The Times knows how to do better, just not when it comes to Atlantic Yards

The New York Times is capable of fact-checking dubious or incomplete claims and it's capable of sustained reportorial attention--just not enough when it comes to Atlantic Yards.

Consider the tough analysis of the post-Katrina recovery, as noted in an article published Thursday headlined Commemorations for a City 2 Years After Storm. (Click on graphic to enlarge.)

Imagine if, say, the Times had similarly fact-checked the projection (according to a document by developer Forest City Ratner) that Atlantic Yards would be finished by 2015, given that the official date is 2016 and the the timetable is already behind schedule?

Or if the Times had reminded readers that the claim of 15,000 construction jobs really means 1500 jobs a year over ten years?

Or if the Times corrected the multiple claims, which it reproduced uncritically, that Atlantic Yards would be built on the "same site" as the proposed new Brooklyn Dodgers stadium?

Or if the Times, belatedly but responsibly, corrected the flagrantly inaccurate 12/11/03 claim, by then-architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, that the project site "is now an open railyard."

Maybe it's tougher to correct your own mistakes, but the Times has had a significant impact on framing the Atlantic Yards story.

Sustained attention?

Part of what makes for solid reporting is sustained attention to a story or beat, and the Times's coverage of Atlantic Yards has too often been lacking.


After the project surfaced in the summer of 2003, Atlantic Yards coverage was split mainly among a sports reporter, a commercial real estate reporter, and a reporter in the Brooklyn bureau. Only in October 2005 did the Times assign Nicholas Confessore to the Brooklyn bureau with the main responsibility to cover Atlantic Yards. (That was more than a month after my report dissected the Times's poor coverage, though I have no proof of cause and effect.)

A capable political reporter and alumnus of the Washington Monthly, Confessore had joined the paper at the end of 2004 but had no particular expertise regarding Brooklyn or development disputes.

His first two major articles, on the "modern blueprint" and changes in jobs and housing, were quite flawed. Remember, the Times let Forest City Ratner's Jim Stuckey claim that opponents' criticism was "Orwellian, almost." Stuckey should know from Orwellian.

His article on the AY blogosphere mainly framed bloggers' scoops as partisan talking points rather than important additions to the discourse. (It's hard to know what role his editors played in all this.)

Confessore eventually provided some more responsible coverage, such as about blight, and even challenged then-Empire State Development Corporation Chairman Charles Gargano.

Who's responsible?

Confessore was not responsible for misleading front-page article 9/5/06 about the imminent minor scaleback in the project's size. (Should we expect another Atlantic Yards "scoop" spoon-fed the Times after Labor Day this year?)

And he probably was not responsible for the Times's failure to include any graphic showing the project's scale in neighborhood context--though (I speculate) a more veteran--or foolhardy--reporter might have been more willing to challenge his bosses on the issue.

(Rendering produced by the Environmental Simulation Center for the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods and adapted by Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab to emphasize Newswalk. Today Rolley's fact-checks an AP photo of "Atlantic Yards" published by ESPN.com.)

And once the project was approved last December, Confessore was gone, promoted to Albany after 15 months. Atlantic Yards, apparently, was a done deal and didn't require sustained scrutiny.

Since then, the Times has mostly steered clear of the story, failing, for example, to cover the hearing on the state lawsuit challenging the environmental review or the investigation of the collapse of the Ward Bakery's parapet. Still, when the Times was handed a scoop by Assemblyman Jim Brennan, Confessore was temporarily reassigned to write that July 1 article in AY financials.

Three-year assignment?

A 15-month assignment is rather brief and apparently not the norm. Recently, Times Regional Editor Jodi Rudoren, who oversees coverage of New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and upstate New York (and has nothing to do with coverage of Brooklyn) suggested, in a Talk to the Newsroom feature, a longer tenure for Metro reporters.

A reader asked, in part:
I'm curious about the relative prestige of these departments; it always seemed to me that local reporters were waiting to be promoted to a national or international position, and saw local reporting as necessary, but less exciting and valued. Is this a common perception among the newspaper's employees, or the readership? ...

Rudoren responded:
One of the cool things about journalism careers is that there's no clear hierarchy or path, particularly among the reporting ranks. The key thing is to keep it interesting and challenging as long as possible, but the order of how that might work is up to the individual. ...We certainly have real specialists on the staff... but in general, The Times places a high value on generalists, and most people tend to switch jobs every three to five years. I think that's mostly a great thing, though it does occasionally leave us vulnerable on some beats.
(Emphasis added)

And if they switch within 15 months, well, there's even more vulnerability.

Brooklyn's a big story--it would be the country's fourth-largest city in terms of population, and projects like Atlantic Yards, the New Domino in Williamsburg, the Coney Island rezoning, and more could keep reporters busy for a while.

Unfortunately, Brooklyn College journalism professor Paul Moses's observation about the borough's place in the mediascape again bears repeating: repeating: Nowhere in the country do so many people get so little local coverage.

New downtown? The Atlantic Yards office space, in DC context

In honor of yesterday's shortsighted Wall Street Journal article on Atlantic Yards office space, it's worth a look at how big that office space might be. Remember, when it was proposed on 12/10/03, Atlantic Yards was to contain 2.1 million square feet of office space, as "New York City requires... additional office space to create and retain new jobs."

But those four office towers, which led columnist Andrea Peyser to rhapsodize about 10,000 office jobs, have mostly been traded for condos. After two rounds of cuts, the proposed Atlantic Yards office space now would cover 336,000 square feet, with space for 1340 jobs and likely 375 new jobs.

That's hardly the new downtown some have claimed for Atlantic Yards, especially since there's no need, as yet, for all the office space proposed in the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning. Atlantic Yards would consist of an arena, a mixed-use office/condo/hotel tower, plus a residential complex--a latter-day Stuyvesant Town, much more dense but at least with retail in the base of the buildings.

Looking at DC

Consider that the entirety of the Atlantic Yards office space could fit easily in one new mid-rise building (above) in Downtown Washington, DC on 15th Street near K Street. The Columbia Center would include more than 389,000 square feet. (Photos taken in April.)

The Columbia Center, according to its developer, "is a new urban landmark, and a striking presence in the Washington office market. The building's bold, angular geometry and a dramatic glass curtainwall combine to create a defining architectural identity along 15th Street."

Broad vs. tall

As Southeast Real Estate Business reported in August 2006:
Much like South Florida, there is little developable land left in the nation’s capital. Washington, D.C.’s office market also faces the challenge of height restrictions that do not allow developers to build any structure higher than the Capitol Building. Typically, the maximum height is 12 stories tall. “The scarce land in the traditional office areas like the central business district and the East End has forced office development down K Street and into NOMA (North of Massachusetts), Southwest and Southeast,” says Rob Hartley, director of market research for Trammell Crow Company in Washington, D.C.

That means that the typical office building in Washington has a broad footprint with little open space, packing a good amount of square footage despite the height limit. The Atlantic Yards office space would be part of a very large mixed-use tower, perhaps 1 million square feet, but if that office space stood alone as a Frank Gehry building, it almost surely would be taller and narrower than the Columbia Center.

But there are a lot of Columbia Center equivalents in Washington. A new downtown needs a critical mass of such buildings, not merely one.

The Wall Street Journal, on real estate and AY, needs some footnotes

A Wall Street Journal real estate column (full text for subscribers only) today tagged BLUEPRINT/Brooklyn and headlined 'Dem Bums' No Longer: A Borough on the Rise, begins:
About five decades after the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, some investors are betting that a planned arena for the Nets NBA team and a residential building boom will help clinch the borough's comeback--and push up its commercial real-estate values.

That's an odd formulation. In many ways, the borough has already come back--residential real estate values have rocketed and the question has been managing growth and maintaining affordability. And commercial real estate has been a sideshow, as both plans by the city and Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner have changed dramatically.

But the column's about commercial real estate, and there's little room for complexity.

On to AY

More than half the article is devoted to Atlantic Yards, even though the project is less and less about commercial real estate:

Among the largest projects planned is the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project being developed by Forest City Ratner Cos., an affiliate of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises Inc. The mixed-use development was designed by Frank Gehry and is partially located over rail yards on the edge of downtown Brooklyn. It is planned to include more than 6,000 residential units and the arena for the Nets, who play in New Jersey. There also will be an office tower, dubbed "Miss Brooklyn" because Mr. Gehry's design is said to have been inspired by a bride. Forest City Ratner plans to begin construction on the arena this fall and have the Nets in Brooklyn for the 2009-2010 season.

Unmentioned: that schedule is highly unlikely.

How much office space, at what cost?

The article continues:
Miss Brooklyn is expected to command rents in the $50-to-$60-a-square-foot range, according to MaryAnne Gilmartin, executive vice president for Forest City Ratner. That is above the $30 average asking rent in Brooklyn, which has historically appealed to financial-services companies as an affordable back-office location that offers good value in comparison to Manhattan. But Glenn Markman, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield, believes the borough will attract new types of companies, such as those in creative industries that will be willing to pay higher rates for a signature building.

Maybe. The New York Times reports today some comparisons:
Landlords are asking $36.85 a square foot on average for Class A office space in Jersey City now, up almost 14 percent from a year ago. During that time, average asking rents in Lower Manhattan rose more than 25 percent, to $50.59, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate services company.

Actually, according to projections in a Forest City Ratner document released in response to the lawsuit by Assemblyman Jim Brennan and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Class A office space is expected to rent at $39 for the first five years, $42.90 for the next five years, $47.19 for the next five years. It would top $50, at $51.91, only beginning in year 16. (See p. 9 of this PDF.) Those projections are almost a year old, but Brooklyn still has a good amount of empty office space.

Unmentioned: the severe cutback in planned Atlantic Yards office space, from about 2 million square feet to 336,000 square feet, and thus a cut in projected jobs. While Brooklyn may attract creative industries, the justification for the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning, and the initial Atlantic Yards office space, was to meet the need for back office space--large floor plates in large building sites for non-creative industries like financial services.

Public opposition

The article continues:
The plan still faces opposition from area residents and legal challenges. Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for a group opposed to the project called Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, says many residents are concerned their neighborhood will be changed for the worse by traffic generated by the arena and the nature of the overall development, which, they fear, will alter the diverse racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups that make Brooklyn special.

Beyond that fuzzy summary, the challenge in state court takes on the government's dubious claims of blight, while the challenge in federal court argues that eminent domain must proceed via a more transparent and democratic planning process.

Developer responsiveness?

The article concludes by giving the developer the benefit of the doubt:
Ms. Gilmartin says Forest City has cut about one million square feet from the project and has worked with state, city and local leaders to address issues of scale and density. In addition, she says the project's location over one of the city's biggest transit hubs makes sense because it will give people access to public transportation, which can help limit traffic.

Gilmartin seems to be channeling her mysteriously-departed predecessor, Jim Stuckey: the project, in terms of square footage, is about the same size as announced, an issue that flummoxed the press nearly a year ago. Of course density is appropriate near a transit hub; the issue is not the prospect of density, but how much.

Our lagging infrastructure, the mismatch with municipalities, and the AY (bad) example

A bridge collapse in Minneapolis and a steam-pipe explosion in Manhattan serve as a jumping-off point for a lengthy New Republic essay by architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen, headlined American Collapse (subscribers only).

And, yes, Atlantic Yards eventually surfaces as a bad example of a public-private partnership that skirts real public needs. Both she and Joel Kotkin, an analyst writing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, point to an unhealthy municipal focus on sports facilities and other sideshows.

She writes:
Headlines screeching news of these two horrifying events have replaced, temporarily, the usual newspaper rhythm of weekly incantations announcing this or that city's plans for adorning itself with a new stadium, public park, or luminescent museum--announcements that often serve to distract the public's attention from the silent scourge afflicting this country's viscera. One pipe explosion and one bridge collapse just might be enough to rouse the public to the news that America's metropolitan regions are in serious trouble. Bridges, utilities, and flood-prevention systems, whether publicly or privately owned, are grossly neglected…

While these matters are usually discussed as problems related to localities or specific pieces of infrastructure, she warns that a balkanized approach is dangerous, and that we should "dispense absolutely with the dichotomy of city versus suburb" but rather think about metropolitan regions.

In his more brief commentary yesterday headlined Road Work author Kotkin similarly looks at our misplaced priorities:
Rather than deal with the expensive and difficult task of retrofitting the sinews of commerce and communication — bridges, tunnels, roads, rail lines, ports, sewers, and drainage systems — America's urban powers focus on the ephemeral and the glitzy. They emphasize not brick and mortar, but sports stadia, convention centers, arts palaces, dubiously effective new light-rail lines, hotels and condo projects.

Of course, ribbon cuttings for such facilities and announcements of new sports teams tend to provide primo p.r. opportunities for elected officials and the private entities they choose to partner with--witness the Nets jerseys unveiled for the initial Atlantic Yards press conference.

Infrastructure issues

Infrastructure, Williams Goldhagen points out, bridges cities, suburbs, and beyond. (Indeed, why is it that the Washington, DC Metro extends into Maryland and Virginia but the New York City Transit Authority subways don’t connect with New Jersey’s PATH trains?)

She writes:
Infrastructure is one crucial point at which politics and architecture merge. A country's physical plant should be front and center in the policy agendas of its public officials, and it should be front and center in the intellectual and professional agendas of the professional stewards of its built environment. For many reasons, this is not the case in the United States... But infrastructure should be defined not by what it looks like, and not by who designs it or who pays for it, and not by who builds it or actually uses it. It should be defined by whom it is meant to serve.

And much of our infrastructure is in lousy shape. According to the latest (2005) "Infrastructure Report Card" by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the highest grade for any of fifteen categories was C, while ten categories—“including drinking water, waste-water management, navigable waterways, transit, and schools--received scores in the D range.”

How did we get here?

