ratner agreed on what I call a privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus. (The lot at right, part of the footprint, has been on sale for $2.25 million.)

The city and state could have decided to take a stand against gentrification without having to resort to blight--the city could have gotten the area rezoned to allow bigger buildings but require affordable housing, and taken bids from developers. That likely would have prevented a single developer from acquiring the site for redevelopment.

So, in this case, the blight claim points to site assemblage for one developer--which has an arena project--more than anything else.

Whose sidewalks?

DDDB points out a fundamental deception in the blight description--most of the obvious deterioriation, such as cracked sidewalks overgrown with weeds, is the responsibility of government agencies:
Section B of the Blight Study presents an overview of the project area to establish the boundaries of the allegedly blighted area. Included in that section are a series of photographs that purport to be representative of the area. The locations of the photographs are shown in Figure 4 with the direction of the photo. The narrative, photos and Figure 4 are intentionally deceiving. The narrative claims that the photos illustrate the blighted conditions on Blocks 1127, 1128 and 1129. However only 3 photos, (C, H and I) are in the vicinity of those blocks. Each of those photos is actually of the northern sidewalk on Pacific Street. While those photos do show overgrown weeds, trash and deteriorated fences and sidewalks – all of those areas are within the existing ATURA boundary and most, if not all are the responsibility of NYCDOT and MTA.

Closer look

I walked around Sunday to snap the picture at right, on the north side of Pacific Street just west of Sixth Avenue. DDDB tries to quantify the damage:
The large majority of “serious sidewalk degradation” denoted in the Blight Study map below is along the rail yards or the City-owned lot on Block 1118. Of the approximately 4,750 feet of sidewalk claimed by the Blight Study to have “serious degradation”, all of it can be attributed to lack of enforcement by the City. But looking closer, the vast majority of degraded sidewalk is the direct responsibility of the City of New York or the MTA/LIRR. 3,389 feet are the direct responsibility of the DOT and MTA/LIRR for which they are negligent. Additionally, sidewalks along the 6th Avenue and Carlton Avenue bridges are not only not degraded, they literally do not have a single crack; yet the Blight Study designates them as “blighted.”


Because most of the degraded sidewalk is the responsibility of the government, or the developer, and some 70% of the blocks south of ATURA do not have “degraded sidewalks,” the railyards don't constitute a “blighting” influence, DDDB argues.

Who's responsible?

A vacant lot, according to the state, represents a blight characteristic. DDDB points out that 15 of 123 total tax lots were vacant as of December 2003, and now there are 90 vacant tax lots. That's not as extreme as it sounds, however. The actual increase is from 4 vacant tax lots to 19--our common understanding of empty lots, while the increase in building tax lots--condos now emptied--went from 10 to 70.

DDDB observes:
The conclusion is that Forest City Ratner has created the key characteristic of vacancy, with the support of the State; the entire Blight Study is severely suspect because of this and should be dismissed as such.

There's also one city-owned vacant tax lot used by the MTA for storing garbage--and also hazardous materials. That lot, at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, would be replaced by a plaza leading to the Urban Room and the Miss Brooklyn skyscraper.

It's clearly an eyesore, as the photos I took Sunday show. But it also seems to be actively used. Is a blight designation required to change its use, or could the government agencies that own/use it put it up for bid?

More challenges

DDDB's report takes on several other blight characteristics. There are only a few cases of structural damage, DDDB says, "beyond the 11 tax lots demolished [461-463 Dean Street, right] by FCR and approved by the ESDC under the cloud of a court challenge, and the lack of any independent structural engineer’s examination of the interior of the buildings in question."

There are few serious building code violations, DDDB says. Moreover, "There is no basis for determining “blight” on the basis of “underutilization” as a “blight” characteristic." We'll see what the court says.

As DDDB points out, "Building below zoned Floor Area Ratio (FAR) is not “blight,” is not illegal and is not unusual." After all, as I wrote, Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Center mall could be considered blighted. Then again, the court's often give deference to executive agencies' findings of blight.

Lost gems?

DDDB makes a case that Pacific Street should be preserved as a relic of industrial history:
The Allied Storage Warehouse with its unique facade is positioned at one end of an industrial zone that was critical, early in the twentieth century, to the growth of the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and to a larger extent, Brooklyn and all of New York City. Within three contiguous blocks, there existed the most beautiful of all storage facilities in New York, the largest company manufacturing sporting goods [Spalding building, right, residential units now owned by FCR], the printing facility of the nation’s largest circulation newspaper and the most modern baking facility in the country [Ward Bakery, below], which turned out more than 1,000,000 loaves of bread per week. In was along Pacific Street in Prospect Heights that prosperity in Brooklyn was created and beautifully reflected.

DDDB argues that interior pictures of the Ward Bakery (exterior pictured) are misleading:
The pictures included (p. C-185 – 189) are meant to say: “Nothing can be done with this ruin!” What an INSULT! Brownstone Brooklyn has been revitalized chiefly because of Brooklynites restoring such buildings, one after another, fully understanding that their quality cannot be achieved today. The acknowledged result of all this careful preservation is a treasure trove of historic neighborhoods. The prices of buildings in this area are now in the millions because everyone knows such thoroughly conceived structures, the order of the day 120 years ago, will never be built again. They are irreplaceable.

Gargano says there's "no question" about blight

As part of the New York Voices show on Atlantic Yards broadcast Friday on Ch. 13, titled The Battle for Brooklyn, host Rafael Pi Roman queried Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) Chairman Charles Gargano about the issue of blight.

CG: We have declared this a blighted area, and there's no question in anybody's mind that drives around there or walks around there, that a lot of the site is.

RPR: How can you declare a site blighted that has apartments of over $750,000?

CG: Well, number one, I heard the same story when we were using eminent domain on 42nd Street. There was drug sales, prostitution, all kinds of illicit activity going on. And people criticized us then, said, "Why, this is America. This is a democracy. Why are you condeming those properties?" You have to look at what's for the public benefit. Look at 42nd Street today. Now it is true, not the entire street was blighted, but a major portion of it.

The parallel is that there were, indeed, thriving businesses in some of the 42nd Street buildings, just as there are thriving residential buildings (and some businesses) in and around the Atlantic Yards footprint.

There are no parallel drug sales, prostitution, and illicit activity around the Atlantic Yards footprint, despite what the ESDC's Blight Study claims.

Railyard blight?

Gargano continued:
Look, I know this site for 50 years. I grew up in that area. This site is dormant. It's on a railyard.

The railyard is actively used. The way to change the use of a railyard, as the city has determined regarding the Hudson Yards in Manhattan, is to have it rezoned and put up for bid.

On the way up?

RP: Part of it is, but we did a report about two years ago, we saw some beautiful apartments, it's on the way up, it was on the way up. Wouldn't you say?

CG: Let me tell you. The order of magnitude of this project, the improvements that this project will bring about for the people of Brooklyn, in that particular neighborhood, in terms of shops, in terms of the apartments that I referred to, eight acres of open space, parks, beautiful amenities for this whole area. This is not just coming in, putting up buildings and going home. This is a question of building an entire community that will benefit all the people from that area.

Indeed, the Atlantic Yards project would represent an enormous change. The improvements, however, are a matter of debate. The open space would be too little for the expected population and it would not be a park but privately managed.

And "building an entire community," according to numerous comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, would overburden the neighborhoods and the infrastructure.

New Yorker critic: Gehry's "talents hardly seem suited" to AY challenge

New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger weighs in this week on two Frank Gehry projects in New York, in an article headlined GEHRY-RIGGED: Two New York projects show how to use Frank Gehry and how not to.

Goldberger likes Gehry's InterActive Corp. building in Chelsea, but he finds the mass and superblocks of Atlantic Yards inappropriate for the site, and he points out what critics charge and even some supporters acknowledge: the arena is the hook for the larger development.

Goldberger writes:
It’s a shame that this quality hasn’t been more in evidence in Gehry’s other New York venture, the Atlantic Yards development, in Brooklyn. This cluster of skyscrapers extending twenty-two acres around a new basketball arena for the Nets is the biggest project he has ever undertaken, and it has been the subject of bitter controversy for months. (Last month, following recommendations from the City Planning Commission, the plans were scaled back by eight per cent, but the project remains enormous.)

Opponents complain that the sixteen residential towers will create a wall between the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. So far, they have cast the developer, Bruce Ratner, as the villain, suggesting that he is cynically using Gehry’s name to add prestige to an ill-conceived scheme. In an open letter to Gehry published in Slate, the novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote, “I’ve been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an unfortunate alliance, with such potentially disastrous results.”