She compares the U.S. to metropolitan regions rapidly developing countries in Asia, “and the gross inferiority of America's physical infrastructure is immediately apparent.” (Indeed; go to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and there’s a speedy, spiffy “train to the plane.”) But even Europe or Canada surpass us; she points to Barcelona’s revamp in preparation for the 1992 Summer Olympics and Vancouver's effort to create a 24-hour city, with the continent’s fastest-growing residential downtown.

But infrastructure is expensive, and hard to plan; she points to recent exhibitions in New York on Robert Moses, which show how difficult it is to plan and coordinate public investment involving federal, state, and local initiatives. Voters don’t like to pay for expensive projects, and thus elected officials don’t like to associate themselves with them. Costly maintenance provides even less political advantage. (So a second-term mayor like Mike Bloomberg, whose PlaNYC 2030 does look ahead, shows unusual foresight.)

Williams Goldhagen writes:
Even in the heyday of American infrastructure-building, from 1930 to 1970, it took an imperious wheeler-dealer such as Robert Moses to take maximal advantage of the funds that the federal government was making available to American cities: owing to Moses, for example, New York City received more than twice the Title I funds for slum clearance of any other city in the country. Robert Caro, Moses’s biographer, who was simultaneously fascinated and revolted by Moses’s labyrinthine anti-democratic conception of his calling, conceded in The Power Broker that “the problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge upon the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one that democracy has not yet solved.” American democracy, that is.

Since the 1970s, she writes, it’s gotten worse, since the structure of states and municipalities doesn’t fit in managing a cross-border metropolitan area. (Indeed; how much could Newark, linked into the New York City Transit Authority, contribute to fighting the regional affordable housing problem?) And the federal government has gotten out of the infrastructure business.

She writes:
Shouldn't we think about our country's physical plant in terms not that different from our legal and regulatory systems in general--as a necessary foundation for the social and economic health and growth of this country, requiring substantial federal leadership and funding? We need a national infrastructure for infrastructure.

Moses, Jacobs, and beyond

She also laments “the public's lack of faith” in the expertise of “city planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and civil engineers,” contrasting it to our willingness to trust other experts like lawyers and doctors. She considers some of the blame justified, some not.

She writes:
It began with the widely publicized failures of the federally funded slum clearance and urban renewal programs of the 1960s, which nurtured a crude morality tale of the consequences of governmental intervention in the country's physical plant, a David-and-Goliath melodrama played out in the standoff between a feisty little lady named Jane Jacobs and an outsize predatory "expert" named Robert Moses. An overly simplistic and misleading fable was born, according to which government should keep its grubby hands off our cities. Nearly half a century later, this legend continues to dominate public thinking about how our country's infrastructure should be managed.

Today's city planners are seen as clueless and well-meaning bureaucrats at best, and as anti-democratic elitists at worst. Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers (including the many who do not merit the slander) are depicted as divas who care more about fancy forms than about the people who live in their buildings or the clients who build them. Expertise in the built environment is often held in public ridicule. As a result, folk wisdom has it that it is up to the public-spirited citizen--the community board activist, the local environmental review agency, the historic preservation commission--to stop them: thus unwittingly validating a salient quotation that was prominently displayed in one of the Moses exhibitions. "The critics," he once said, "build nothing."

And this of course is the ready reaction to Atlantic Yards critics and opponents, even labeling them NIMBYs, though a group that organized the alternative UNITY plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard could hardly be called NIMBY.

Williams Goldhagen allows that public mistrust “is not wholly misplaced” and suggests that two “glaringly inadequate” visions dominate architecture and urban design. She writes:
The CNU [Congress for New Urbanism], inspired by the ideas in Jacobs's The Death and Life of American Cities, promotes a more or less sensible set of principles for urban development that are now commonly accepted: zoning should nurture a mix of commercial, retail, and residential uses; density is preferable to sprawl; nodal communities are preferable to bedroom suburbs; infrastructural planning should prioritize mass transit over the automobile; and so on.

But most CNU examples, she suggests, such as Seaside and Celebration, Florida, don't work. She calls the other option, promulgated by Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, "little more than developer-friendly urbanism." Her one hope is James Corner, of Field Operations in New York City, which "is committed to an interdisciplinary approach to the infrastructural, ecological, and social problems facing metropolitan regions," but so far has only proposed rather than executed some major projects.

It's disappointing that she didn't try to address the New York City Department of City Planning's efforts, which are extensive--and, of course, omit Atlantic Yards.

Plans and privatization

On paper, she suggests, Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's Central Area Plan for Chicago, both look good. But on the ground, “much of what is being done is pernicious.” She points to the willingness of city and even state governments to sell off parts of their public infrastructures—roadways, water systems, etc.—to private bidders.

While she doesn't mention it, Forest City Ratner's plan to provide a new Vanderbilt Yard for the MTA as part of a larger development, rather than have the MTA identify its infrastructure needs first, shows another example of a developer taking the lead.

One worthy private effort, she suggests, is the recently opened Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, a public amenity funded almost entirely through philanthropy—and thus not a replicable model.

(I wrote about the park in January. Photo from the Seattle Art Museum.)

The desperation of Atlantic Yards

And then she finds Atlantic Yards the poster child of a public-private partnership gone wrong, though I think she focuses on the wrong thing. She writes:
More typical are the so-called public-private partnerships to which desperate cities across the country have been increasingly turning since the 1970s. One such project is Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Headlines on this project have predictably run this way: Brooklyn teams up with the developer Bruce Ratner to create a major new project that will contain private residences (which will profit the developer) and new public amenities. This project will jump-start the economic revitalization of downtown Brooklyn. Then a few years go by. New headlines: New York City has granted Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner X, Y, and Z additional zoning, or land use, or other concessions. These concessions threaten to severely limit public access to the project. Yet if the concessions are not granted, the developer may pull out, to the economic detriment of the city. If Atlantic Yards is built as it is now envisioned, its public spaces are likely to suffer the same fate as those "privately owned public spaces" in Manhattan that Jerold Kayden meticulously documented in his book Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience.

The failure to propose truly public space is hardly the greatest vulnerability of the Atlantic Yards plan, and Forest City Ratner has not publicly threatened to pull out without getting additional subsidies or concessions.

Rather, the still-fuzzy accounting of subsidies, the failure to plan in ways PlaNYC 2030 now recommends, and the questionable claims of blight are among the bigger issues raised by AY.

Who's responsible?

The privatization of infrastructure, Williams Goldhagen warns, leaves bottom-line focused companies to ignore larger needs and points to a larger political responsibility:
Infrastructure is the classic public good that the free market does not and cannot provide. On the scale that is necessary, only the federal government can make the difference.

...We need a National Infrastructure Agency... At the very least Congress should establish a federal line-item capital budget, as most other developed countries have, which would help to reduce the perpetual scanting of long-term budgetary needs in favor of short-term ones. State officials should demand federal assistance to address their infrastructural needs. Municipal officials should find the legal and political mechanisms... that would allow them to work in concert with, rather than in competition with, their counterparts in neighboring communities. Leading design professionals should refuse to be merely producers of high-end cultural icons and luxury housing, and make themselves relevant to every part of the infrastructure challenge, and work to re-instate the public's trust in their authority.

The public good

She concludes:
Surely ordinary Americans can recognize this crisis: they drive on it, cursing the traffic, every day. The ribbon of concrete and steel washing into the Mississippi River; the chasm on West 41st Street in New York (or the larger one--very different in origin, to be sure--that remains at New York City's Ground Zero); the boarded-up acres of urban disaster in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina left behind; the billions of gallons of raw sewage released into our waterways every year; the stupendously mediocre Rose Kennedy Greenway; the bridges and the highways closed because of some spectacular failure or the need for emergency repairs--all these disasters are only the most publicly visible evidence of what happens, or does not happen, when policymakers and design professionals fail to effectively use their power for the oldest and best purpose of all, America's public good.

Brooklyn, as the Empire State Development Corporation has declared, would seem to be getting some elements of the public good via the Atlantic Yards plan: a new subway entrance, a new railyard, affordable housing, open space. However, as Williams Goldhagen's essay suggests, a developer-led process may be enough to convince local decisionmakers, but it may not be a full assessment of community needs, or the appropriate balance of costs and benefits.

However, as she also suggests, an inability or unwillingness to plan and fund projects can lead communities to turn to developers. But that's not the fate for all of New York City and the balance is different elsewhere; the Columbia University expansion and the proposed Coney Island development are both proceeding with greater weight for community and civic skepticism.

Atlantic Yards, which seems to be popping up more regularly as a negative example, seems to have already taught officials some lessons.

The “owner-use” eviction controversy comes to Prospect Heights

As property values skyrocket in New York, the cheapest—though perhaps not the least risky—route to a substantial living space may be the use (or exploitation) of the “owner-use” clause in state rent regulations, which allows landlords of rent-stabilized buildings to take “one or more apartments” for personal use.
(Photos by Jonathan Barkey except as marked.)

And that’s the issue on Bergen Street in Prospect Heights, where dozens of neighbors, along with some elected officials, on Sunday protested plans by the new owners of 533 Bergen to use five of eight apartments for their family, thus evicting rent-stabilized tenants from four railroad apartments, each averaging not much more than 800 square feet.

“I have no problem with them having a big house,” commented lawyer Brent Meltzer of South Brooklyn Legal Services (SBLS), who represents 28-year tenant Evelyn Suarez, who faces eviction. “But why develop on the backs of these tenants?”
(Pictured are Suarez (l.) and fellow tenant Sillather Bullock, who calls her neighbor "a second mom." Bullock does not face eviction. Photo by Adrian Kinloch.)

Because, apparently, it’s cheaper--and follows the letter, if perhaps not the spirit, of the law. The four-story building cost owners Deanne Cheuk, Andre Wiesmayr, Felicity Loughrey, and Dan Bailey $860,000 in 2006, a jump from the $470,000 sales price in 2004, according to city records, but still a relative bargain in today’s real estate market. One rent-stabilized tenant, apparently without much legal counsel, already departed on payment of a pittance. Of the three apartments not targeted, according to Meltzer, tenants pay $2000, $700, and $800 a month.

Indeed, while rent-stabilization laws have kept the rent for Suarez, who lives in her apartment (right) with two children and a grandson, at $402, the estimated market value of the building, according to city records, has skyrocketed.
2003: $232,000
2004: $544,000
2005: $555,000
2006: $666,000
2007: $799,000

Bailey and Loughrey, who live in the building, were out of town, and messages left for them and their lawyer were not answered. But attorney Jeffrey Goldman told the Brooklyn Paper earlier this year that, while Suarez wouldn’t likely find a similar rent, she’s long enjoyed a “very good government deal” and like many others, will face the market. “I don’t think that’s unfair,” Goldman said. “It may be unfortunate. But I don’t think it’s unfair.”

“Do they wish there was some other way?” Goldman said. “Yes, but in today’s market, it’s just not possible.” Suarez, whose apartment has a bunk bed in the main bedroom, says she fears going to a shelter.

"It's a very difficult situation," said tenant Carlos Martinez (right) at the protest, speaking through a translator. He and his family have lived in the building for 17 years.

Meanwhile, Bailey and Loughrey, who have one child so far, seek the same amount of space some other families—wealthier, luckier, more frugal?—have gained elsewhere in the city or country: a first floor with a living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room, storage room, and bathroom; a second floor with four bedrooms and two bathroom; and a third floor with a guest bedroom and den.

Comments on Brownstoner yesterday ran the gamut, with defenders of the owners calling rent-stabilized units “an incredible perk” and pointing to the disconnection, in some cases, between actual need and access to such units and the difficulty of evicting illegal subletters. Defenders of the tenants, however, pointed out that the price of the building factored in the presence of rent-stabilized tenants.

The protest was organized by the Fifth Avenue Committee, along with SBLS. A letter to Bailey and Loughrey handed out at the block party stated, “Your intent to evict our neighbors is nothing less than an affront to this community and to the character which it embodies.” And promotional material referred to Cheuk as an “international design favorite” and Loughrey as a “celebrity journalist,” questioning whether “good artists” could be “good neighbors.” In other words, without the law on their side, the tenants and their advocates must try moral suasion--and beyond, as the snake on the balloon indicates.

The law evolves

Also attending the protest were several tenants from 47 East Third Street in the East Village, where an even more dramatic owner-use eviction case is unfolding, and has led so far to a state court decision denounced by tenants and tenant advocates, including a good number of elected officials in Manhattan.

Catherine and Alistair Economakis, who own the building, live in a floor-through apartment on Pacific Street with two children but want a larger space for their family. They initially filed plans to evict all tenants from the 15 apartments at the six-story building, turning an 11,600 square foot, 60-room building into a home with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a den, a playroom, a gym, a library, and a two-floor living room. (Next door is a Catholic Worker soup kitchen and down the block is the Hell's Angels clubhouse.)

While a trial court ruled that allowing a landlord to recover all the remaining units in a tenement building for owner-occupancy purposes would be incompatible with the Rent Stabilization code’s intent to provide affordable and stable housing to city residents, the New York State Appellate Division February 15 unanimously overruled that decision.

The judges ruled:
We disagree because the Legislature has determined that an owner's need to recover units for personal use and occupancy as a primary residence is a legitimate exception to the rent stabilization scheme. Plaintiffs' argument that a restriction on the number of units that may be recovered for personal use is more consistent with the rent stabilization scheme is more appropriately directed to the State Legislature.

Assemblymember Deborah J. Glick called the landlords’ proposal “cruel” and said that, “along with more than 25 of my colleagues in the City and State Legislatures, I sent a letter to New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo about the dreadful Appellate Division ruling.”

A letter to Gov. Eliot Spitzer handed out at the protest said, “It is a cruel irony that the long term residents who fought to make our neighborhoods better places are now being displaced, ‘victims of their own success.’” The letter urged that the law be amended to limit the number of units a landlord may recover for his/her family to one and to enhance penalties for those who evict tenants and then, rather than use them for family as stated, rent the apartments at market rate.

(Tenant advocates in the New York Is Our Home! Affordable Rent Campaign request: Make the rules for NYC the same as those used in the suburban counties: restrict landlords two units for their own personal use, should have to show an immediate need for the unit, and seniors, disabled tenants and tenants in occupancy for 20 years or more should be protected against owner-use evictions.)

In The Villager, Economakis said that the building cost about $800,000 and noted, “The cost to renovate this property and convert it to a single-family home is significantly less than anything comparable on the market.” (A renovation would cost about $350,000).

The Villager reported:
Asked whether he felt turning a 11,600-square-foot tenement into a single-family dwelling was excessive, Economakis replied: “As long as an owner can prove he has a good-faith intent to occupy the space, no one should tell him whether he has the right to live in a certain size home.”

So far, the courts agree.

Economakis now says six of the remaining nine rent-stabilized tenants could stay, but, according to The Villager, would not say if that offer was still on the table.

A 6/26/05 New York Times article on the conflict, headlined Everybody Out?, quoted Andrew Scherer, who represents tenants and wrote Residential Landlord-Tenant Law in New York, "The size of the space that somebody claims they intend to live in must pass what lawyers call the 'giggle test' -- the notion that the claim is believable and will not cause a judge to start to giggle. The idea that someone would take 15 units with 60 rooms as a primary residence is absurd."

The case in Brooklyn is surely less “absurd,” but the principle is similar.

AY effect?

Both City Council Member Letitia James (right) and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery cited the looming effect of Atlantic Yards, as did advocates for the tenants. But Atlantic Yards may be more a symptom than a cause. Bergen Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues is a diverse block in a less diverse district. The eastern segment is mostly row houses, several with "No Arena" signage.

The western segment, which includes 533 Bergen, is a mix of old tenements and industrial buildings; one of the latter houses a city Department of Housing Preservation and Development service center, another was torn down for new housing, while another houses Lava, an all-female troupe whose work combines dance, theater and acrobatics.
(Photo by Adrian Kinloch)

Nearly across the street from 533 Bergen is the Iglesia Evangelica Latina, a sign of the neighborhood’s Spanish speaking community. Next door to 533 Bergen is a home operated by Girls and Boys Town (right), where some two-thirds of the youth “have had formal court involvement for delinquent acts such as theft.” To the east, at Carlton and down one block to St. Marks, a bodega was supplanted in 2005 by Restaurant Sorrel.

Two doors to the west is the Dean Street playground, site of some stupendous renderings of Atlantic Yards, which would encroach on the north side of Dean Street. At the corner with Sixth Avenue is the 78th Precinct headquarters.

Census figures from 2000 place this block of Bergen Street smack in the middle of an upper-income district, suggesting it was a bit of an anomaly. (Click to enlarge; mark indicates location of 533 Bergen.)

Concerns about Atlantic Yards-related traffic may dampen, rather than enhance property values. The most dramatic changes are likely to come in outlying areas like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where tenants without rent regulation would see rents rise.

In other words, the most likely explanation for this conflict is that this building was a relative bargain in the midst of gentrification, Atlantic Yards or not.

And times certainly have changed. A search on “533 Bergen Street” turns up a 5/16/85 New York Times article, which reports that two Brooklyn men, one a resident of 533 Bergen, robbed a Brooklyn wholesale clothing and knitwear manufacturer in Gowanus. One of the gunmen died in the shootout. Not only has crime declined in 22 years, but so has manufacturing. Meanwhile, housing values have rocketed.

At the beach volleyball tourney, Nets synergy but no ticket promotion

The just-concluded second annual Brooklyn Open, the new stop on the AVP pro beach volleyball tour, signals a commitment to a broader borough presence from Forest City Ratner subsidiary Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment (BSE).

And there's surely synergy; as the NetsDaily blog pointed out yesterday, Nets star Vince Carter and Nets owner Bruce Ratner presented the winning check, and the tournament winners wore Nets jerseys.

However, it looks like the FCR folks are fine-tuning their approach. Last year, according to an interview quoted by NetsDaily, a BSE executive referred to the new company as "Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment in partnership with Atlantic Yards." And that, of course, is what the signage said last year (below).

This year's model, however, eschewed the Atlantic Yards mention, though a press release mentioned it. Of course, Barclays, which bought naming rights to the planned arena, signed on as a sponsor.

Does Atlantic Yards no longer need a plug, now that it's been approved?

No Nets tix

When I wandered by temporary tour stadium off the Coney Island boardwalk at about 12:30 pm on Saturday, there were many empty seats, as the photos below show. More fans were on their way, so maybe it filled up later, as it apparently did last year.

One noticeable difference: unlike at last year's event, there was no booth promoting Nets tickets next to the main ticket table.

What to make of it? Was it more important last year to promote the Nets? Were ticket sales too low to make it worthwhile? Is the focus now on selling high-rollers access to more expensive suites in the planned Barclays Center?

Still, as the photos show, Forest City Ratner and Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment got plenty of exposure.

A Nets fan's candor: 2009 deadline "increasingly unlikely"

As part of a blog post yesterday on the efforts by Forest City Ratner to become more of a sporting presence in the borough, via Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment's (BSE) sponsorship of events like the pro volleyball tour, the anonymous fan behind the NetsDaily Blog lists potential arena events and muses, "None of this can happen until the arena is built and that 2009-10 deadline looks increasingly unlikely."

Indeed, the project is way behind schedule.

NetsDaily also cites a 2006 quote from BSE executive Chris Brahe: "As you know we are moving our team to Brooklyn, hopefully for the 2009 season..."
(Emphasis added)

Forest City Enterprises executive Chuck Ratner in March seemingly confirmed a 2010-11 opening season, then insisted afterward, "We remain committed to our goal of opening the arena in time for the 2009-2010 NBA basketball season.”

The future of Coney Island will not look quite like this

Thor Equities may call its changing, not-yet-approved plan for a prime chunk of the Coney Island amusement zone "the future of Coney Island," and that may be so--at least for that central portion.

But it's unlikely that the future will be defined by the enduring Coney Island icons--the Cylcone, the Wonder Wheel, the Parachute Jump--Thor has chosen for its oft-repeated graphics, which line the walls of prime but empty property along Stillwell Avenue, the straight shot from the subway to the beach.

For Atlantic Yards watchers, it may hearken back to 2003, when the 16-tower Atlantic Yards megaproject was launched with a web site called BBall.net.

Showdown in September?

A Daily News article yesterday, headlined Sands of time catch up to Coney Island, suggests a showdown next month:
Megadeveloper Thor Equities and its president Joe Sitt envision hotels, entertainment venues and amusement parks in a new Coney Island that draws crowds year-round.

The success of that vision — as well as another plan to build mostly luxury housing by developer Taconic Investment Partners — hinges on a city zoning overhaul expected to be released in September.

The city has never been thrilled with Thor's Las Vegas-style vision. Earlier this month, a high-ranking city official told The News, "Thor's proposal is dead in the water."

One concern is that land may remain fallow and boardwalk storefronts empty if the city and Thor remain deadlocked.

Channeling Jane Jacobs?

An esteemed historian of Coney's good times and bad offered a money quote to the Daily News:
"What's strange is Coney Island has always had this sense of anarchy and now here's somebody who's trying to sterilize and impose a vision of retail-tainment," said Coney Island historian Charles Denson. "Sitt's not an evil guy. But this is his vision and the worst thing to have in Coney Island is one person's singular vision."

Denson sounded like he was channeling urbanist Jane Jacobs, patron saint of mixed uses and diversity of ownership. She wrote:
The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop -- insofar as public policy and action can do so -- cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.

She was writing about neighborhoods, not amusement districts, and surely many amusement parks or areas have just one owner. But Coney is different, right? The Department of City Planning has been resistant to Sitt's plans, so let's see what emerges.

Civic project? The (unmoored) Nets net Wrigley as "off-season presenting sponsor"

Still pending, with a decision expected in September, is a lawsuit, filed in state court, by Atlantic Yards opponents and critics challenging the legitimacy of the environmental review. “The legislature did not intend a privately owned sports facility” to be a civic project, plaintiffs' attorney Jeff Baker contended in court on May 3.

But what is a civic project? It's defined as “A project or that portion of a multi-purpose project designed and intended for the purpose of providing facilities for educational, cultural, recreational, community, municipal, public service or other civic purposes.” Attorneys for the Empire State Development Corporation argue that sports facilities of course constitute civic projects.

That may be so, but how much are sports franchises about community spirit--remember the attorney for the MTA cited "civic pride"--and how much are they about marketing opportunities?

Wrigley's and the Nets

That brings us to... gum. Wrigley has become the National Basketball Association's official chewing gum. And a Forest City Ratner press release avoids the location New Jersey--no civic pride for the Garden State?--in announcing some special news regarding the Nets:
The Nets have named Wrigley as the first-ever off-season presenting sponsor for a sports team in the metropolitan area.

In presenting Nets Overtime: The Summer Season, Wrigley will receive rotating brand exposure of its five chewing gum brands -- Big Red, Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Wrigley’s Spearmint and Winterfresh – on all communications including, but not limited to, press banners, press releases, email campaigns and www.njnets.com, as well as all materials associated with basketball clinics, community programs, season ticket holder events, ticket sales collateral and the 2007 NBA Draft.

Nets Overtime runs throughout late spring and the summer until the opening day of training camp in October. It will include an extensive series of events and activities such as the Nets Draft Party, basketball camps and clinics, coaching clinics, street fairs, and auditions for the Nets Dancers, Nets Kids, Team Hype, and the NETSational Seniors.

"Nets Overtime is a unique opportunity to create value for the Wrigley brands by strengthening their awareness to our fan-base and beyond in the number one media market,” said Nets CEO Brett Yormark. “Wherever our brand goes, the Wrigley brands will be visible. We are thrilled that Wrigley is demonstrating its commitment to Nets Basketball and are confident that this new partnership will provide a powerful opportunity for it to deliver a direct, positive message.”

In addition, Wrigley, a Chicago-based company, will be a valued partner of the Nets throughout the 2007-08 season. The agreement includes an extensive list of unique elements tailored to the company’s communication goals such as the branding of the Nets locker room and ball boys, gum dispensers on the team benches and scorers’ table, courtside and LED signage, presence on www.njnets.com, unique in-store retailer promotions, and a fan-friendly in-arena feature.

Governor signs 421-a revision; Times, others ignore "Atlantic Yards carve-out"

So Governor Eliot Spitzer has signed the reform of the 421-a tax break, which includes an "Atlantic Yards carve-out" worth up to $200 million for developer Forest City Ratner. When the "carve-out" was worth $300 million, it was criticized by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, ACORN's Bertha Lewis, Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, affordable housing advocate Brad Lander, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), the Brooklyn Paper, and others.

When it was reduced but not eliminated, the only official to offer measured criticism was Jeffries. (He issued it after I queried him, but he may have been prepared to issue a statement anyway.) DDDB seemingly stood alone in its forceful criticism.

Affordable housing advocates, city officials, state officials, and the public at large all had something to gain in the revised legislation, beyond the "carve-out." So perhaps some critics felt they could only go so far.

But what about those seemingly independent? Good government advocates were silent, as were editorial pages beyond that initial Brooklyn Paper comment. The New York Times, in its reporting, managed to mangle the historical record. No one beyond a few Brooklynites questioned whether signing the bill comports with Spitzer's claim of being a reformer.

Moses redux?

It's somewhat reminiscent of the success of Robert Moses, the power broker and master builder who changed the face of New York not merely by leveraging significant federal funds but by getting the pillars of New York liberalism to concur. (Also, he had the press on his side.)

We've recently been through some Moses revisionism, but that began years ago. One example is Joel Schwartz's 1993 book The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City, which is available online in full from the Ohio State University Press.

Schwartz concludes:
The New York approach depended not only on Moses and his men on the Committee on Slum Clearance, but also on his allies in the liberal city. He could not have succeeded without them and the era of active, interventionist government that they shaped. The Title I program, the product of postwar liberalism, could not have been engineered by the AFL building trades alone or by Tammany, which was battered and in eclipse. It also depended on the ambitions of liberal New Yorkers. Moses could count on a realtor such as William Zeckendorf, a Brooklyn banker such as Thomas Shanahan, and a political fixer such as John McGrath. But redevelopment also needed stalwart liberals such as Samuel Rosenman and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., union housing visionaries such as Abraham Kazan and Maxwell Tretter, ethical realtors such as James Felt and Milton Saslow, inspired capitalists such as David Rockefeller, and inspired planners such as Lawrence Orton. Some were Randall's Island cronies. Others were only limited partners in particular projects. Still others managed to convince themselves that their own decent pursuits were detached from Moses's ruthless deals. But they were all participants in the redevelopment of New York.
(Emphasis added)

The Times's report

From today's New York Times, an unbylined article, headlined New Laws for Housing Tax Break, seems based on the governor's press release, but ignores the carve-out:
Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed into law yesterday three bills to revamp a popular tax break for developers and encourage the construction of thousands of apartments for low-income New York City residents.

The laws are expected to expand the number of neighborhoods where developers are required to include apartments for residents of limited means in order to receive tax breaks. Advocates for lower-cost housing have long said the laws would mean more housing for low-income residents and fewer incentives for developers to build luxury high-rises.

“This legislation will allow New York City to target its limited tax abatement resources to more effectively promote the construction of affordable housing in the neighborhoods that need it most,” the governor said. The tax program that is being revamped, known as 421-a, was started in the 1970s to spur housing development of any kind. Under it, developers received a 10-to-25-year exemption from increases in property taxes resulting from their work. But government officials and advocates for affordable housing say that given the change in New York’s real estate market since the program’s inception, the tax breaks are no longer needed in Midtown and other thriving parts of the city.

Under the new laws, developers will be required to meet more stringent affordability standards, give priority to neighborhood residents for lower-cost units, and ensure that units remain affordable for at least 35 years.