Yet Gehry’s design is a large part of the problem. He told me that he accepted the job in part because he has never taken on this kind of urban challenge, but his talents hardly seem suited to it. Gehry’s great success has come from architectural jewels that sparkle against the background of the rest of a city—the Bilbao Guggenheim; the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles. In Brooklyn, the task is to create a coherent cityscape that relates comfortably to its surroundings. Gehry tried to do this by grouping some understated towers around a few very elaborate ones. (The six-hundred-and-twenty-foot-high main tower, foolishly named Miss Brooklyn, is full of self-conscious Gehryisms.) Rather than giving a sense of foreground and background, the juxtaposition of plain and fancy just looks like a few Gehrys bought for full price next to several bought at discount.

Gehry has told me that he sees the project as a kind of homage to the old Manhattan sky line, but the romance of that vista is a happy accident of diverse buildings in a tight web of streets. Atlantic Yards, by contrast, involves eliminating streets, and has the look more of a single structure spanning multiple blocks than of a townscape that has grown organically. Gehry perhaps conceived of the whole thing as one huge object that could play off against the city—a gigantic version of one of his jewels. The problem with trying to do Bilbao on this scale is that it ceases to be an eccentric counterpoint to the context. It is the context.

Buried within the construction is the building that was the catalyst for the entire project—an arena for the Nets, the basketball team purchased by Ratner and which he intends to move from New Jersey to Brooklyn. The arena is the best part of Gehry’s plan. Its glass-enclosed spaces bring vibrancy to the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, and it will contain lots of public areas, not just for spectators but for anyone passing through. Such exclamation points in a cityscape are something Gehry knows how to create better than anyone. That’s what Diller asked him to do, and it worked.

Ratner’s exclamation point, however, unlike Diller’s, can’t pay for itself, and Ratner is using it as a loss leader to justify an enormous real-estate venture. Although the site cries out for development, neither Ratner nor Gehry has a convincing idea of how this should be done. Ratner seems to have been less interested in using Gehry’s architectural talent to best advantage than in trying to leverage his celebrity to make an unpopular development more palatable. Gehry, for his part, clearly loved the idea of taking on the biggest project in New York. But even the most famous architect in the world has limits.

Urban Room

I'm not sure what Goldberger meant when he said that the arena would "contain lots of public areas." That's apparently a reference to the Urban Room, which would contain ticket windows, a team store, entrances to the hotel, office space, and transit hub, as well as restaurants, cafes, and gathering spaces.

Anne Schwartz in Gotham Gazette summarized the debate:
It is also not clear whether the 10,000-square-foot "Urban Room" in the arena will function as intended. "It is being marketed as the Grand Central for Brooklyn, but it's configured like it's going to be a lobby to the arena," said Goldman. "Will it function as a public space given that?"

"We do hope people use the Urban Room to access activities at the arena," said DePlasco of Forest City Ratner. "But beyond that, we hope that it is a comfortable place to just sit, rest, and watch other people. There will be programming there as well, including music, art displays and other activities."

An arena in Coney? DEIS ignores the most recent studies

There was something fishy about Borough President Marty Markowitz's rapid disavowal, in 2003, of his longstanding support for an arena in Coney Island. After all, as Brian Hatch and I
have pointed out, there are strong arguments--transportation capacity, neighborhood revitalization--for an arena in Coney.

And, as I noted, there's something fishy about the quick dismissal of Coney in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) issued by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

However, as a study (Report on Three Decades of Locational Analysis for a Brooklyn Arena) from urban planner Simon Bertrang on behalf of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn shows, the ESDC's failure is much worse. The agency, wile relying on a 1974 study that seems to point to Prospect Heights as the only remaining arena site, omits any mention of later studies, in 1984 and 1994, both of which preferred sites in Coney Island.

And, as Bertrang shows in the graphical renderings reproduced here, the arena could fit on available sites.

Executive summary

Bertrang's executive summary deserves quotation in full:
The siting criteria and analysis for the proposed basketball arena in Prospect Heights are summarily dealt with in three pages in Chapter 1 of the DEIS. The major source of information is a preliminary study three decades out of date. The DEIS does not include a comprehensive comparison of potential arena sites in Brooklyn and does not engage in a convincing site survey and feasibility analysis for any site. The location of a sports arena for Brooklyn has been studied repeatedly over the last few decades - and yet the DEIS fails to identify those studies and ignores their results, choosing to focus on the Prospect Heights location to the detriment of a sound economic development and planning process for Brooklyn.

After reading the 1974 study and the successive studies on arena locations in 1984 and 1994, we looked at the current status of the sites identified. Based on the siting criteria proposed in the DEIS and the 1984 locational analysis, we find that the preferred location for an arena remains Coney Island. ESDC must examine Coney Island and other potential Brooklyn arena locations as viable alternatives to a Prospect Heights arena. ESDC and the people of Brooklyn need a clear comparative analysis of appropriate alternatives in order to develop an authoritative conclusion as to the best location for a Brooklyn arena.

There is NO evidence or argument made in the DEIS as to why an arena should be located at FCRC/ESDC’s chosen Prospect Heights location or why a proposed Brooklyn arena must be developed in conjunction with a major residential development. ESDC has made a gross error by ignoring the results of the 1984 and 1994 studies that found Coney Island to be the best site in the borough for a multi-use arena.

It's a historical gap even worse than the failure in the DEIS to acknowledge the role of historic preservation in reviving the neighborhoods around the proposed Atlantic Yards site.

Looking back

The 1974 report by the City of New York, titled Preliminary Study of Feasibility: Brooklyn Sports Complex, does not establish siting criteria, Bertrang notes. (The DEIS does dismiss the other potential sites as unavailable, but as I noted, the construction of KeySpan park--and thus the loss of the preferred Coney Island site--didn't deter Markowitz and others from focusing on a site next door, shown at right, with Abe Stark rink in the background.)

The ESDC can't say it didn't know about the 1984 report, titled The Brooklyn Sports Study: Phase 1 Locational Analysis; the agency's predecessor commissioned it. Bertrang writes:
Ten years later, the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development picked up where the City left off. It conducts a similar survey of sites, this time eleven instead of ten. Four of these sites, Coney Island, Broadway Junction, Atlantic Terminal and Brooklyn Army Terminal, are the same ones considered by the City in 1974. The report was prepared by Pratt Institute for the New York State Urban Development Corporation, the same entity undertaking the current study and proposal (In or about 1995, UDC changed its operating name to ESDC).

While the earlier study touched on a demographic analysis, an analysis of transportation networks and the existing conditions of the sites, the 1984 report concluded that two Coney Island sites were best, based on a set of site selection criteria.

Some of those site selection criteria have also been used in the DEIS--size, transit/highway access, and proximity to existing infrastructure--but others have not, such as reinforcing the economic vitality of the surrounding community, should be located mostly on vacant/available land, and should be in a community supportive of the proposed arena.

In 1994, the Brooklyn Sports Foundation and the Temporary State Commission on Brooklyn Recreational Facilities commissioned the Brooklyn Sportsplex Development Plan to evaluate a project on the site of the former Steeplechase Park.

(This was not a full study, rather a closer look at one of the two preferred sites from a decade earlier.)

The Coney sites

While Bertrang shows that an arena could fit on the "Gateway site" owned by KeySpan Energy, within walking distance of the Coney Island terminus, that site isn't so attractive today. Not only would it require a pedestrian bridge over Coney Island Creek, the arena would be isolated--a mini-Meadowlands in Brooklyn--rather than part of the urban fabric.

More feasible would be the "Waterfront site," which retains space for an arena, either in the parking lot of Abe Stark Rink just west of KeySpan Park, or using a footprint slightly to the west, assuming the acquisition of adjacent privately-owned and underutilized parcels. (Also, the rink, which opened in 1970, could be razed.)

Siting criteria

The chart here deserves some footnotes. While Bertrang notes that the Prospect Heights location lacks land availability, that's because several property owners are unwilling to sell to Forest City Ratner, and some will sue to block eminent domain. He adds:
In addition, the proposed Prospect Heights site requires the demapping of two city streets and the relocation of the Vanderbilt Avenue railyard at considerable public expense.