The governor's press release

Spitzer's press release mentions Atlantic Yards, but fails to explain how it would get special treatment. The headline is GOVERNOR SPITZER SIGNS BILL TO REFORM NYC TAX EXEMPTION FOR HOUSING DEVELOPMENT: New Law Will Encourage Construction of Affordable Housing. It states:

Governor Eliot Spitzer today announced that he has signed bills that will encourage housing construction throughout New York City, with an emphasis on the construction of affordable housing. The package of bills reform New York’s outdated 421-a law to better target limited resources to neighborhoods in need of affordable housing.

“This legislation will allow New York City to target its limited tax abatement resources to more effectively promote the construction of affordable housing in the neighborhoods that need it most,” Governor Spitzer said. “This reformed law will build on our efforts to solve the housing crisis that has pushed too many working New Yorkers out of the middle class and prevented those struggling New Yorkers from climbing up into economic security.”

The 421-a program was initially established 36 years ago to promote the construction of multiple dwelling housing units in New York City during a housing market downturn. The law has provided property tax exemptions to housing developers, particularly developers of desperately needed affordable housing, and has produced more than 110,000 apartments in New York City.

Given the dramatically changed real estate market in New York City since the program’s inception, tax breaks are no longer necessary as incentives for pure market-rate housing projects in many booming areas of the city. Thus, reform of the program was necessary to direct more of these tax dollars toward the production of affordable housing.

The three bills signed into law amend the 421-a program to significantly expand the areas within which affordable housing is required for tax abatements; require that these units meet more stringent affordability standards; give community residents priority for the affordable units; assure that these units will remain affordable over a long period of time; and require projects receiving City tax subsidies to pay prevailing wages to their building service employees. Moreover, a grandfather provision is included that prevents the disruption of projects already in the development pipeline by exempting them from these new regulations.

The Legislature has also agreed to swiftly pass further reforms that address some outstanding concerns. Among other provisions, these promised amendments will assure New York City’s continued ability to provide tax abatements to moderate and middle income housing projects for which it is providing substantial government assistance. They will also assure that the buildings that make up the Atlantic Yards project will receive enhanced abatements only if they meet on-site affordability requirements during each phase of project construction.

“I am pleased that all sides were able to come together to produce this important reform, which is critical to the future development of affordable housing in New York City,” Governor Spitzer said.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said: “I want to thank Governor Spitzer and our partners in State government, along with the City Council and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, for coming to a landmark agreement on 421-a reform. Through inventive rezonings and the largest municipal affordable housing plan in the nation’s history, we have already built tens of thousand of affordable units, and today’s signing - along with the additional amendments that the Legislature has agreed to swiftly pass - will ensure that we have the tools to spur even more affordable housing construction for years to come.”

Assemblyman Vito Lopez, Assembly sponsor of the legislation, said: “I commend Governor Eliot Spitzer for signing the 421-a Reform Bill into law. This groundbreaking reform will for the first time require the production of on-site affordable housing for working class families in many of the City’s up-and-coming neighborhoods. In an unprecedented effort to offset gentrification, our reform also mandates that 50% of the affordable units built using 421-a will be set aside for community residents, and that all the affordable units will remain affordable for at least 35 years. In addition all building services workers in buildings over 50 units will receive a prevailing wage for their services. This is a major victory for low-income and middle-income New Yorkers.”

Senator Marty Golden, Senate sponsor of the Legislation, said, “After a great deal of work from all the stakeholders in the process--governmental, private, and consumer--we have a bill that will not only preserve but will expand and target affordable housing in New York City, and help preserve the vitality of the housing market generally. This measure comes just in time, as the national housing market undergoes tremendous pressure, brought on at first by the collapse of some sub-prime mortgage investors, but with troubles now expanding to some of the more blue-chip lenders. It is no surprise that the first sector to be affected by problems will be affordable housing. This is the right time for government to provide the help needed to stabilize and expand the market.”

Who's paying for the affordable housing? New Domino-watchers want to know

If one of the lessons of the Atlantic Yards project for developers--like those of the New Domino project proposed in Williamsburg--is that they should hook up with affordable housing advocates to override zoning (or achieve a rezoning), a lesson for critics is that they should follow the money.

After all, Atlantic Yards has been touted as "providing" affordable housing without any reference to the public funds behind the units or any analysis of whether they represent a good bang for the buck.

So the Municipal Art Society (MAS), in its comments to the Department of City Planning (DCP) on the New Domino draft scope, a prelude to the environmental impact statement, begins:
Discussion of irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources to develop the project should, to the fullest extent possible, disclose the sources of the public funding that will be used to subsidize the affordable housing units; the total amount of the funding; and the percentage of that funding devoted to the projected site in relation to the total funding available citywide.

And Williamsburg architect Leah Kreger has started a blog, Domino Sugar Redux, and posted her comments on the draft scope. Among her requests:
Since the affordable component figures prominently, please have the applicant describe the strategy for financing the affordable component as they relate to tax and government subsidies.

Questions lingering

There's no guarantee those questions will be answered. Last year, the MAS, in comments filed after the Atlantic Yards Final Environmental Impact Statement was issued, asked:
In order to accurately assess whether the Atlantic Yards proposal will result in a net gain of affordable housing units, there needs to be an accounting of the public expenditures on this project versus the total amount of public subsidies available in the same fiscal year so that decision makers can accurately assess the public costs versus the public benefits. What percentage of the city’s total funds for housing will be required to build the project’s 2250 units?

In response, the Empire State Development Corporation offered only generalities. (Only after the project was approved did details emerge.) Will DCP be more forthcoming? The EIS will be written by the same environmental consulting firm, the ubiquitous AKRF.

On height and open space

While a rezoning further north along the Williamsburg waterfront allows buildings that are 400 feet, the height of two proposed New Domino towers, the MAS points out that neighborhing structures are generally no taller than 50 feet. The organizations suggestes a 250-foot height limit "in order to better respect the adjacent inland neighborhoods."

Assemblyman Vito Lopez has recommended that each of the tallest planned towers, two at 300 feet and two at 400 feet, should be reduced by ten stories, or 100 feet.

The MAS also suggests that the analysis consider waiving parking requirements, "in order to deter car traffic to retail destinations," a restriction on construction of condo-hotels; and allowance of ground-floor manufacturing use for new development.

MAS, commenting on the proposed open space, warned, as it had with Atlantic Yards, that “publicly-accessible” but privately owned open space may not "be a meaningful public amenity." MAS suggested that the open space could be mapped as public parkland, handed over to a local conservancy, requiring commercial retail or a community facility at the base of the restored Domino refinery facing the water, to draw people, and requiring retail frontage along the base of all buildings facing the waterfront.

Cumulative impacts

The New Domino project, as currently proposed, would mostly not be out of line with the height and density proposed for other areas of the Williamsburg waterfront. (An upland parcel would contain taller buildings than permitted upland elsewhere.)

But the Domino site was not rezoned, nor was it considered when the rest of the neighborhood was rezoned. So the MAS argues for consideration of cumulative impacts:
The Lead Agency must assess the impact the recent rezoning of a large section of Greenpoint/Williamsburg, in combination with the proposed rezoning here, will affect all the areas of concern. These two rezonings should not be examined independently of each other. In order to accurately analyze the significant environmental impacts of the proposed rezoning, this EIS should take into account the predicted and actual impacts resulting from the adjacent rezoning of Greenpoint/Williamsburg

Kreger comments similarly:
We hold the opinion that the proposed rezoning of Domino needs to be considered cumulatively with the effects of the zoning adopted in 2005 for the waterfront from N4th to Manhattan Avenue. The neigborhood needs assistance financial and otherwise to create a comprehensive plan instead of spot rezoning such as that proposed for Domino.

The Times corrects some ten-year-old errors; what about the "same site" error?

A correction in the New York Times on Thursday:
An article on Aug. 13, 1997, about an investigation into the police beating and torture of Abner Louima while he was in custody at a Brooklyn station house misstated his age at the time. (The same error appeared in at least nine other articles in 1997 and 2002, the year his case came to trial.) He was 30 then, not 33, and is now 40. A reader of The Times’s Web site noticed the error on a Times Topics page that was updated around the 10th anniversary of the attack.

The attack was 8/9/97, which means that, for the anniversary, the Times managed to do the research and issue a correction in about two weeks.

So why has it taken so long for the Times to correct the multiple errors, from 8/8/03 to 11/13/05, in which Atlantic Yards was described as potentially occupying the same site Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted for a new stadium? The newspaper was put on notice more than two-and-a-half months ago.

Errol Louis denounces jock spousal abuse, but where's JKidd?

Daily News columnist Errol Louis on Thursday took up the case of Michael Vick, the quarterback with an unsavory appetite for dogfighting. In a column headlined It's a dog and pony show: While Vick gets ripped for animal cruelty, the jocks who beat their wives get a pass, Louis made a quite reasonable point:
The same sports execs falling over themselves to sever Vick from the sport have been downright lenient when it comes to other offenders.

His examples:
--Michael Pittman of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a fourth domestic-violence arrest.
--Lionel Gates of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, charged with beating a pregnant woman.
--Lamar Thomas, formerly of the Miami Dolphins, put his pregnant fiancée's head through a window.
--Brett Myers of the Philadelphia Phillies allegedly dragged his wife around by the hair publicly.
--Bobby Chouinard of the Colorado Rockies, doing a year in jail after putting a loaded pistol to his wife's head.

What about JKidd?

I wondered if Louis would cite an example closer to home: New Jersey Nets point guard Jason Kidd, whose wife Joumana, in a recent divorce filing, accused him of serial adultery and regular physical abuse--front-page news in Louis's own newspaper.

Kidd was arrested in 2001 for hitting her; here's the 911 call. He pleaded guilty to a spousal abuse charge and was ordered to attend anger management counseling.

A fund-raiser

I checked to see if Louis has written about Kidd. A Lexis-Nexis search turned up no results.

A web search did show one intersection; Louis in June MC'd a Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service (BBCS) celebration event. BBCS, which runs a variety of social services, is surely a worthy cause, but any association with the event meant an association with Barclays, the title sponsor, Forest City Ratner, and the Nets. (Bruce Ratner's on the BBCS board.)

According to the BBCS web site:
Notable guests included Jason Kidd of the Nets; Bruce Ratner, President and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies; Gerard LaRocca, Chief Administrative Officer, Americas, Barclays Capital; Charles J. Hamm, Chairman Emeritus of the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service; and Brett Yormark, President and CEO of Nets Sports and Entertainment.

(The caption on the BBCS web site for the above photo: Nets legend Darryl Dawkins and Errol Louis during the Nets live sports memorabilia auction. Louis seems to be using his hand as a visor or saluting.)

A columnist's connection

Now that Louis has hobnobbed with Kidd and his bosses, in service of a good cause, maybe it's tougher for the columnist to classify Kidd in the same category as Pittman, Gates, and the rest.

I don't know the Daily News's ethical guidelines, but if Louis worked at the New York Times, he'd probably be running afoul of the guideline that says:
[Staffers] may not lend their names to campaigns, benefit dinners or similar events if doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or their newsroom's ability to remain neutral in covering the news.

As it happens, I have my doubts about the concept of neutrality and acknowledge I'm not neutral, that my skepticism aligns me closer to project opponents, though they don't speak for me and vice versa.

But I do think the accuracy and general quality of my work stands up much more than does Louis's Atlantic Yards coverage. He could've taken a step toward improving that record, however, had he included Kidd in his list.

ESDC says it's not not-hands-on, but could it do more?

The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) is indeed a little touchy about whether it's perceived as not-hands-on-enough regarding Atlantic Yards.

Last week, the ESDC issued out a statement:
ESDC Chairman Pat Foye never told the New York Observer that he was taking a hands-off approach to the Atlantic Yards project. The paper is running a clarification in its next edition.

ESDC has been thoroughly engaged with the community on this project. Our representatives have met with elected officials, community leaders, and even project opponents.

What Foye sought to convey to the Observer is that unlike the government-led projects our agency is shaping right now, Atlantic Yards was approved before this administration and is led by a private developer in partnership with government actors. Despite that distinction, ESDC - under its new leadership - has and is taking steps to closely monitor the project and address community concerns as it gets built.

This week's Observer noted:
Clarification: An Aug. 20 article ["Easy Does It for Pat Foye"] stated that Patrick Foye, downstate chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, "has previously explained to reporters that he has not taken as hands-on an approach" with Atlantic Yards as with the Javits Center and Moynihan Station projects. Mr. Foye has said that he has taken a different approach, as explained elsewhere in the article, but does not characterize it as any less vigorous.
(Emphasis in original)

The ESDC's effort regarding AY may be no less vigorous than regarding other projects, but the agency is vulnerable to criticism that it is less vigorous than it could be. For one thing, Foye was supposed to take a walking tour of the AY footprint in March; as far as I know, that hasn't occurred.

And, however much the ESDC wants to be careful in choosing an ombudsperson, the clock has already hit 108 days. While the current administration isn't responsible for the timetables of its predecessor, Brooklynites weren't given the same kind of slack in responding to the voluminous Draft Environmental Impact Statement. It was issued 7/18/06; comments were due little more than two months later, on 9/29/06.

Flashback, 1999: Developers, said FCR, must be "more creative" in finding sites

An article in the January 1999 issue of the late Brooklyn Bridge magazine, headlined "King of the Deal," suggested that Forest City Ratner was not only not yet imagining Atlantic Yards, it had run out of land in Brooklyn.

Given other evidence that the developer already had its eye on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard, it's safe to consider that a feint for public consumption.

The article begins:
Sandeep Mathrani used to fly over Brooklyn in a helicopter, videotaping traffic patterns and housing concentrations. As director of retail development for Forest City Ratner, he was searching for large spaces within residential neighborhoods on which to build new shopping complexes. "It's hard to drive and get a bird's-eye per­spective," says Mathrani.

The spaces winnow

And, after describing the developer's Atlantic Center mall and the emerging Atlantic Terminal mall, the article ultimately finds Mathrani almost wistful:
Mathrani no longer takes helicopter rides over the borough. In fact, his market research has led him to conclude that Brooklyn has little land suitable for further development. "There aren't any options," he says, sounding almost wistful. "Three or four years ago, it was an emerging market. Today, it is well-defined."

When Mathrani speaks about the number of stores in the suburbs versus Brooklyn, you can almost hear the sound of heartbreak in his voice. "We have 2.6 million people in Brooklyn, and four department stores," he says. "If you look at Nassau County in Long Island, which has the same population as the borough, they have twen­ty-six Staples, where I think we have five or four."

Mathrani expects the pace of retail development in the borough to slow down soon, simply because there will be no places left to build. "Developers are going to have to be a lot more creative."

The railyard beckons

At that point, clearly, the developer was not stating plans--at least not publicly--for building a platform over the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard. But that was before the price of land in Brooklyn skyrocketed and such a platform became financially feasible.

As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's Dennis Holt wrote last November, hearkening back to the 1993 groundbreaking for Atlantic Center, the developer did have its eye on the railyard, if not for retail than for a larger building:
“For the first time in a public setting, officials from Forest City Ratner Companies and their consultants revealed their plans for the Atlantic Center site.

“Forest City also revealed its desire to expand the project site to include space across Atlantic Avenue from Sixth Avenue west to Flatbush, where they hope to build an office tower over the open Long Island Railroad Tracks. These officials even talked about their vision of a new subway and rail complex.”

Plans change

The office tower became an arena and 16 towers, with retail at the base of several, and the ambitions of the plan required the developer to purchase land on the private market, convince the city government to convey streets and other properties, to win a belated bidding process for the railyard it had seemingly been promised, and, most contentiously, get the state to exercise eminent domain to assemble the 22-acre site. The latter effort is still in court.

Tellingly, the developer succeeded in leading careless journalists into describing the site as an "open railyard" (even though little more than a third of the site would be a railyard) and stating that the project would be built "on the... railyards" (rather than on and around the railyards).

The Columbia expansion, Atlantic Yards, and the cognitive dissonance of Richard Lipsky

When you hire Richard Lipsky, the man behind the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, you get not only an experienced lobbyist on behalf of small business, you get a blogger, a regular commenter on the news.

When clients on different sides of somewhat parallel development disputes hire Lipsky, however, readers get something else: some cognitive dissonance.

Lipsky, as Atlantic Yards watchers know, was hired by Forest City Ratner to organize an amateur sports league at the planned Brooklyn arena and to do other lobbying for the developer's projects. He’s said he typically would oppose a project with eminent domain but it wasn’t bringing in big-box stores or displacing other retailers. (Well, not directly, unless you count Freddy's Bar & Backroom.)

And Lipsky has been hired by Nick Sprayregen, owner of Tuck-it-Away storage, the largest landowner who has yet to sell to Columbia University and thus the most visible opponent of the university’s West Harlem expansion plan.

So that has led Lipsky to use some similar arguments and rhetoric for Atlantic Yards and against Columbia--and it just doesn't compute.

[Update Friday: Here's Lipsky's response, plus a comment from me.]

All or nothing?

Lipsky recently wrote about Columbia’s hiring of political consultant Bill Lynch to generate community support for the plan:
It is, however, somewhat beside the point since the real community concern has been in the all or nothing approach that the university has taken; as well as in the way in which Columbia, unlike Forest City Ratner in Brooklyn, has refrained from engaging the community in direct negotiations.
(Emphasis added)

Of course Columbia is willing to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) with the new West Harlem Local Development Corporation that includes members of Community Board 9 and project opponents, who were conspicuously absent from the Atlantic Yards CBA.

The LDC has been rightfully criticized, but compared to the Atlantic Yards CBA, which was negotiated with hand-picked parties behind closed doors, it’s a model of transparency.

Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chair of CB9, famously told the New York Observer last year that “We are avoiding the Brooklyn model,” seeking a wider coalition.

Last September, however, Lipsky wrote about Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn spokesman Daniel Goldstein’s unwillingness to compromise:
The all or nothing approach is never going to succeed unless you have the full support of an impacted community, and even then it won't be enough if a development has a larger public impact that will affect people well beyond the footprint of a project-which is exactly what AY does have.
(Emphasis added)
… The attack on the arena underscores the scorched earth nihilism of the DDD agenda.

The difference, apparently, is that Lipsky thinks the arena trumps all. (Update Thursday: Lipsky also cites the provision of affordable housing in the Atlantic Yards plan and points out it's not yet part of the Columbia plan; however, the presence of such housing did not convince the three affected community boards in Brooklyn to support Atlantic Yards.)

Lipsky has a regular critic, who posts pseudonymously as “SmithBrotherJoe,” flaying Lipsky for his inconsistencies. SmithBrotherJoe responded:
How easy and honest it would be to replace "Bill Lynch" with "Bruce Ratner/Marty Markowitz/Richard Lipsky;" "university" and "Columbia" with "FCRC/ESDC;""Harlem" with "Prospect Heights." Anyone can see that.

Lipsky doesn't rebut his critic. So let's assume his June 2006 acknowledgement offers his response:
Our goal is definitely to advance certain issues but we like to inform as many as possible on the various sides of any policy debate. Sometimes this wish is limited, as some readers never fail to point out, by the fact that we are in business to defend our clients' interests.

Targeting one guy

Recently Lipsky wrote about attacks by “grassroots” representatives on his client:
In a continuation of our commentary on the attempts by Bill Lynch to generate grass roots support for Columbia's expansion, we want to take a look today at the attempt by the Lynchites to make Nick Sprayregen into a poster child for rich white privilege.
Which brings us to the inconvenient fact that Nick Sprayregen is part of a racially and economically diverse grass roots coalition that thinks the Columbia plan stinks; and this coalition, in turn, is reflective of the unanimous sentiment of CB#9 that has an entirely different vision for the area than does the benevolent university.

A year ago, however, Lipsky hurled similar criticisms at Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's Daniel Goldstein, verging into thinly-veiled threats, calling someone who is clearly principled—wrongheaded to some, of course—into a misanthrope and crank:
Goldstein also told the paper that a size reduction alone would not halt the "my way or the highway"opposition to the project. Even the linchpin of the development for so many in Brooklyn-the team and the arena- is something that this misanthrope wants to disappear. Which means that the best thing that could happen to Brooklyn would be for Goldstein to disappear from the footprint of the borough.
His opposition to the arena, something we are going to advertise far and wide throughout the borough, means that there are now thousands of newly minted volunteers who will be delighted to man the bulldozer when the legal green flag is waived to demolish this obstructionist's abode. He has now gone from being a legitimate critic to just some self-serving crank and a pest.

Sprayregen has a legitimate reason to resist eminent domain, but he’s also a businessman. (Compared to most in the Columbia expansion zone, he has deep pockets, and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the plan; then again, Columbia has much deeper pockets.)

Lipsky recently wrote that Sprayregen and Columbia are negotiating a plan “to swap property with Columbia in order to create affordable housing while at the same time preserving Nick's own ownership rights.” Goldstein has nothing material to gain.

Comparing the communities

Last year, Lipsky criticized the Atlantic Yards opposition:
What was missing in all of this was an honest broker who could represent the community interests. The reason for the absence was that the mood in the community that coalesced around Develop Don't Destroy wasn't looking for any compromise that would have allowed the Nets to come to Brooklyn-the linchpin of the entire development.
So at the end of this long process, the opponents have their fruitless lawsuits, but little else. Knowing Bruce Ratner as well as I do (since I work for him on this development), I know that he was ready to listen to anyone who was willing to be reasonable. On the other hand, if you believe in all of your heart that a project will never be in the community's benefit, then you can't be reasonably expected to negotiate a community benefits agreement.

SmithBrotherJoe couldn’t resist:
Oh, just shut your lying mouth!!!!
Ratner refused to meet with any established organizations and actually CREATED COMMUNITY GROUPS OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH!!!
But somehow that doesn't bother you at all. I wonder why...
"The community coalesced around DDDB..." gee, you acknowledge that the COMMUNITY OPPOSES THIS PROJECT but you're willing to give the developer and his government stooges a pass on this. I wonder why...

(Also today, I compare the two CBAs.)

Lipsky on the poll

Lipsky in April found himself endorsing pollster Craig Charney’s take on the Atlantic Yards poll he conducted. (Here's my criticism.)

Lipsky wrote:
On the contrary, the the grass roots efforts for the two projects are grossly disparate. Whereas Ratner and crew really went to develop local support, the university is looking to build a faux effort through the use of its political muscle. The West Harlem LDC is a prime example of this ersatz effort, and resembles more of a Potemkin Village than a real representation of West Harlem's interests. What local group would hire one of the city's leading real estate attorneys pro bono to represent its interests, someone who has never sided with local groups in any land use battle?

As noted above, whatever its flaws, the West Harlem LDC is a lot more transparent. It even has a web site. In Brooklyn, we get BEE.

Booty capitalists

I wrote in August 2006 about Lipsky’s use of the term ‘booty capitalists” to describe local folk looking to cash in. In a column earlier this month, he criticized Columbia's hiring of consultant Bill Lynch:
The diversionary tactics involve organizing the booty capitalists, and stigmatizing Nick Sprayregen…
There was once a time when folks like Bill Lynch would have been on the front lines in defense of these tenants, but at $40,000 a month Lynch's priorities have been dramatically altered. As Tom Lehrer remarked about the shifting allegiances of the rocket scientist Werner Von Braun: "A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun."

Lipsky is paid, too. He writes:
And for those who may be curious about the Lipsky lobbying retainer it is for $6,000 a month. Our experience over twenty five years only reinforces the observation that it doesn't pay as well to battle Goliath; but it generally is a good deal more satisfying.

In the Atlantic Yards case, the Goliath is surely Forest City Ratner and its allies. Goldstein is paid about $6000 a month less than Lipsky.

The role of the CBs

And what of the local community board? Lipsky writes:
Will not Columbia's lion eyes be struck blind? Lost in this bit of sleight-of-hand is the inconvenient existence of a real community organization-CPC-representing scores of local groups and vehemently opposed to the university's solipsistic vision.
…The blatant hypocrisy of these tactics have done little, however, to move the hearts and minds of the community. Oh yes, we almost forgot. There is a community board that is on record strenuously opposed to the Columbia land grab. Did Nick Sprayregen suborn all of those folks on CB9 who unanimously voted in favor of the 197-a plan?

The same goes for Brooklyn’s plan. While the three affected community boards in Brooklyn, 2, 6, and 8, do not share DDDB's agenda, they all either opposed or criticized Atlantic Yards.

Ignoring AYR on Columbia

Lipsky, apparently, didn’t attend the raucous CB9 hearing August 15 where the public mostly opposed the plan and a board committee nearly unanimously voted it down as it currently stands. (On Monday, the board as a whole voted similarly, setting the stage for a recommendation by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and, likely, further negotiations over a Community Benefits Agreement.)

So Lipsky relied on other reportage, in the Columbia Spectator, and secondhand coverage from the Times’s City Room blog, the New York Press, and the Daily News.

It’s curious that he ignored my report, which, whatever its flaws, had several compelling photographs, thanks to photographer Jonathan Barkey.

Was it because I wrote that Sprayregen, though his grievance may be legitimate, does not represent what opponents were describing in a handout, which stressed that eminent domain “historically abuses communities of color and low and moderate income people.”

I doubt it; after all, CB9 Chairman Reyes-Montblanc declared my coverage a “good article.”

I suspect Lipsky blanched at the comparisons between Columbia’s plan, whatever its flaws, and the Atlantic Yards plan.

Lipsky apparently decided that I was not “our new friend,” which he dubbed me in May after agreeing with some of my analysis of the Manhattan Institute’s critique of the city’s environmental review processes. (We’ve never met.) Perhaps he’d read back further in my blog to find some tough criticisms.

The Times’s City Room blog also ignored my reportage. I suspect it was my references to the Times itself, which has supported Atlantic Yards on the editorial page while taking a more cautious approach to Columbia’s plan.

CBAs head to head: Columbia vs. Atlantic Yards

Now that Community Board 9 has issued its nonbinding vote strongly against Columbia University’s West Harlem expansion plan, the project is not so much over but entering a new phase of community negotiation, according to the Columbia Spectator.

That’s because the Community Board actually has a say, as part of the city’s ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn points out.

AY's flawed CBA

The Atlantic Yards process bypassed the community boards and touted a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that was flawed in comparison to existing CBAs elsewhere, notably in pioneering Los Angeles, as Bettina Damiani of Good Jobs New York testified.

And it’s flawed in comparison to the CBA planned for Columbia. The new West Harlem Local Development Corporation includes members of Community Board 9 and project opponents, who were conspicuously absent from the Atlantic Yards CBA. The LDC has been criticized for not allowing public comment at meetings and that seems to be a significant flaw. Even so, it is far more transparent than the behind-closed-doors Atlantic Yards CBA. Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chair of CB9, famously said last year that “We are avoiding the Brooklyn model,” seeking a wider coalition.

The West Harlem LDC is funded not by the developer but by a quasi-public entity. As City Limits reported:
The New York City Economic Development Corporation provided $350,000 and a professional mediator, John Bickerman, to facilitate negotiations.

CBA scope and topics

And the CBA contemplated by West Harlem LDC covers several areas, including transportation, historic preservation arts & culture, and green spaces, not part of the Atlantic Yards CBA. (Another West Harlem CBA issue is research & laboratory activities, which applies to the specific Columbia situation and is not applicable to Atlantic Yards.)

Columbia University expansion	Atlantic Yards
housing	housing
employment/jobs	workforce development
business/economic development	small business development
community facilities/social services	community facilities/amenities
environmental stewardship	environmental initiatives
--	public housing initiatives
--	faith-based referral services
education	educational and related services
arts & culture	--
transportation	--
green spaces	--
research & lab activities	n/a

Hyping the AY CBA

A 6/27/05 press release from the mayor’s office touted “the first-ever Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) in New York City to accompany a major development project.” Forest City Ratner has claimed that the three Community Boards around the proposed Atlantic Yards site footprint participated in crafting the "historic" Community Benefits Agreement.