The question of community support isn't simple. There is significant opposition to the project in Prospect Heights. While Coney Island leaders, including City Council Member Dominic Recchia, have expressed support for an arena in Coney, Recchia has also endorsed the Atlantic Yards plan.

Key difference

Still, there's a glaring difference between the mass transit capacity at Coney Island--where trains can be positioned at the end of the line to quickly load crowds--and that at the busy but already crowded hub at Atlantic Terminal. Bertrang writes:
The Coney Island subway lines have low existing passenger loads and substantial reserve capacities. In addition, the Stillwell Avenue station is a newly renovated jewel – with wide ramps and platforms designed to handle a surge in crowds and efficient vertical movement from platform to street. The Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street station on the other hand has no reserve capacity – the platforms and trains are overcrowded, the platforms narrow and the maze of underground corridors connecting the various platforms confusing. If mass transit’s capacity to absorb new riders, especially the kind of surge in riders associated with the beginning or end of an NBA game in New York City, is taken into account, the Coney Island sites are far superior.

What about proximity to a Central Business District? Bertrang calls that criterion the "least convincing" one in the DEIS, noting that a mixed-use development need not include offices but could, in Coney, be part of an entertainment district. (Note that an arena next to KeySpan Park, above, would be even closer to the subway than at the Gateway site.)

Indeed, as I wrote, Forest City Ratner earlier said the project couldn't be built in Coney Island because of the need to build office space near a downtown transit hub. However, the developer initially projected about 2 million square feet of office space and 10,000 office jobs; now the office space has been cut by more than two-thirds, and the job projection by three-quarters.

Bertrang writes:
The City’s new vision for Coney Island is a year round entertainment district with exactly the kind of “strong mix of urban land uses” that ESDC prefers for an arena location.

Moreover, an arena in Coney Island would help revitalize the area--indeed, the neighborhood still awaits major investment and refurbishing or replacement of vast public housing complexes.

Bertrang suggests redevelopment in Prospect Heights "with appropriately scaled development" would be appropriate and welcomed. He adds:
However, nothing in the economic development goals of the Prospect Heights neighborhood necessitates an arena - in fact, an arena may be a drag on the project – creating an infrastructure headache, requiring the expensive relocation of the rail yards, and necessitating the use of eminent domain and the delays associated with its application.

Unmentioned here, or in the DEIS, is one of the main reasons for the arena: to leverage state and city funds, and political support, for a much larger development project. As the Slatin Report last month quoted a pro-development city official:
The arena, the official complained, is a "Trojan Horse" that the developer used to sneak an overly dense project into Brooklyn.

More criteria

As previously noted, an analysis by Michael Sorkin compared the proposed West Side Stadium site to other sites, and Coney Island, among some other sites, was judged superior. While a stadium is not an arena, many of the arguments apply, and the Prospect Heights site falls short.

Most derided part of the DEIS? The shut-in solution to noise

Let's say you live on Dean Street or Carlton Avenue near the proposed Atlantic Yards project. The construction of a ridge of towers nearby would be quite noisy, and so would the future traffic, as the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) issued by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) acknowledges.

The solution: batten down the hatches. And if you don't have double-glazed windows and air conditioning, Forest City Ratner will buy them for you.

The only problem: you have to stay inside.

The failure in that proposed mitigation is obvious not just to opponents and critics of Atlantic Yards, but even to Borough President Marty Markowitz, the project's biggest booster. Perhaps the Final Environmental Impact Statement will propose a better solution.

What the DEIS says

From Chapter 15 of the DEIS, covering Noise:
At most locations in the area where significant noise impacts are predicted to occur, most residences already have either double-glazed windows or storm windows, and many have some form of alternative ventilation (air conditioning). At all of the locations where significant noise impacts are predicted to occur the project sponsors would make these types of noise mitigation measures (i.e., storm windows and alternative ventilation) available, at no cost for purchase and installation, to owners of residences to the extent such measures are already not in place. These measures would mitigate project impacts for residential uses (see Chapter 19, "Mitigation"). At locations where owners elect not to take advantage of these mitigation measures, the proposed project would have unmitigated significant adverse impacts.

Marty disagrees

Borough President Marty Markowitz:
The FEIS [Final EIS] should acknowledge that the measure intended to mitigate noise and air quality problems during construction – providing double-paned windows and air conditioners for residents and community facilities – is not a solution for these problems, only a way to mask them while residents are inside their homes. The FEIS should recommend further mitigation methods so that these impacts are lessened in outdoor spaces.

An outraged neighbor

Boerum Hill resident Anders Thomsen:
The fact is that the DEIS does not provide any viable reroute of traffic. Instead the mitigations include installation of storm windows and a/c units for affected residents. First of all, this is making mockery of the affected residents. Are they no longer to have a conversation on their stoop outside their own house? The NYC noise code clearly states that we, the residents, have the right to enjoyment of our property (whether rented or owned) free of intrusive and excessive noise.

By offering storm window and A/C units to affected residents, the DEIS indirectly admits that the stoop facing the streets will be encroached upon by excessive and permanent noise pollution as a result of the project. Building the project will prevent people from sitting on their stoops and the face of Brooklyn will permanently be altered. That is unacceptable.

An expert's observation

Lehman College professor emerita Arline Bronzaft, in comments for the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, said:
The DEIS downplays the significant impacts of Project-related noise in residences, with the statement that “most residences already have double-glazed windows or storm windows, and may have some form of alternative ventilation.” If air conditioning and double glazed windows are not in place, consultants note that the Developer would make these available to owners at no cost for purchase and installation.

They do not offer to compensate residents for the cost of running air conditioning for the sole purpose of noise mitigation. Given that accepting the proffered mitigation will obligate residents to an ongoing and perhaps unexpected expense, it is very possible some will not accept the material required by the mitigation.

In this event the DEIS draft consultants state that the proposed project would have “unmitigated significant adverse impacts.” This conclusion does not go far enough. It is improper to characterize an obligatory expense being transferred to local residents as mitigation. Therefore, the DEIS has not proposed any significant mitigation and the condition of construction related and ongoing Project related noise remains an unmitigated negative impact for an unknown percentage of the population.

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. People also stroll the streets near their homes.

A residence extends beyond the apartment or the house; it includes the surrounding neighborhood areas as well. 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.

Planning group says AY "raises serious questions"

Calling the Atlantic Yards project "overwhelming," the New York Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association (NY Metro), which includes more than 1200 planners, offered a highly critical take on the project, if not fully opposing it. The testimony echoed some of the criticisms made by organizations like the Municipal Art Society and the Regional Plan Association, through the latter, a group with strong backing from business, was overall far more encouraging about the project.

Testimony submitted by NY Metro president Ethel Sheffer stated:
As planners, we welcome grand visions and ambitious designs to bring higher purpose to underutilized portions of the city and help shape the future of New York. However, this proposal raises serious questions of good planning and design, public process, appropriate scale and density, respect for surrounding neighborhood character, and adequate transportation and infrastructure -- all of which deserve careful study and modification.
(Emphasis added)

In the testimony, NY Metro pointed out that the state review process hardly matches that required by the city:
The DEIS comment process is not as rigorous, or as inclusive, or as extensive as a full mandated public review process and the absence of the full process, together with the very short DEIS comment period, is a serious planning and procedural omission.

Density and scale

While the group acknowledged that the project location near a major transit hub is an argument for higher density, there are limits:
This is an enormous project and though some of the buildings and the sports arena are located at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn’s bustling downtown, the majority of the new buildings are adjacent to streets and neighborhoods that are low-rise and architecturally very different in character, activity and use than the proposed new skyscrapers.
New buildings on Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues, on Deane and Pacific Streets, on Sixth Avenue and elsewhere, will rise hundreds of feet higher than the tallest buildings on these streets in Prospect Heights and surrounding neighborhoods. The scale of the 16 buildings taken together will have an overwhelming, permanent visual and physical impact on these vital and distinguished neighborhoods.

The group urged a more extensive discussion and analysis of the impacts of such a large number of residents on the infrastructure, schools, and on the surrounding neighborhoods.

Public streets?

While the group saluted Frank Gehry as a great architect with an innovative concept, it stated, good planning should precede architecture.

Citing concerns already expressed by the Municipal Art Society and others, NY Metro criticized the demapping of public streets and the likely private nature of open space, expressed "serious reservations" about the proposed superblocks and internal pedestrian walkways, and called for a significant revision of the street designs and connections, as well as an enhancement of the open spaces proposed and a harder analysis of the impacts of this massive development on surrounding green spaces and parks.

Eminent domain

NY Metro, which has offered measured support for the use of eminent domain in the aftermath of the Kelo decision, again offered a balanced position:
Although we recognize and support the use of eminent domain as a vital and important tool in large-scale project developments which usually require the assemblage of large contiguous sites, we are equally concerned that this project permits the acquisition of property by Forest City Ratner for new private projects.
(Emphasis added)

The group also referenced the issue of adaptive reuse:
Since this is a long-term project we recommend that every effort be made to allow existing uses to remain through a modification of the scale and scope of the project.

Comments on transit

NY Metro also issued several comments regarding transportation and traffic. For example, given the promise in the DEIS that "police and traffic control officers would be deployed at key intersections in the vicinity of the arena," the group wondered if this was a financial commitment from Forest City Ratner or not.

The group recommended that the additional demand for on-street parking spaces during peak hours should be met by increased on-street parking fees that are returned to the local area.

Because traffic was analyzed at individual intersections, This does not account for vehicular queuing to upstream intersections, NY Metro said, recommending a more sophisticated network analysis.

Community benefits

While the group did not comment on the adequacy or substance of the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), the first in New York City, it noted that such CBAs are likely to become more frequent. Even now some elected officials are saying that the promises regarding housing and jobs should be enshrined in a governmental document, not a side contract.

NY Metro commented:
[W]e urge that these arrangements become part of a major dialogue among city government officials, communities, developers and civic and professional groups, before they become a de facto component of negotiations in major development projects. These arrangements raise questions about the distinctions among amenities, mitigations, exactions, contractual obligations, enforcement, legal standing, and existing regulations, and should be widely discussed and debated.

Housing questions

The planning group also raised questions about the affordable housing:
More than 2,200 apartments of the projected 6,860 will have rents targeted to middle-, moderate-, and low-income families. We commend this goal, although we have grave concerns about the realistic enforcement and financing of this objective.

City officials have said that the number of apartments would be guaranteed in the financing documents. However, there's no assurance that housing subsidies planned for Phase 2 can guarantee the timing or construction of that phase, and the housing subsidies haven't been made public yet.

Will ESDC accept part of CBN's DEIS response that missed deadline?

With only 66 days to respond to an enormous Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) that took many months to prepare, the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN)--along with other community groups and local elected officials--had asked the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to extend the deadline for two months in the public interest. After all, smaller projects like Yankee Stadium had gotten four months, albeit from a city, not state agency.

The ESDC only nudged the deadline back a week, so CBN and the consultants it hired, thanks to city and state grants, were staying up late as Sept. 29 approached. The submission CBN produced on deadline date was hefty, but at 219 pages, actually a little smaller than anticipated.

That's because 45 pages were missing, six chapters: cultural and historic resources, urban design and visual resources, shadows, noise, neighborhood character, and construction impacts.

After the missing chapters were pointed out--I told CBN I had noticed that some chapters shown in draft form were absent from the final submission--the group quickly assembled a supplementary submission on Oct. 2 and delivered it to the ESDC, citing a "production error." (The supplement is now incorporated into the main CBN filing.)

"We regret the oversight and appreciate the opportunity to provide these materials and complete our Response as intended," CBN said.

Up in the air

So, will the ESDC accept this? Spokeswoman Jessica Copen told me, "It's under review by our legal counsel."

Attorney Jeffrey Baker, who represents Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and has been involved in environmental review procedures before several agencies, has already argued that the ESDC should have extended the deadline date.

Baker told me that state and local agencies often grant waivers when the error is clerical as opposed to meeting the deadline altogether. "In this case it is clear that the comment period is too short (legally and practically) and people were scrambling to put together their materials," he said pointing out that CBN has received city funds to help in its review.

CBN also received state funds--for a total of $230,000--giving it the capacity to offer more professional heft than any other group in its response to the DEIS. Thus CBN has pointed out that government officials intended that the group's response represent the public interest, and should be considered in full.

Copen said she couldn't predict when ESDC would issue its determination on the issue.

ESDC's Gargano: "We cannot stop progress" (or share fiscal projections)

Charles Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), long ago abandoned any pretense of objectively evaluating the Atlantic Yards plan, telling the New York Observer in December that "“There is no need to scale down the project,” even though it was months before the environmental review would be launched.

Ten months later, he remains disturbingly misleading regarding basic questions about the project, confidently declaring that eminent domain will not be used and waving off questions about process and transparency. And if the p.r. process demands it, he can easily reverse himself, telling his interviewer, "We have been working with the developers to lower the size of the project."

Those comments come in an interview Gargano did for the New York Voices documentary, Ratner's Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan, scheduled to run tonight on Ch. 13 at 10:30 pm. Others to be interviewed include City Council Member Letitia James, a project opponent, and Daniel Goldstein and Shabnam Merchant, the spokesman for and a fellow leader of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, the coalition opposing the project.

A source sent me a transcript of those comments. (I can't be sure if they're exact, but I'll tape it tonight and make any corrections if necessary.)

Overwhelming scale

Gargano was first asked about the project's scale.

Q: If the Atlantic Yards Project is approved, as it now stands, it would create 16 very tall buildings, one of which will be over 600 feet tall... Some critics say that this will dwarf the neighborhood. What do you say?

Gargano: Well I think, you know, New York City in general is a city of skyscrapers. We've had plenty in Manhattan. We have had some in other boroughs. We had the Williamsburg Savings Bank that I remember from when I was a little boy growing up in Park Slope Brooklyn. I don't think that was obscene in any way. Look, all of these things, we cannot stop progress, stop development. I think what we have to do is to make sure we go through the proper process to assess everything, from an environmental point of view, from a traffic point of view, from every aspect of it-which we are doing. That's the important thing. It doesn't matter whether it is two buildings or 10 buildings. There's always going to be more buildings built in New York City. Thank God.

The proper process includes some effort to assess the scale of the development. As the Municipal Art Society has pointed out, the project would equal 23 Williamsburgh Savings Banks. The New York Observer's Matthew Schuerman yesterday delineated how he calculated that Atlantic Yards would be twice as dense as the densest census tract in the country.

In comments submitted by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), Ethan Cohen of the City College Architectural Center observed, "The sheer size of the project makes it inherently incompatible with the City's approach to upzoning other districts to promote new development."

And, of course, there's a widespread belief, not just from critics who responded to the DEIS but even from Borough President Marty Markowitz, that the "proper process" hasn't yielded legitimate solutions to looming traffic and transit bottlenecks.

Affordable housing

Q: If this project goes through, many of the affordable housing units are slated to go to families with a household income of between $70,000 and $113,000. In what respect can we consider those households families of limited means?

Gargano evaded the question.

A: All I can tell you is that this project, and we have insisted on that from the very beginning, and a developer has been extremely cooperative, of more than 6,000 apartments, 2,250 will be affordable housing. And also in addition to that, we have since the project will be staged, a portion will be completed by 2010, along with the arena, the basketball arena, we want to be sure that many of these affordable housing units are built first. And the developer has agreed to that.

Many = 550 of 2250. Unmenioned is that there are no guarantees of when or if Phase 2 would be built. Or that the developer originally promoted the plan as including 900 apartments for moderate-income households, earning between $42,500 and $70,900, rather than 450 units as now promised.

But host Rafael Pi Roman followed up.

Q: Would you consider these homes that build between $70,000 to $113,000 affordable housing units?

A: Well first of all, affordable housing, that's a question of what the market is. It has to be measured by the market. Where affordable housing levels are, where market levels are. This is what determines what's affordable and what's market.

That's a highly inadequate answer. Affordable housing is, simply, housing that costs 30% of household income. And yes, there can be affordable housing for families earning at or above the Area Median Income (AMI) of $70,000, but the question is how much. The number of units geared to particular income groups depends on subsidies and other costs, not the market. And we don't even know what the housing subsidies would be.

In the Atlantic Yards plan, there would be five bands--from 30% to 160% of AMI. Note that the New York AMI, because it includes prosperous suburban counties, is about twice Brooklyn's median income. Hence the effort by some groups to have the Atlantic Yards affordable housing better serve Brooklynites. The Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, in fact, extended the bands to below 30% of AMI.

Households at Brooklyn's median income would be eligible for only 40% of the affordable housing.

No eminent domain?

Forest City Ratner owns or controls some 90% of the land needed, but as I've reported, that understates the need to negotiate with tenants or gain their property via eminent domain.

Q: Are you willing to declare eminent domain and push them off the territory?