In May 2006, the chairpersons of the three CBs complained to Forest City Ratner, saying the “statement overstates our participation. As you may or may not be aware, we were invited to play a limited role that ended months before the agreement was signed when some eventual signatories barred us from attending the working sessions.”

Now-departed Forest City Ratner executive Jim Stuckey told the Courier-Life chain that “we met with individual community boards on many occasions and also attended a joint community board meeting that was also open to the public.” As I noted, “did play a role” does not mean “crafted.”

CBAs and beyond

There’s an argument that CBAs, as non-governmental deals, dangerously usurp the role of government. Indeed, the Bloomberg administration now seems to be shying away from them.

But if there are to be CBAs, the Columbia example shows that community concerns extend well beyond those chosen by Forest City Ratner and its partners, some of which it funded.

In January 2006, members of the Park Slope Civic Council said that Forest City Ratner seemed willing to meet and negotiate with representatives of Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods over issues like traffic and urban design--issues that seemingly would come up in the Columbia CBA under "transportation" and "green space."

But such a neighborhood agreement—separate from the CBA, which the developer was unwilling to open—never came to fruition.

Flashback, 2000: the borough president criticizes the mayor over a sports facility

Just seven years ago, the Brooklyn Borough President disagreed with the Mayor over the siting of a baseball stadium in the Coney Island and the no-bid process behind it.

And backers of the original sports facility planned for the site wanted to ensure that public land and public subsidies supported amateur, not professional sports.

Times have changed.

The much-needed Sportsplex

Consider this passage from Brooklyn 2000: State of the Borough, an annual report from then-Borough President Howard Golden that I recently looked at:
After over a decade of advocacy, the Borough President was pleased to learn in 1997 that the city and state governments had each provided $30 million, combined with his $7 million, to fund the creation of the Brooklyn Sportsplex. This major sports facility, dedicated to indoor scholastic, inter-collegiate and amateur athletics, would accommodate 12 events simultaneously through the following facilities.
--an arena for track and field, basketball or ice hockey with 12,300 seats
--a gymnasium accommodating 2000 spectators
--a multipurpose room for a variety of sports
--a boxing gym
--training arenas
--a sports medicine center

With over two million residents and more than 600,000 scholastic, college and amateur athletes active in organized sports, Brooklyn needs and deserves the Sportsplex. These needs were documented in a report commissioned by the Brooklyn Sports Foundation, a not-for-profit organization formed 10 years ago by Brooklyn's elected officials, business, educational and community leaders to address the critical shortage of recreational and competition space in Brooklyn.

The report further showed that the Sportsplex would not require any city subsidies to operate. In fact the report by Ogden Entertainment, the largest arena management firm in the nation, showed that the facility would produce more than $8000,000 in annual operating surplus through almost 2000 amateur athletic and community group uses and 112 commercial uses such as Disney on Ice and Ringling Bros. Circus, according to the report.

Developers were interested in the Sportsplex. As I wrote, the Daily News on 11/12/98 (BOROUGH BIGS NEARLY WHIFF ON RUDY'S BALLPARK CURVES) reported that developer Bruce Ratner had "talked with Brooklyn Sports Foundation officials about building the Sportsplex at cost, provided he can build an entertainment complex next door."

On 3/22/02, Golden's successor Marty Markowitz issued a press release about the Borough's State Legislative Agenda, citing a goal to "retain funding for the Coney Island Sportsplex and increase the allocation in order to attract an NBA franchise." Even in 2003, on the day of his next State of the Borough address, the New York Daily News reported (Marty’s Minding Our Manners, 1/23/03):
The borough president also goes to sleep dreaming of bringing a National Basketball Association team to Coney Island.

That plan, of course, fell by the wayside later in the year as Forest City Ratner's plan for Atlantic Yards emerged.

Rudy wins

Golden's report continued:
Unfortunately, none of the funding has been released to the Brooklyn Sports Foundation to proceed with planning or construction because the mayor [Rudy Giuliani] has proposed to build a minor league baseball stadium on the same Steeplechase Park site in Coney Island that was slated for the Sportsplex. Compounding this mistake is that the mayor has decided to give the stadium to a New York Mets Single-A level, short-season team on a sole source basis, rather than utilizing a competitive process.

The Borough President urged the mayor to utilize a competitive process to identify a team for this stadium that would yield higher economic benefits for Coney Island and the city than the proposed single-A, short season team, which would play only 38 games with the possibility of 6 additional playoff games. The Borough President has received interest from two independent leagues seeking to play in the vast Brooklyn market.

Realizing that the Brooklyn market deserves a team with a higher level of play, the Borough President commissioned a study entitled "Out at First! The Giuliani Administration's Missed Opportunity." This study, prepared by Dr. Mark S. Rosentraub, Professor and Assistant Dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, documented that the concession being negotiated by the city with the Mets "is not in the best economic interest of the City of New York or the Borough of Brooklyn." Dr. Rosentraub also recommended, "to maximize the benefits received from a minor league team in a new Coney island ballpark, the City of New York should issue a request for proposals from major League Baseball and the independent minor leagues." The mayor, unfortunately, has not followed this advice.

The Borough president will work with the Brooklyn Sports Foundation and community organizations to save the Sportsplex project, while continuing to urge the mayor to utilize a competitive process for the selection of the highest caliber minor league team for the proposed minor league stadium.

Contemporary analogue?

Atlantic Yards is not precisely analogous; there's no pool of professional basketball teams that might bid to play at a city-funded arena. But was the RFP for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard, issued 18 months after Forest City Ratner was anointed the developer for the yard as well as nearly 14 acres around it, a "competitive process"?

I wonder what Golden would say. After all, he earlier this year cautioned against the Manhattanization of Brooklyn.

Sports for whom?

The original role of the Sportsplex raises a question; would the Barclays Center, if built as planned, really serve Brooklyn's amateur athletes? After all, a planning document prepared by Forest City Ratner predicted just eight college basketball games and five high school sports events, a far cry from the 2000 annual amateur sports and community uses predicted for the Sportsplex.

Have those needs been met elsewhere?

A 6/7/99 Daily News article, headlined SPORTSPLEX SEES SOFTER CITY STANCE, quoted Brooklyn Sports Foundation Chairman Peter Kiernan:
"I believe public land and public money should go for public purposes," Kiernan said, underscoring the foundation's insistence that the Sportsplex be focused on amateur, not professional, sports.

More recently, at the 5/3/07 hearing on the challenge to the Atlantic Yards environmental review, Empire State Development Corporation attorney Philip Karmel, as I reported, got into trouble when pressed on exactly how a professional sports arena fits the law’s definition of a facility for recreational purposes.

“It generally means you have a community-based basketball team” or other sports team, Justice Joan Madden suggested.

“It would be recreational activity” to watch a basketball game, Karmel responded.

"I thought that was profit-making,” responded the judge.

After a bit, Karmel returned to the theme. “We believe that going to a ballgame is a recreational activity, and having a ball team is a civic event… It brings pride to a community.” (Perhaps, but “civic event” doesn’t necessarily segue to the statutory definition “civic project.”)

Madden's decision is expected next month.

Journalists and the AY timetable

Do you accept the official story or are you allowed to express skepticism? From today's Daily News, in an article on the AVP Volleyball Tour co-produced by a Forest City Ratner subsidiary:
"This will allow us to start doing business in Brooklyn before the Atlantic Yards Arena opens in 2009," [executive Chris Brahe] said. "This way we don't have to wait two years."

But no one who's checked the construction schedule believes that the arena would open as scheduled in 2009.

Yesterday, in an interview with Metro for its Blogarithms column, I said, "After all, Atlantic Yards could take 20 years--it's supposed to take ten, but no one believes it."

That view is not limited to opponents and critics. Project landscape architect Laurie Olin has said it could take 20 years, as has project supporter Kathryn Wylde of the New York City Partnership.

The Times's deceptive 421-a coverage--and the need for more disclosure

I’ve argued time and again that the New York Times should take special care in its coverage of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project, given the parent New York Times Company’s business partnership with the developer in the new Times Tower. And, as evidenced most recently in coverage a special tax break for the developer, the Times has failed.

In other words, Atlantic Yards deserves the same care that Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, in a column yesterday headlined When the Issue Is War, Take Nothing for Granted, urges for highly contested topics such as the potential for war with Iran.

Regading Iran, Hoyt concluded that the Times’s coverage has generally been good, but he still has some qualms, writing:
But there are special lengths that The Times — or any other news organization — must go to when dealing with an issue so protracted, so complicated, and so politicized. It must take pains when reporting today’s events to add yesterday’s perspective. It must attribute information exhaustively to keep sources’ credibility and motives in view. And it must be willing to revisit old ground when new developments change the context.

Looking at Atlantic Yards

Let’s apply that standard to coverage of Atlantic Yards, specifically coverage of the “Atlantic Yards carve-out” that remains part of the state legislature’s revision of the 421-a tax break, which awaits Gov. Eliot Spitzer's signature.

The law gives a tax break to new construction but in certain areas--a zone extended by the revision--only if affordable housing is included. On August 8, I analyzed the Times’s coverage, and it’s worth another look.

The Times reported, in an article headlined (online) Bill Aims to Spur Housing for New York’s Poor:
In addition, the Legislature’s [earlier] bill gave a new break to the Forest City Ratner Companies, the developer of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. City officials estimated that the bill gave Forest City Ratner an additional $300 million worth of 421-a benefits than what it would otherwise have received….
As for Atlantic Yards, city officials said the new agreement represents a fair compromise. To receive the maximum tax break, 20 percent of the units in any building will have to meet the new affordability guidelines, which are more stringent than those that originally applied.
(Emphasis added)

The reportage in this segment does not meet a minimum standard of good journalism, must less Hoyt’s more stringent guidelines.

The basic question for any reporter and editor should have been: if the previous iteration of the bill was to give a special $300 million 25-year tax break to Forest City Ratner, would the revision maintain any tax break or eliminate it?

The article doesn’t answer that question but leaves the impression that the tax break might be gone. Rather, a tax break worth $150-$200 million would remain, as reported by the Post and the Sun.

The Times failed to mention that AY condo buildings could still receive a special 15-year tax break. And the use of the word "originally applied" is very ambiguous. The new affordability guidelines are more stringent than those currently in place, but they are less stringent than the bill as passed by City Council and as originally passed by the State Legislature.

The bottom line is this: whether or not the guidelines are “more stringent than originally applied,” Forest City Ratner would still get special treatment.

A higher standard

Let’s look at the three guidelines promulgated by Public Editor Hoyt.

1) Adding yesterday’s perspective

The Times, in previous coverage, had raised more questions. A 6/29/07 article headlined City's Plans For Housing Flop in Albany reported:
But the bill would also provide what the city estimates are an additional $300 million in tax breaks for the vast Atlantic Yards complex being developed by Forest City Ratner Companies, the development partner with The New York Times Company in the Times' new Midtown headquarters, without getting any additional affordable units in return. [Assembly Housing Chairman] Mr. [Vito] Lopez said it was a concession sought during negotiations with Mr. Spinola and the Senate over his bill.
…Yet, State Senator Frank Padavan, a fellow Republican, contends that the Senate bill was rushed through with little discussion of the special deals for developers like Forest City. ''It didn't pass the smell test,'' he said.

So, the obvious questions would be: Does the revised bill pass the smell test? Were any critics of the carve-out quoted? No and no.

2) Sources' motives and credibility

While city officials “said the new agreement represents a fair compromise,” that doesn’t mean that we’ve been told enough, as Hoyt urges, “to keep sources’ credibility and motives in view.”

The city was negotiating with Lopez regarding the neighborhoods subject to the requirement, under 421-a, of providing affordable housing in exchange for the tax break. Under the compromise, the map Lopez drew remains; in exchange, Lopez agreed to relax the cap on Area Median Income (AMI), redefining “affordable” upward in order for the city to pursue its plans with major middle-income projects like Queens West.

Atlantic Yards was a sideshow. Given the city’s previous criticism of the tax break, something had to give, but the city, apparently, wasn't going to the mat to push Lopez. So the city wanted its result--a higher AMI--above all. It wasn't a question of principle regarding Atlantic Yards.

In the Times, some other sources, either neutral experts or Atlantic Yards critics, should’ve been quoted as to whether the result, indeed, was a fair compromise.

3) Revisiting old ground

The Times should have looked back on its previous coverage, as well as coverage by others.

Yes, Forest City Ratner would now have to include affordable units in every building to get the maximum tax break. But it would still get special treatment--at least $150 million based on a tax break available to no other developer.

That was clear to some other reporters that day.

I could imagine Times defenders explaining that it was a complicated story, with several elements, written under deadline and with space constraints.

All true. But that's an explanation, not an excuse. And the Times, if it wishes to meet the standards it professes, much less the standards Hoyt urges for sensitive topics, should not have misled the public.

Disclosure and its benefits

The Times in that article didn't disclose its parent company's business relationship with Forest City Ratner. Should it have done so?

Most people would probably say no, given that the article was about a broader topic. Indeed, former Public Editor Byron Calame in June 2005 suggested a standard:
Mr. Ratner’s project with The Times was mentioned almost every time he had a substantive role in an article.

I've agreed with Calame's formulation, but now I'm revising my views. I think that the issue should be not merely substance--a significant chunk of an article regarding the company--but controversy. Disclosure should be the default even if the controversy, as in this case, is described briefly.

Such disclosure should--in the ideal world--spur the reporter and editors to ensure that the article is not merely not inaccurate but intellectually honest. After all, the Times's coverage Aug. 8 was not inaccurate. But it was deceptive.

Even in a brief mention, the Times can mangle the historical record. Since the Atlantic Yards project surfaced in the summer of 2003, the Times has not met its responsibility to cover Forest City Ratner exactingly. Something has to change.