A: We are not using eminent domain at this point in time. I believe there was one instance where we might have, it wasn't necessary. It was in done in a [friendly] condemnation. We will look at that at the appropriate time. Right now it is not our intention to use eminent domain. It is our intention to work this out with those families and let them know that this new project will be very good for them in terms of what will be available to them on an affordable level rent rate.
(Emphasis added)

However, the ESDC plans to use eminent domain, via "friendly condemnations," on the property in the footprint owned by the developer, and also for those property owners who've refused to sell. Not all of those property owners are families that would need a new place to live; some are business owners who don't like having to negotiate under the threat of eminent domain.

Doesn't Gargano read his agency's own documents? See p. 4 of the public hearing notice:
The following is a list of the specific parcels that would be acquired by eminent domain, which list includes parcels owned by the City, Forest City Ratner Companies (“FCRC”) or its affiliates, or unrelated private third parties.
(Emphasis added)

Gargano's time sequencing is again confusing.

ESDC objectivity

Q: Now Mr. Gargano, the Empire State Development Corporation, which you chair, is the entity that will have to decide whether or not to approve the Atlantic Yards Project. As we have seen, you are a supporter of this project. So the question has to be asked, is there really a chance that the Empire State Development Corporation won't approve the development of the Atlantic Yards?

A: Well let me tell you the process here. You know, I don't think it is fair to try and categorize this as a project that we want and we just want to get this over. We have been working with the developers to lower the size of the project. Now the project has been reduced by 8%. And we are constantly, we talked to the developer about increasing the size of the park, the amenity. We are doing all of this all of the time... We work for a common ground, something that the developer can live with and not walk away from a project and say well too bad, we can't do it; the public sector doesn't want to be a partner with us. That's what happened 50 years ago with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The reduction, it must be noted, would bring the project back to the same square footage as originally announced. An increase of one acre of open space still would leave far too little for the vast new population, and the open space wouldn't arrive until after Phase 2, which isn't guaranteed. Given the extremely valuable site at issue, is the state really at such a disadvantage?

Time frame

Q: And where is the process now?

A: The process now, we have completed our public forums, our hearings... Now we are reviewing all of the comments, all the concerns, and we are trying to address all of them. When we are satisfied that they have been addressed, and the staff and consultants are all working on this, all different types of experts. Once that is accomplished, it will then come back to the Empire State Development Board of Directors for approval, affirmation once again. But there is still a process to go through.

Will the ESDC require a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to respond to flaws in the DEIS, as several groups have requested? Or will the agency do its best to rush the project through approval so it can be signed off by outgoing Gov. George Pataki, who supported it?

Missing fiscal impact analysis

Q: Some individuals--lawyers, some journalists--want to know exactly how you came up with the figures, of the gains and losses, and they've even filed under the Freedom of Information act, but the [ESDC} has refused...

A: Well first of all, what they are looking for is internal documents, working documents... Completed documents, once the project is approved, once we have completed the negotiations with the developers, they will all be public record. So we are now still negotiating and when you are negotiating you don't open your cards up to who you are negotiating with... I mean that's simple business. Now it is not a question of not wanting to make documents available. When they are completed, when the deal is done, then the documents will be public record.

That's nonsense. The fiscal impact analysis is based on the project as it was presented, and the ESDC was eager to promote the net gain, $1.4 billion, without explaining how it was derived. The Independent Budget Office released its analysis. The New York City Economic Development Corporation did so as well. And so did Forest City Ratner's own consultant, Andrew Zimbalist.

Yes, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn asked for the documents, but I and fellow journalist Neil de Mause did so as well. Community Board 2 noted the lack of transparency. And the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods pointed out that the DEIS "fails to disclose public costs."

Any journalist attempting to report on this topic in any detail should be asking the same question. Maybe Assemblyman Jim Brennan will have better luck in gaining this fundamental piece of information.

Brennan asks ESDC for AY financial plans

So it's not just journalists who've begun asking the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to reveal more financial details about the Atlantic Yards project.

Yesterday, Assemblyman Jim Brennan, who represents Park Slope and adjacent neighborhoods and has previously called for significant reductions in the scale of the project, said his office submitted a Freedom of Information Law request for "the complete financial and business plans" for the project.

"The decision-time is here," Brennan said at a meeting of the Park Slope Civic Council. "Within the next month to six weeks the ESDC will be approving it, with our without modifications." Getting information about finances on the table is important, he said, "so issues related to density, affordability, and subsidy can be discussed."

His request includes projections for costs, revenues, and expenses, so it goes beyond the request I and others have made for the ESDC's analysis that claims $1.4 billion in new tax revenue from the project.

Will ESDC respond?

The ESDC has not been forthcoming to journalists and opponents, and ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano defends the practice in an interview being broadcast tonight. Then again, Brennan and fellow Assemblymembers should have some influence with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who, as one of the three members on the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), can stop or modify the project after the ESDC board approves it.

"I'm hoping that because I'm a state official, they'll cooperate," Brennan said. Rather than ask the agency to send him documents, he said that, as in previous requests, he'd prefer that the agency assemble the documents in a room and let him take a look.

He said he hoped his colleagues in the Assembly from Brooklyn will support his request. Fellow Assemblymembers Joan Millman, Roger Green, Joseph Lentol, and Annette Robinson all supported a bill Brennan unsuccessfully proposed to reduce the project by 34% but add subsidies for affordable housing.

"I think most people think it's too big and that eight percent"--the recently-announced cut back to square one--"is kind of insignificant," he said.

Brennan said he and his colleagues "have many concerns" about the size of the project, the implementation plan, and the amount of affordable housing that would be built in Phase 1 of the project.

Lawyer to ESDC: don't condemn buildings with rent-stabilized tenants

Attorney George Locker, who represents four rent-stabilized residential tenants at 624 Pacific Street and ten rent-stabilized residential tenants at 473 Dean Street--both buildings now owned by Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner--has protested plans by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to use eminent domain to take over those buildings.

Locker's argument: the rent-stabilization laws should not be trumped by the ESDC, and thus the process should be significantly delayed.

"Drunk on... eminent domain"

In comments submitted last Friday to the ESDC, Locker wrote dramatically:
FCR met with and then repeatedly urged my clients to surrender their Rent Stabilized leases, under terms and conditions that were illegal and confiscatory. As the project has progressed, my clients also have witnessed FCR literally empty and destroy their thriving and growing neighborhood. In June 2006, drunk on the power of eminent domain, FCR terrorized my clients at 624 Pacific Street by illegally using a backhoe to demolish 622 Pacific Street -- and shake their building for good measure -- in violation of the City demolition permit and in violation of a City stop work order.

(Photo copyright David Gochfeld)

No condemnations?

Locker repeated some of the concerns he'd expressed about "friendly condemnations," the ESDC's plans to use eminent domain for all of the property in the project. The state agency says it's to clear title; Locker says it's to clear tenants.

He pointed out, among other things, that at a City Council meeting last year, the developer titled a chart “FCR has substantially reduced the need for condemnation." The message, he said, is "that tenants in FCR-owned buildings would not lose their homes to eminent domain/condemnation."

"We regard none of these condemnations as “friendly”, a phrase intended only to mislead the general public," he wrote, adding that the process would serve to erase his clients' rights.

Fewer hoops

While a private developer who wants to demolish a building with rent-stabilized tenants must get a state permit and compensate tenants thoroughly, FCR is using an end-around, Locker argued, offering the tenants "essentially nothing in return," compared to the money and succession rights they retain now.

He wrote:
The so-called Relocation Plan (“Relocation”) proposed by ESDC for my clients deprives them of substantial financial compensation and other rights to which they are entitled under the Rent Stabilization law.
Moreover, by limiting relocation essentially to providing the services of a real estate broker, ESDC ignores the high cost of rental real estate in areas that are generally no less desirable than the present neighborhood.

What the ESDC offers

The state offers the following relocation assistance:
--referrals to alternative housing
--moving services and expenses will be provided.
--a one-time payment of $5,000 per household

The General Project Plan states:
The above described residential relocation program is the minimum assistance that will be provided. The Project Sponsors have entered into a Community Benefits Agreement whereby they agreed to provide certain enhanced benefits to occupants who were in occupancy of their residence for at least one year. Such benefits include the right to return and to rent a comparable unit within the Project Site at a comparable rate to what they are currently paying.

What Forest City Ratner hasn't offered, however, is proof that it would provide sufficient interim rental assistance for those tenants.

A New York landlord-tenant story

For an astounding story that shows how the combination of rent-stabilization laws and a truly obdurate tenant can make life miserable for a landlord who's offered much more than what the state would offer Locker's clients, check out this week's Village Voice.

A Roberta Flack footnote; her lawyer is Nets investor

So why exactly was singer Roberta Flack, not exactly a Brooklynite, front and center at the press event/rally held before the Aug. 23 Draft Environmental Impact Statement hearing?

Well, here's a suggestion: Flack is represented by L. Londell McMillan, a Brooklyn-born entertainment attorney who owns a piece of the Nets. (He travels in some of the same circles as hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, another Nets owner).

Also, successful 11th Congressional District candidate Yvette Clarke got a boost from McMillan, who helped organize some high-profile women to back Clarke and raise funds for her. And we know that Michael Ratner supported Clarke too.

Looming: 421-a reform and thousands of affordable units

Housing advocates in New York for months have been arguing for reform of the city's 421-a tax break, which subsidizes market-rate developments outside of an "exclusion zone" (roughly, 14th-96th streets) in Manhattan--and could create tens of thousands more affordable units.

In the "exclusion zone," developers must fund affordable housing in exchange for the tax breaks, but the market remains quite healthy; a study issued earlier this year calculated that $320 million in subsidies was unnecessary.

And in recent rezonings, such as for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, the City Council has required affordable housing in exchange for the right to build somewhat larger buildings.

(I've dubbed the Atlantic Yards project a privately-negotiated zoning bonus, because the affordable housing deal Forest City Ratner signed with ACORN has been used to argue for the project's scale, which is a political rather than a regulatory issue. Atlantic Yards is already on track for the subsidies.)

421-a reform coming

Now, reform of the 421-a program is looming. Yesterday elected officials and advocates held a press conference arguing that 421-a subsidizes gentrification.

The New York Observer quoted East Harlem council member Melissa Mark Viverito: "We are taking tax dollars from working families in East Harlem and using that money to subsidize the construction of luxury condominiums across the street from them selling for over $1 million. Essentially, we are asking people from El Barrio to pay to price themselves out of their own community."

As Crain's New York Business reported, they asked that 30% of the units created by the tax break be affordable.

According to the Daily News, Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the committee that would revise or extend the law by the end of 2007, the Williamsburg rezoning worked. "The real estate developers didn't run; they kept building," Lopez said. "It just cut into their profits a little bit."

Devil in the details

At issue is exactly how to revise the program, which was launched in 1971 to spur construction in a moribund city. The New York Sun reported, program critics want to make sure that all 421-a tax breaks require affordable housing--and that developers not be able to fulfill their obligation by building the affordable units in low-cost neighborhoods (as in the Bronx) but in the same area where they build the market-rate units.

That's not what a mayoral task force is thinking, however, and those recommendations, which are due shortly, are expected to be influential--and fuel for a tussle with the City Council.

The task force, according to a source familiar with its work, is expected to extend the exclusion zone only to certain neighborhoods--larger parts of Manhattan, waterfront blocks in Brooklyn and Queens, parts of Downtown Brooklyn and DUMBO (both sites of furious market-rate construction), and perhaps even along the Flatbush Avenue corridor (which would bump up against the Atlantic Yards project).

The administration is, however, expected to propose eliminating the certificate program, which allows developers of housing in Manhattan to fulfill their obligation by funding affordable housing in cheaper neighborhoods.

Manhattan is key

Why isn't their more momentum to reform the law? "The market now assumes the program as it is currently," the source said. "It will felt by developers as a takeaway because they currently get a preposterously rich benefit. So we'll see as it goes through City Council."

Even though the 421-a program is glaring in Brooklyn, given the market-rate housing it's funding in neighborhoods in and around downtown, the vast majority of the subsidies go to Manhattan. So the extension of the zone in Manhattan would have a significant effect as a start, since if the tax revenue went to a trust fund, it could be distributed around the city.

Still, advocates in City Council are likely to point to the need to balance development in their neighborhoods. For example, City Council Member Letitia James, who represents Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, has introduced a bill to eliminate the exemption in her the 35th District.

Misused certificates

Part of the problem is how the certificate program works. As the New York Observer recently reported:
Outer-borough builders earn four or five certificates for each unit of affordable housing they produce, and then sell the paper for $12,000 to $20,000 each to Manhattan developers to qualify for 10-year tax abatements on market-rate condos and rentals. At a hearing in June, Jon Furlong, an advocacy associate at Habitat for Humanity, testified that a building at Trump Place on the West Side would receive $12 million in tax breaks for paying $2 million in certificates.

The article noted that, with the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, Lopez persuaded Housing Preservations & Development Commissioner Shaun Donovan to eliminate the certificate option, thereby requiring that the affordable housing be located on the same very expensive waterfront property on which the luxury condos would go.

More units coming

The bottom line, according to the Observer:
Mayor Bloomberg is counting on $200 million in revenue from the reforms to meet his goal of creating or maintaining 165,000 affordable-housing apartments citywide by 2013.

In the best-case scenario, Atlantic Yards would include 2250 affordable units by 2016. So those supporting the Atlantic Yards project because of the affordable housing aspects should keep an eye on the larger picture.

AY flier touts 137.5 affordable units a year (and 15-story buildings)

The latest Atlantic Yards p.r. flier has already been dissected by the Brooklyn Record and No Land Grab, but a few details deserve emphasis. First, let's note that Forest City Ratner finally did show the public some towers, unlike in the brochure distributed in May. However, the towers here only go about 15 stories tall. However, only one of the 16 buildings planned would be under 200 feet, at 184 feet.

Second, the flier requires footnotes. The statement that "50% of the rental units will be set aside for middle- and low-income families" papers over the actual affordability of the units.

Actually, only 900 (40%) of 2250 affordable rentals would go to families with an annual household income of $35,450 or lower. And 900 of the affordable rentals would rent for more than $2000 a month

550 in Phase 1

And the statement that "affordable housing will be built in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the development" lacks specifics. As the City Planning Commission said in a letter last week, "at least 30% of the units built in Phase 1 (approximately 550 units) will be affordable."

If Phase 1 takes four years, as planned, that means 137.5 affordable units a year, including 55 units a year for families at or below Brooklyn's median household income. And there's no assurance that Phase 2 would be built, since it depends on market conditions and other factors.

Decoding the flier

The copy in the flier--about the difficulty of living in Brooklyn--taps into a legitimate concern. The choice to feature minorities in the brochure misleadingly suggests that this is mainly a project to assist them.

If Forest City Ratner really cared about affordable housing--rather than advancing a project that could bring a billion dollars in profits--the developer would have taken advantage of several opportunities to inform the public of the effort to reform the city's 421-a tax break, which subsidizes much market-rate construction without requiring any affordable units. It hasn't.

CB 2 calls for halving of AY density, no eminent domain or street closings, host of changes

Community Board 2, which would include some two-thirds of the proposed Atlantic Yards site, has not officially opposed the project, but issued a harsh series of recommendations that would change it drastically—and perhaps block it. (Of the other two boards covering the footprint, CB 6 disapproved of the project and CB 8 did not take an official stand but submitted a sheaf of criticisms and concerns.)

In a letter submitted to the Empire State Development Corporation on Sept. 29, the deadline date for comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and General Project Plan (GPP), CB 2 issued several recommendations, among them that the residential density “should be no greater than Battery Park City at full build-out, which is 152 apartments per acre.” The project as proposed in the DEIS would be about twice as dense, though an eight percent reduction—proposed by the City Planning Commission last week and agreed to by developer Forest City Ratner—would shave it slightly.

While the planning commission agreed that flagship tower Miss Brooklyn could stand at 620 feet, CB 2 recommended that no building in the site should be higher than 400 feet.

Eminent domain

CB 2 also recommended “No use of eminent domain as part of this project,” which is tantamount to opposition at this point, because several property owners are unwilling to sell to the developer, and the ESDC would pursue “friendly condemnations” on properties owned by FCR that house rent-regulated tenants, which a lawyer for those tenants considers a tactic to sever their rights.

As for alternative plans, CB 2 expressed “great disappointment,” stating that “The goals of the official state project seem to have been tailored to the proposed development.”

Public space and streets

CB 2 said that no streets should be closed, suggesting that the arena and other parts of the project could be built over streets if necessary, and that “lively streets would do more to enliven the area.”