Day 421-a, everything changes? Spitzer slammed for closed-door negotiation

Gov. Eliot Spitzer gets slammed in the August 20 issue of the conservative Weekly Standard, in an article headlined Troopergate, New York-Style: Eliot Spitzer's character problem, by New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin and historian Fred Siegel.

Beyond the current scandal regarding the administration's attempt to discredit Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, the authors detail a disturbing pattern of Spitzer using family money to fund his campaigns and his lifestyle, without disclosing it.

And, they point out, Spitzer's ethical record as governor is hardly sterling:
The result was gridlock, familiar ground in Albany, but one of the things Spitzer had promised to fix. His campaign motto was "Day One, Everything Changes," and he had cited secret negotiations, higher taxes, and unchecked spending as targets for his new administration. Yet it was already clear that Spitzer no longer saw those practices as problems. His first budget, despite repeated promises not to raise taxes, did just that. He increased spending by close to 8 percent--nearly triple the rate of inflation.

Perhaps most troubling, he continued the discredited practice of meeting with legislative leaders in private to make secret deals on laws and spending. When Michael Goodwin confronted Spitzer by noting that not a single public hearing had been held on any major issue before the deals were cut, Spitzer responded icily. "I'm the governor of the state," he said. "I'll be Lyndon Johnson. I'll craft the deals and I'll get the job done. You will write and I will do. That's why you're there and I'm here."

Spitzer has made some progress, but the "compromise" on the revision of the 421-a tax break, which left a significant "Atlantic Yards carve-out" for Forest City Ratner, certainly didn't happen in public.

Superblocks, a massacre in Newark, and Jane Jacobs

I haven't read of anyone blaming the superblock design of some housing towers in Newark for the August 4 massacre of three young people and the severe injuries to another, but a New York Times article on Wednesday hinted that an outmoded modernist design contributed, at least, to an atmosphere of lawlessness.

The Times article was headlined In Newark Murder, a Mixed Band of Men and Boys. While it focused on the perpetrators and their drift into crime, it explained the setting: the Ivy Hill Park Apartments were built in 1952, the superblock supremacy era, and include ten 15-story buildings over a wide plain with no intervening streets.
(Graphic from New York Times)

While the area has improved, some crime persists, and in places it apparently flourishes:
And they lurked in a place known as “the bushes,” a garbage-strewn thicket of high weeds behind two of the buildings where they could set upon anyone who used a dirt path as a shortcut to a nearby shopping center, according to residents and several of those who said they had been victimized.

There are no streets between the buildings, obviously, and a photo in the Times shows no retail or community facilities at the bases of the buildings. So there's little reason for there to be "eyes on the street," in the phrase of the late urbanist Jane Jacobs.

AY's superblock

Atlantic Yards has been criticized for its superblock design, and that design has in turn been defended as a better superblock than Stuyvesant Town, as it would include retail and managed public space, and pathways that aim to extend the street grid from Fort Greene.

And there's no reason to think a luxury housing complex like Atlantic Yards would be a crime magnet like the Ivy Hill Park Apartments.

Still, the superblock design, if implemented, might still have some unintended consequences. And the AY complex, if publicly accessible space is closed as projected by 8 pm during part of the year, might steer "drunken sports fans," in the words of one project opponent, to be "peeing on the stoops of the rest of us.”

Jacobs and crime prevention

In an obituary posted 5/1/06 on The Nation's web site, headlined Jane Jacobs's Genius, Roberta Brandes Gratz & Stephen A. Goldsmith pointed out how the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) web site offered a tribute to Jacobs, a sign of how far her teachings extended.

CPTED prizes "eyes on the street," which is the term that Jacobs devised for her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Apparently there weren't more such eyes on that fateful night in Newark.

In Coney, development, planning, and the cost of delay

Three very different editorial messages regarding Coney Island development appeared in the past week, and from some surprising venues, if not authors.

It was the New York Times, often pro-development and steadily supportive of Atlantic Yards, which published an op-ed highly critical of Thor Equities’ plan for a massive beachside project heavily dependent on towers—once condos, now perhaps hotels and time-shares.

The New York Daily News, also pro-AY, published another critical op-ed. (The willingness to publish an op-ed doesn't necessarily signal the newspaper's outlook, but consider that the Times refused op-eds critical of Atlantic Yards before publishing a lukewarm one in November 2005, nearly two years after the project was announced.)

And it was the weekly Brooklyn Paper, which has editorialized against Atlantic yards and provided critical print coverage, that seems far more welcoming to Thor.

Baker's warning

The 8/12/07 op-ed in the City section, headlined Paving Over Fun, was written by Kevin Baker, whose historical novels concern New York City; his Dreamland was set partly in Coney Island.

Baker writes:
My German friends also expressed their amazement that all this marvelous, beachfront property wasn’t lined with luxury housing. There is the rub. After so many years of decline and neglect, Coney Island at last has a serious developer, Joseph Sitt. Mr. Sitt, who says his company has spent $120 million buying up land in and around the area’s entertainment district, has dangled the idea of erecting a 40-story condominium there.

The City Planning Commission, to its credit, scotched this proposal. And last week The Daily News quoted a city official as saying that Mr. Sitt’s $1.5 billion plan to create some sort of enclosed, multimedia 21st-century amusement park, complete with time-sharing hotels, was “dead in the water.”

The question of just what Coney Island should be — a democratic bastion of raucous, honky-tonk entertainment, or something more genteel — has been disputed for nearly 200 years. Lately, though, it has become a struggle with a greater resonance, one that may foretell just what the future of New York as a whole will be.

Coney, he allows, is “diverse and edgy and even seedy in places, much more like the rest of the city was in the 1970s,” but he acknowledges that changes continue. Will Coney go the way of lost sports facilities, restaurants, and nightclubs?

While he concludes that some changes are inevitable, they shouldn't be developer-driven:
The city cannot simply react to developers’ plans if it is to save Coney Island. The Bloomberg administration, which has recently shown a heartening interest in reviving the idea of city planning, needs to get ahead of the process and solicit ideas for what Coney should be. The dozens of small businesses that stuck it out through Coney’s worst years and did so much to preserve its honky-tonk flavor should be encouraged to stay. Strange as it may seem, Frederic Thompson had it right. We will have to manufacture frolic if we are to have it at all.

There is, in fact, a Coney Island Development Corporation.

Denson's vision

In a Daily News op-ed Monday headlined Coney's roller-coaster ride: Surf's a sought-after turf, so mayor must save this paradise, Coney Island native and chronicler Charles Denson, author of the definitive Coney Island: Lost and Found, writes:
Most people agree that Coney needs improvement, but they also realize that a scenario that includes just one owner and a rezoning that allows high-rise residential development is a dangerous combination that could lead to the death of Coney Island.

Coney Island has seen vast improvement over the past decade. Crime is down, a new subway terminal and ballpark opened, and the Bloomberg administration saved the historic B&B Carousel.

Denson points to an ongoing planning process:
In 2003, the mayor, City Council and borough president formed the Coney Island Development Corp. and gave the group the task of spearheading a long-overdue planning process for Coney Island. This led to the Coney Island Strategic Plan, a compromise worked out in public meetings with community and stakeholder input.

The plan calls for the preservation of a central amusement zone, yet allows residential and retail development in the vacant outer fringes of the zone. This is the plan that Thor Equities is seeking to undermine with their high-rise project.

Why not Thor?

In an editorial last week headlined Why not Thor? the Brooklyn Paper begins
The city’s failure to redevelop, reimagine and reinvigorate Coney Island is a decades-long calamity.

It’s an echo of Borough President Marty Markowitz’s 2005 statement, "The Atlantic Yards area has been available for any developer in America for over 100 years.”

Well, just as “the Atlantic Yards area” has morphed from a manufacturing zone to a development zone, the value of land rising as gentrification proceeded nearby, Coney has also been in flux. Perhaps most importantly, in 2005 a marvelous $300 million subway station opened, the largest in the world, a catalyst for any development.

The Brooklyn Paper editorializes:
Given all those years of failure, we remain completely baffled — and, frankly, appalled — by the Bloomberg Administration’s handling of a legitimate proposal by Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities to redevelop a vast stretch of Coney Island’s amusement area into a $1.5-billion year-round theme park, recreation, hotel, restaurant and retail Xanadu.

For the past year or so, Thor has spent more than $100 million buying up land — including the Astroland amusement park and most of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park — at market rates. At this point, Sitt owns most of the land between the landmark Cyclone roller coaster and Nathan’s Famous.

But to realize his dream of adding hotel units to Coney’s amusement distict, he needs the city to grant him a zoning variance.
For some reason, the city is playing hardball.

(Graphic from the Gowanus Lounge)

The newspaper legitimately criticizes city officials for leaking “doling out little ‘exclusives’” to both the Daily News and the Post, calling the plan “dead in the water.”

The cost of doing nothing

Daily News columnist Errol Louis, in embracing the Atlantic Yards plan, has observed, “And there’s been a cost for not doing anything.”

The Brooklyn Paper opines similarly:
Nowhere, it seems, is anyone willing to remind the mayor of one important benefit of Sitt’s plan: it is a plan! For the first time in decades, there is an actual plan on the table. But rather than debate it on the merits, “city officials” are going on paid junkets and negotiating through hand-picked stooges in the media. (And, all the while, negotiating with Sitt behind closed doors, the papers have reported.)

Yes, there is a plan, and it's the city's fault for not moving faster, and for not changing tax laws that make it easy for landowners to leave their plots fallow. But the subway station is new and the Brooklyn residential market hot.

So the newspaper suggests that the city’s existing Uniform Land Use Review Procedure—which AY eluded—would be the right way to go:
Let Joe Sitt apply for his zoning change, force him to make concessions so that he can get through the land-use review process with the necessary approvals, and stop all this back-room, leak-driven nonsense.

That may be better than AY. But that doesn’t deal with the issue of planning. When a developer borrows some techniques from Atlantic Yards and has a web site ambitiously titled “The Future of Coney Island,” well, shouldn’t the press be a bit wary?

A letter in response

A letter to the editor in this week's Brooklyn Paper:
Your editorial praising Thor Equities’ Coney Island plan ignored one thing: That Thor’s plan is just one idea for rebuilding the Coney Island amusement zone (“Why not Thor?” Aug. 11).

Unfortunately, Thor tried to play it cute. First, the company told area landowners that the city would never let them build condos. This allowed Thor to buy up land at a cheaper price.

Then, the company turned around and tried to push the condo idea. They are still playing it cute with their hotel and time-share proposal.

So instead of taking the city to task, maybe you should be putting your energies into castigating Thor for the disingenuous way it has bargained with the city and the Coney Island community in general. Thor’s approach has demonstrated to me that it cares more about profit and less about restoring a great historical treasure.

The writer is Lloyd Handwerker of Park Slope, grandson of Nathan Handwerker, founder of the Nathan's hot dog emporium, still an anchor of Coney.

The Courier-Life, in print, gets the "carve-out" wrong

From this week's Courier-Life chain, an online article headlined Spitzer sent compromise 421-a plan describes the modified Atlantic Yards carve-out" not inaccurately:

According to published reports, the deal includes Ratner getting a subsidy for 15 years instead of 25 years as per the 421-a subsidy on 1,930 market-rate condos slated for the Atlantic Yards project.

Oddly enough, the print version of the article, like the New York Times's coverage, omits the special tax break for Forest City Ratner that would remain, worth $150-$200 million. An article in the Park Slope Courier states:
Under the new legislation, FCRC buildings in the project must meet the new affordability requirements in order to qualify for a 25-year tax abatement.

Unmentioned is the 15-year subsidy available to no other developer.

AMI follies

The Courier-Life article states at one point:
[Assemblyman Vito] Lopez said he has met with the city six or seven times and the key issue has always been Average Median Income (AMI) guidelines as set by the federal government, which includes the metropolitan area surrounding the city.

AMI means "Area Median Income," not "Average Median Income."

Again, Errol Louis misses the point regarding the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning

In his column (not yet online) in the August 16 issue of Our Time Press, Errol Louis writes about the city's plan to spend $2 million on a cultural project to commemorate Brooklyn's role in the Underground Railroad.

It's a response to the city's plan to to condemn houses on Duffield Street for the Downtown Brooklyn plan. Owners of the houses and some experts say there's strong evidence the houses were part of the Underground Railroad; the city and its experts acknowledge only that there was abolitionist activity in the area.

Call him cynical

Louis writes:
Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt that the city's money or the top-notch advisory panel named to administer it will quiet the critics of development in downtown Brooklyn. The real goal of the loudest critics is to prevent the new condos, apartments, hotels and retail stores in the area, following the misguided logic that keeping investment, amenities and new residents out of this part of Brooklyn is the best way to keep local housing prices from rising.

That battle was fought and lost long ago. The city council voted years ago to rezone downtown Brooklyn so that tall buildings could be built near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge and the mayor signed the bill. The resulting plans to invest billions in the area represent all kinds of business and job opportunities.

Didn't Louis make the same mistake a little more than two months ago? The City Council voted to rezone Downtown Brooklyn to foster office space and increase jobs. Instead, the market changed and housing became more lucrative.

Critics have called for inclusionary zoning--sharing of the wealth offered developers by the increase in their development rights. The organization FUREE argues that public dollars disproportionately favor the wealthy.

It's a complicated job to balance growth and equity, especially when the City Council didn't anticipate the result. Louis disregards that.

On the radio, a question about terrorism & AY

A segment Thursday on The Brian Lehrer Show focused on a New York City Police Department report on homegrown terrorists. The guest host was New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis, a noted Atlantic Yards supporter.

Sure, the show wasn't focused on Atlantic Yards, but there are concerns about terrorism at the planned project. AY critics have questioned how much preparation there has been to protect against terrorism; indeed, the Empire State Development Corporation, in its response to the AY environmental lawsuit, has acknowledged that a review has been conducted, but has been unwilling to make details available.