The board criticized the proposed seven acres of publicly accessible open space as apparently private, saying that “the developer has essentially created a large back-yard patio.”

Also, CB 2 said, the planned publicly accessible open space “should be open to the public during the same hours as a park operated by the city,” rather than more limited hours, and that pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths through the project “must be accessible 24 hours daily.”

While Forest City Ratner originally promised public open space above the arena, it cited security and other reasons for making it accessible only to tenants of the four buildings surrounding it—a change that even project supporters like Borough President Marty Markowitz criticized. CB 2 said that the “open space above the Arena should be available to the public in some form.”

The board also took aim at FCR's plans to raze properties in the eastern half of the site for surface parking lots and staging areas. Given that the amount of open space during the first phase, the arena block, would be much lower than the city recommends, “CB2 recommends that the sponsor also provide interim open space and recreation that can be used between now and 2016,” the projected time for completion.

The board also referenced the possibility that Phase 2 of the project might be delayed indefinitely, recommending that “Buildings should not be vacated and demolished until replacement design and financing are in place.”

Other recommendations

CB 2 issued a host of other recommendations (verbatim except for the addition re schools):

--Provide adequate day-care slots for the increased number of residents and employees.
--Improve the sewage and Combined Sewage Overflow service/architecture to cover the projected increase in the number of residents and workers.
--Provide adequate tree plantings for a project of this size to mitigate the adverse impact of project-associated air-borne pollutants.
--Utilize Big Belly Compactors (or similar technology) to reduce the amount and number of collections of project-generated solid waste.
--Downsizing the height and bulk of the buildings in the development and implementing design guidelines which address the impact of shadows directly should occur
--The decline in the overall open space ratio for combined active and passive space which will occur with the arrival of close to 20,000 residents and workers (depending on the use of Variation 1 or Variation 2) must be mitigated.
--The project sponsors and the lead government agency must accept the obligation to improve the existing open space conditions for the public good.
--Sufficient limited affordable parking should be available for the people residing in the development.
--A residential parking permit program should be created and enforced in the neighborhoods effected.
--Necessary government permit parking should be limited to garage spaces or authorized limited on street parking and strictly enforced (with towing) with a no permit zone around the arena and the surrounding neighborhoods.
--The open space should be easily accessible physically and visually to the rest of the community
--Sufficient public schools should be on the site. (CB 2 suggests adaptation of the historic Ward Bread Bakery complex, currently slated for demolition, and warns that “the possible site proposed in the project plan, Building 5, is inappropriate because it is directly across Sixth Avenue from the arena.”)
--Sufficient resources should be available to handle garbage and sewer.
--Steps to maintain and improve traffic and pedestrian circulation should be done (building skyways: separate traffic, pedestrians and cyclists)
--Renewable and environmental sustainable energy should be provided on site (i.e wind and solar energy) for the development and immediate area.
--Adequate fire and police protection should be provided.
--A wind effects study should be done on any planned construction to prevent unnecessary localized problems.
--Signage should respect the surrounding communities in character, quality of life and color (It shouldn’t be Times Square.) and not cast light on to the surrounding area. The major illuminated signage should be turned off by 11 PM.

CB 2 recommended “that ESDC form a City/State inter-agency taskforce, including the three community boards with jurisdiction over the project site, to monitor the project, the implementation of mitigation measures and review issues as they arise.”

CBA concerns

Commenting generally, “Community Board 2 finds the project descriptions in the GPP and DEIS incomplete,” noting that affordable housing is not part of the state documents but memorialized in the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which should be made a legally binding part of the GPP.

CB 2 commented: “For the record, Community Board 2 believes that the parties negotiating and signing the CBA are not representative of the entire community and the negotiations lacked transparency, making the term “community” benefits agreement a misnomer,”

Blight?

Though the overarching goal of the project is to transform a blighted area, CB 2 “disagrees with the determination that the project site is blighted,” citing successful redevelopment of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA). “The LIRR Vanderbilt Yards, ATURA Site 6A, is the only site in the plan to remain undeveloped. The rail yards may not be attractive, but it is incorrect to characterize a functioning, integral part of the regional rail system as blighted.”

CB 2 added: “The area south of the project site, in Community District 8, has experienced considerable private investment in recent years and Community Board 2 believes that the neighborhood would have continued to improve without government intervention. The crime statistics in the DEIS are misrepresented and cannot be used honestly as evidence of blight.”

City role

CB 2's letter stated that, while the DEIS states that the project would “require approvals from the City’s transportation, environmental protection and buildings departments and Art Commission, as well as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,” but such approvals are not explained—and should be.

Economic benefits?

CB 2 said the economic claims are insufficient: “The developer has stated that the scale of the project is determined in large part by the cost of decking over the rail yard, the environmental clean-up of the project site and other expenditures. However, the type of financial information necessary for public evaluation of the veracity of this statement is not included in the GPP and DEIS."

Downtown Brooklyn?

CB 2 said: “The DEIS states that the Atlantic Yards project may complement the goals of the Special Downtown Brooklyn District (SDBD). However, very few people would say that the project site is in Downtown Brooklyn. When the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower was built over 75 years ago, it was imagined that it would someday be the southeast corner of downtown. It has stood alone for three-quarters of a century, testament to an idea that still has not been realized."

CB 2 recommended caution, saying that it "believes that the goals of the SDBD should be achieved in Downtown Brooklyn before pioneering new territory beyond even the most visionary concept of what constitutes downtown."

Traffic & transit

CB 2 warned that “the traffic mitigations are not nearly comprehensive or nuanced enough to address the intricacy of the existing congested traffic network and the additional traffic burdens being placed upon it by the proposed development” and repeated its call for a traffic model to be prepared.

CB 2 scoffed at the explanation that that the DEIS didn’t consider development resulting from the Downtown Brooklyn Development Plan until 2016 because “no plans for new development have been finalized.” Said CB 2, “The community board considers this a serious and unacceptable flaw in the DEIS that must be addressed in the final environmental impact statement.”

As for the assumption of an 0.5 percent growth rate for the Atlantic Avenue subway station in the “no build” scenario, CB 2 pointed out that “the recorded rate of this station’s growth in ridership therefore is 24 times greater than the growth rate that the DEIS assumes.” Moreover, “the DEIS does not provide sufficient data to substantiate the claim that “crowding on the platforms at the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street subway station complex is not expected to be problematic.”

Noise & rats

Community Board 2 said it was concerned that three community parks as well as the Pacific branch of the Brooklyn Public Library would be overwhelmed by noise during construction and arena events.

As for one solution, CB 2 said it was "greatly concerned that the project developer and sponsor would suggest that significantly adverse levels of noise be mitigated by sealing the apartments of near-by residents with doubled-glazed windows and air conditioners. The existing residents should not have to bear the burden of the mitigation."

Beyond that, CB 2 warned that rats would be proliferate during construction, stating, “Containment plans to mitigate the inevitable disturbance and escape of large numbers of rodents into neighboring communities needs to be specifically defined and coordinated with appropriate governmental agencies in advance.”

CB 8 sends ESDC committee and individual criticisms of DEIS

Community Board 8, which takes in part of the proposed Atlantic Yards footprint at its western tip, didn't take a harsh official stance toward the project as did Community Board 6, but it did submit numerous letters of concern from Executive Committee members and area residents to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

In fact, while CB 8 did submit a summary of the testimony at the public hearing it held Aug. 3, which attracted a significant fraction of project supporters, all of the dozens of other pages submitted to the ESDC raised questions about the project or criticized it.

CB 8 Chairperson Robert Matthews submitted a cover letter on Sept. 29 along with the documents. He wrote:
It is my understanding that as a member of the Community Advisory Board, we were expected to review and comment on the DEIS and the General Project Plan (GPP). However, given that your agency notified my board of these proceedings in late July when our Board is not in session, it has been impossible to thoroughly complete this task.
...Further, as we have noted in the past, Community Boards do not have technical support to adequately review materials that are normally examined by attorneys and engineers. We are at a disadvantage. We hope your agency will seek to address this inequity in the future.
...In the future, I hope that you would allow our community ample time to address such urgent matters.

Bill Batson, cochair of CB 8's Atlantic Yards subcommittee, told me that, given the board's lack of power to approve or disapprove of the project, an up or down vote was avoided, since it could lead to divisions. (Several project supporters, including officers in Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), are on the CB8 board.)

"We felt we needed to educate our community on all of the aspects while avoiding the heated rhetoric," said Batson, who ran for the 57th Assembly District seat on a platform critical of Atlantic Yards but was defeated by Hakeem Jeffries.

CB 8 concerns

CB 8 submitted a copy of Matthews' testimony at the AY community forum on Sept. 12, in which he said that the board sought a time horizon for the analysis to be extended from ten to 20 years to better account for development in the area; that the direct and indirect costs of the project be specified, and that the effect on community facilities be considered.

Such comments were amplified in individual submissions. Holly Fuchs Furguson, representing CB 8's Fire and Transportation committees, sent a copy of the testimony she delivered, in which she pointed out that the impacts of the project on police and fire response "are ignored with the comment of no significant impact because these are considered reactive, not pre-planning agencies."

Ferguson slammed the treatment in the DEIS of traffic and transportation issues. "The current document ignores the looming intense gridlock, as it ignored the current near gridlock conditions on project streets during weekday and rush hours," she said. "The document ignores the congested bus and subway lines during rush hours."

Ultimately, she said, the DEIS shouldn't go forward because it lacks a "credible traffic and pedestrian model."

No real parks

The chairpersons of CB 8's Parks and Recreation committee, speaking personally, criticized the project for not including actual parks. "We choose to define a park as something that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation controls, operates, and maintains," wrote Robert Witherwax. "The much touted Publicly Accessible Open Space included in this plan is, by that defnition, NOT a park."

Given that the space would be controlled by a nonprofit organization created by the developer, he wrote, "In the view of the Chairs, this is an unacceptable arrangement."

Community facilities

Akosua Albritton, chair of the Youth & Family Services Committee, criticized a DEIS statement that child care facilities in the area would be able to accommodate the increased population of children 12 and younger. "This statement is counter to the reality of the subject area," Albritton wrote, adding, "CB8 has an insufficient number of daycare slots at present."

Albritton also pointed out that the new population would strain libraries, which offer rooms for meetings and events, and serve as places for after-school homework and tutoring.

Nizjoni Granville, chairperson of the Housing and Land Use Committee, noted that the DEIS incorrectly described a Prospect Heights Historic District, which implies greater protection against overdevelopment than the actual situation, in which part of Prospect Heights is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Granville also pointed out that a reference to the "now-closed Brooklyn Jewish Hospital" was misleading, because the site has since been transformed into market-rental housing.

Power & waste

CB 8's Ethel Tyus questioned the DEIS's estimates regarding the electrical supply: "The DEIS' blithe blather about merely laying new conduits in the street to replace aging wires and that Con Ed is taking steps to provide increased capacity are not sufficient assurances that the electrical infrastructure will be adequate to [the] task."

Ede Fox, chair of the Environment/Sanitation committee, expressed concern--as have several experts--that the project would overload the city's waste treatment system. Additionally, Fox wrote, "We want more extensive air monitoring, more limitations on heavy construction and an active community advisory committee throughout the ten-year construction period."

"Radical changes"

Several residents within the district sent versions of a letter calling for "radical changes in response to public concerns":
--project impacts "must be meaningfully mitigated or averted"
--the scale should relate to but not overwhlem its neighbors
--local streets should not be overloaded
--the open space would be insufficient, inaccessible, and unavailable for years
--the housing should match the neighborhood's socioeconomic diversity
--the proposed construction phasing, which would clear the Phase 2 footprint for vacant lots and surface parking, "may blight our neighborhood for at least a decade."

Two views of Brooklyn Speaks: middle ground or "same stale agenda"?

From Stephen Witt's article in this week's Courier-Life chain on Brooklyn Speaks:
Cracks of dissention and capitulation are beginning to show among the opponents of Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project.
Several organizations long aligned with the organization Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) announced last week the creation of a website aimed at seeking a middle ground on the project.

Louis weighs in

Columnist Errol Louis, however, didn't do much homework. Then again, his pork-over-principles agenda is pretty clear.

In his Oct. 1 Our Time Press column, headlined Different Group, Same Elitist Song, Louis writes:
A new group bearing the misleading name Brooklyn Speaks has popped up with a website and the same stale agenda as Develop Don’t Destroy and the other anti-development groups hell-bent on killing the $4.2 billion Atlantic Yards project.

Same stale agenda? Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn has criticized Brooklyn Speaks for not addressing the issue of eminent domain. Brooklyn Speaks doesn't want to kill the project; they aim to modify a project that they believe is on the track to approval.

Middle-class loudmouths?

Louis writes:
Don’t be fooled by the name: Brooklyn Speaks actually speaks for a small group of middle-class loudmouths who have no problem with denying housing and jobs to people who desperately need it and a majority that supports the project....

Louis is correct in saying that the name is ambitious for a group that, at least in its inception, contains no groups from Crown Heights and parts further into Brooklyn, though Brooklyn Speaks does intend to gain more allies.

But his statement that they are "denying housing and jobs" flies in the face of the intention of Brooklyn Speaks to make the housing at the project affordable to average Brooklynites. Two of the groups in Brooklyn Speaks, the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Area Community Council, have long experience in working with low-income communities.

Looking at the evidence

Louis writes:
By now, the press and public are well aware that most New Yorkers and most Brooklynites are in favor of some version of Atlantic Yards. They have said so in every possible way – in public hearings, in opinion surveys and at the polls on election day, when anti-Atlantic Yards candidates were trounced.

At public hearings, most of the people supporting the plan were associated with unions or Community Benefits Agreements signatories that stand to gain from it. The latest poll was deeply flawed.

And while most Atlantic Yards opponents did poorly in the recent election, the low turnout, district boundaries, and failure of the victors to campaign on the Atlantic Yards issue puts Louis's assertion in doubt.

Transparency? Another tussle with the ESDC

In Riverkeeper's response to the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), regarding CSOs (combined sewer overflows), the organization charges that the ESDC thwarted public participation by failing to include a key report in the DEIS.

The charge:
In both the Hudson Yards and Greenpoint-Williamsburg EISs, the lead agency (NYC Planning Department) retained HydroQual to analyze the CSO increases, as ESDC has done here. But in both of those EISs, the lead agency included the HydroQual report as part of the EIS itself or in an appendix thereto.
Here the HydroQual report was not included in the DEIS or an appendix thereto. Riverkeeper’s counsel was able to obtain the HydroQual report from the ESDC, but only after numerous calls and emails, and many weeks after the comment period had begun. Because many other members of the public did not have ready access to the HydroQual report, the ESDC had not made full and proper disclosure of its analysis and has thereby thwarted public participation.

Lawyers for the poor charge AY violates state constitution

Does the Atlantic Yards project violate the New York State Constitution? There are some potentially damning charges in the comments filed Friday on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement and General Project Plan (GPP) by South Brooklyn Legal Services (SBLS), which represents low-income residents in the proposed project footprint.

State subsidies, according to the constitution, must go to low-income housing, not the mixed-income Atlantic Yards project, notes SBLS on p. 10 of its filing. Nearly 70% of the Atlantic Yards project would be market-rate housing--though the recent 8% scaleback would shave off some condos and adjust that percentage a little--and, of the proposed affordable housing, less than half would be low-income housing.

SBLS cites the State Constitution, Article XVIII:
Section 1. Subject to the provisions of this article, the legislature may provide in such manner, by such means and upon such terms and conditions as it may prescribe for low rent housing and nursing home accommodations for persons of low income as defined by law, or for the clearance, replanning, reconstruction and rehabilitation of substandard and insanitary areas, or for both such purposes, and for recreational and other facilities incidental or appurtenant thereto.

The clearing of blight, the constitution suggests in Section 6 of Article XVIII, is limited to helping the poor:
No loan, or subsidy shall be made by the state to aid any project unless such project is in conformity with a plan or undertaking for the clearance, replanning and reconstruction or rehabilitation of a sub-standard and unsanitary area or areas and for recreational and other facilities incidental or appurtenant thereto. The legislature may provide additional conditions to the making of such loans or subsidies consistent with the purposes of this article. The occupancy of any such project shall be restricted to persons of low income as defined by law and preference shall be given to persons who live or shall have lived in such area or areas.
(Emphasis added)

SBLS argues:
The GPP, while acknowledging that the Sponsor [Forest City Ratner] will benefit from state aid to finance the construction of residences, fails to comply with the Constitutional restriction that occupancy of such aided land use and civic projects be restricted to persons of low income.

It seems like a strong point, but it's hard to believe that the state didn't anticipate such a challenge, so let's see what the response is.