"New York City has been repeatedly cased by terrorist operatives," said Richard Falkenrath, NYPD deputy commissioner for counter terrorism, explaining that that the police regularly aim to "harden" potential targets to protect against terrorism.

The AY connection

During the listener call-in segment of the show, at about 33:30, Brooklynite Alan Rosner, co-author of a July 2005 white paper on terrorism and AY, was on the line, identified as "Alan from Brooklyn."

Rosner: Right now, there's a large Middle Eastern community along Atlantic Avenue near Flatbush. Back in 1997, two Palestinians came within hours of bombing the Atlantic Avenue station. Now, with the Atlantic Yards development project, that would be the densest area in all of the United States, with these terrorist targets. Do you think this going to have an impact as the police focus more and more on this area?

Louis seemed eager to skip past the specifics.

Louis: Thank you for the call. I do think there's going to be--I think if you heard the whole interview, you could sort of sense me trying to pull out of the deputy commissioner... what exactly the NYPD is going to do with this report. Unfortunately, I think it's going to be one of these questions where we have to leave it as, 'we'll see.' The report is not going to be dropped on the desk of every precinct and used as an operational guideline, that it's just a piece of research to try to help people understand all of this. If everyone does their job the right way, the public will stay alert, the press will stay skeptical, the police will try to keep us safe as well as remain mindful of civil liberties concerns. And we're going to have to leave it there for right now.

Let's acknowledge that the subject of the show was a report about a population, not a close look at potential targets, and that Louis was running out of time. But you didn't get a sense that Louis, who described himself at one point as "someone who has to follow the news for a living," wants to focus on the AY angle.

Stadtmauer Bailkin, Bruce Ratner, and the web of subsidies

The package of subsidies that have been pledged for Atlantic Yards are part of a pattern in large projects. A law firm specializing in wrangling such subsidies was where Forest City Ratner CEO Bruce Ratner got some key experience. And now that firm's behavior in a Yankee Stadium deal has been questioned.

Consider Metro's report July 30 on the questionable deal for parking garages at Yankee Stadium, and the web of insider connections:
At a Community Board 4 meeting last month, attorney Steven Polivy took credit for putting together the “private-public partnership.” Polivy works for Stadtmauer Bailkin LLP, which specializes in securing government subsidies for corporate clients. CIDC’s president, William Lowenstein, has had a long relationship with the firm.

That’s one of many backroom connections listed in a new report by watchdog group Good Jobs New York.

The report

Here's the press release for Insider Baseball: How Current and Former Public Officials Pitched a Community Shutout for the New York Yankees, and the full report--3.75 MB PDF.

The report states:
CIDC’s President William Loewenstein was a strategic partner with incentives procurement advisors Stadtmauer Bailkin Biggins, LLC, until 2006...
Lowenstein is currently a “market team member” with the successor firm Stadtmauer Bailkin Economic Development Group (SB-EDGe). One of Stadtmauer Bailkin, LLP’s specialties involves securing economic development subsidies for corporate clients; it is listed on the New York City Industrial Development Agency’s core application for the parking bonds as legal counsel for CIDC.
One of Stadtmauer Bailkin’s managing directors, Jane Orlin, has promoted herself as having written incentive guidelines while she was an employee of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

The Bruce Ratner connection

An article in the January 1999 issue of the late magazine Brooklyn Bridge, headlined "King of the Deal," explained the origins of MetroTech:
At around the same time, Polytechnic, the private engineering university located on Jay Street, was suffering a financial crisis, and its president, George Bugliarello, came up with an idea that was designed to save both his university and the neighborhood. He proposed to turn the run-down area around the university's campus into an East Coast version of Silicon Valley, a high-tech research center to be called MetroTech. In 1984, Polytechnic issued a request for proposals (RFP) to develop the 16-acre site.
The attorney who assisted Polytechnic in the preparation of their RFP was Michael Bailkin, a partner at the law firm of Stadtmauer, Bailkin, Kessler, Walzer & Ratner. Bruce Ratner had joined the firm after leaving his position as consumer affairs commissioner in the Koch administration in 1982. "Bruce was at the firm to look for development deals when MetroTech came along," says Bailkin. And it was Ratner's connections that got the ball rolling.

Bruce Ratner's role in the firm is not mentioned in his biographical sketch on the Forest City Ratner web site.

The Forest City Ratner connection

At the law firm's web site, there's a page titled Representative Clients — Economic Development Incentives - Zoning, Planning & Large Scale Redevelopment.

Stadtmauer Bailkin's practice encompasses all aspects of land use. Its primary focus, however, is on major projects that create or redefine the urban framework. The firm has been responsible for some of the largest and most complex redevelopment projects in New York City.

Atlantic Center
The firm initially represented Rose Associates, the original developer of this 24-acre urban renewal site in Brooklyn, in securing a $10.7 million Urban Development Action Grant. The firm then represented Forest City Ratner Companies in the development of the multi-phased retail, office and residential complex. The first phase involved the construction of a 300,000 square foot shopping complex. The firm obtained City approvals, restructured the UDAG grant and obtained Caldor as the anchor retail tenant.

MetroTech - Brooklyn, New York
This project is a 6 million sq. ft. office complex for applied technology operations. The firm conceptualized the project, and was primarily responsible for urban renewal designation, rezoning, and incentives in the range of $300 million for the overall projects and for major tenants. The firm also negotiated incentives packages to attract each of the following anchor tenants:

One MetroTech Center / Bear Stearns and Co.
The firm assisted in packaging approximately $17.5 million in incentives for Bear Stearns' relocation to 250,000 square feet in One MetroTech Center. The package included electrical subsidies and sales tax exemptions on construction materials, machinery and equipment, in addition to job tax credits.

One MetroTech Center / Brooklyn Union
Stadtmauer Bailkin negotiated and secured an incentives package to induce Brooklyn Union to relocate its corporate headquarters to 450,000 square feet at One MetroTech Center, the newly constructed 865,000 sq. ft., 23-story building. The package included $10.3 million in City capital budget funds, $130 million in taxable Industrial Revenue Bond financing and an $8 million Urban Development Action Grant.

Two MetroTech Center / Securities Industry Automation Corporation ("SIAC")
Two MetroTech Center is a 535,000 square foot, 10-story building. SIAC, the company that processes securities transactions for the New York and American stock exchanges, relocated its corporate headquarters to 320,000 square feet in this building. The incentives secured by the firm included a $6 million Urban Development Action Grant, $80 million in taxable Industrial Revenue Bond financing and $16.3 million in Municipal Assistance Corporation and City capital budget funds.

Three & Four MetroTech Center / Chase Manhattan Bank
This project consisted of the construction of a 1.5 million square foot computer operations complex on two sites in MetroTech. The firm conceptualized and helped negotiate an incentives package that induced Chase to retain operations in New York by relocating to Brooklyn instead of to a competing site in New Jersey. A complex package of electrical subsidies, tax abatements, city grants and related incentives valued at $235 million was provided by the City and State.

There's no mention of Atlantic Yards, so it's possible the firm hasn't worked on the latest project. Had Forest City Ratner developed enough in-house expertise, or did some other firm help?

For Columbia expansion in W. Harlem, a tougher road harvesting community support

There are some curious contrasts and commonalities between Columbia University’s proposed expansion and Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan, and they became clearer last night at a raucous public hearing held by Manhattan Community Board 9 regarding a rezoning for Columbia’s project, which would mainly occupy an area bounded by Broadway and Riverside Drive between 129th Street and 133rd Street.
(Photos by Jonathan Barkey)

I only spent an hour at the hearing, so, just as I’ve criticized the press for missing aspects of the Atlantic Yards story, I’ll admit I can’t yet do the Columbia controversy justice. I’m still reading about it all. (The people in the t-shirts are from the Mirabal Center, a tenants rights group.)

Quick: here's a 5/21/06 New York Times Magazine overview. Here's a good list of articles. Here’s a Columbia site, which argues that Columbia needs a contiguous nearby footprint, including a deep “bathtub” for parking and power plants, will bring 6000 jobs and add numerous community amenities, and contribute to the university’s mission, including world-changing scientific research. (Though Columbia's presenting its project in the best light, it has surely offered more details than did Forest City Ratner. And Columbia at least honestly calculates about construction jobs.)

Here’s an opposing coalition, who question the safety of the “bathtub,” warn that the open space will feel private, and argue for a community-driven plan that preserves manufacturing jobs, opens up development to multiple parties, stresses affordable housing, and eschews the use of eminent domain.

And here’s the Community Board chairman’s blog, which shows that, at the end of the night, the land use committee voted nearly unanimously that the board as a whole oppose the Columbia plan unless it changes significantly, including: withdrawal of the proposal for eminent domain and gag orders on those selling; abandonment of the “bathtub” plan; a significant affordable housing commitment; a commitment to preserve historic buildings; meet the goals of the community plan regarding job creation, public space, and other issues. (CB 9's 197-a plan has been developed with the Pratt Center for Community Development.)

And here's the Department of City Planning's Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS).

Lucky Bruce

But the single strongest impression, for me, was that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is not so lucky as Forest City Ratner CEO Bruce Ratner, a graduate of Columbia Law School. Ratner appears only at scripted public events and, even then, such as when the Barclays Center deal was announced in January, his press availability is rather limited.

Ratner never had to testify at a public hearing related to Atlantic Yards. His then-lieutenant, the mysteriously departed Jim Stuckey, twice addressed City Council hearings, spoke at a contentious informal meeting of three affected community boards, and spoke at smaller informal sessions each board held. But no Forest City rep, however was required to speak at the two hearings that counted most, held by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) in October 2005 and August 2006.

Bollinger, however, does not have the ESDC’s fast-track process behind Columbia’s proposed expansion into West Harlem (aka Manhattanville). The city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) requires a gamut of hearings, including before the local community board, even though its role is only advisory. (The three affected community boards expressed opposition to or withheld support for Atlantic Yards, but their concerns vaporized in the ESDC process.) And Columbia is a nonprofit institution dedicated to academic inquiry, not a real estate developer dedicated to maximizing shareholder value.

So Bollinger had to speak last night, even though he knew Columbia’s 17-acre plan for new academic facilities has generated intense opposition in a community already suspicious of gentrification and a university which has increased its land holdings while causing a historically tense relationship with its Harlem neighbors. And even though Columbia has garnered—in some cases at considerable cost, notes the Harlem Tenants Council—not insignificant community support for the Manhattanville project, Bollinger was walking into a lion’s den.

The signs outside the Manhattanville Community Center in the Manhattanville Houses warned of the “Columbia Hurricane,” leading to residential displacement and threatening the community with biohazards. Representatives from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) handed out fliers arguing that Columbia underpays its security guards. For the Atlantic Yards hearing last August, the construction and building services unions, along with BUILD, ACORN, helped (many believe, including the chairperson of Brooklyn CB 2) unfairly pack the room in favor of the project, at least at the beginning.

The room, with fewer than 200 chairs, was packed with at least another 100 standees, and scores more waited outside. [Update: The chairman of the CB writes that there were more chairs, and about 600 people attended in total.] On each chair was a copy of a 2/25/07 Daily News article with an astonishingly slanted headline: Columbia Launches Land-Grab Plan, placed by the Coalition to Preserve Community, or CPC (but not to be confused with the Community Preservation Corporation, which is behind the New Domino plan in Williamsburg).

There was no stage for the speakers. And the acoustics were lousy—too little amplification for the large room, especially given the steady murmurs in the crowd, which quickly ramped up to booing and cheering.

(Update) Outside, reported the Columbia Spectator:
Confusion began before the public comment period, when participants in a program calls the Addicts Rehabilitation Center-run by Rev. Reginald Williams of the United Missionary Baptist Association-stood outside the community center, handing out leaflets supportive of Columbia. Few knew why they were there or what they were doing.

Urban design?

So leadoff speaker Marilyn Taylor of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, a blue-chip architectural firm, was out of her element as the restive crowd proved uninterested in her explanations, backed by photos and renderings (right) that few could see, of why Columbia’s urban design would be a major step forward.

“An active ground-floor layer of shops and open space” that help connect to the waterfront may sound good to some comparing Columbia’s plan to the current array of light manufacturing uses in Manhattanville, but that wasn’t the purpose of the hearing. (Atlantic Yards opponents have pointed out that the project should’ve gone through ULURP; those arguments may be strong, but let’s not kid ourselves; ULURP does not guarantee that the public is either hearing or listened to. There will be further public hearings held by the Manhattan Borough President, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council, which, unlike with Atlantic Yards, has a vote in this case.)

There would be no loss of streets, Taylor stressed—again, a good point if you compare Columbia’s plan to the Atlantic Yards superblocks or even the superblock public housing project just outside. The plan would be very different from the gated and fenced Morningside Heights campus. And “almost 100,000 square feet” of new public space sounds good, right? (Well, actually, it’s just a little over two acres—a net gain, but not a huge percentage of 17 acres. Atlantic Yards would have eight of 22 acres as open space, but, then again, it would introduce a huge new population.)

And all the buildings, she said, would fit into the neighborhood around them, with none taller than the 320-foot-tall 3333 Broadway, a notably dense complex just north of the site, with 1190 apartments. It recently left the Mitchell-Lama program, with attendant fears of displacement. (The maximum building height in Columbia's project would be 260 feet, plus an additional 20 to 60 feet for mechanical equipment.)

In fact, the Columbia expansion zone is directly bordered in several places by significant density, as the graphic below shows—far more towers than immediately surround the Atlantic Yards footprint. And while there’s some low-rise walk-up housing nearby and actually within the Columbia expansion site, none is of the vintage of brownstone Prospect Heights.

Enter Dinkins

Then longtime Harlemite David Dinkins, the former mayor and now Columbia professor, stepped up to the microphone, to introduce the Columbia president. “Oh no,” exclaimed one person from the audience. “Oh yes,” responded Dinkins, who’s come out as a supporter of the project. (He wrote a Times op-ed.) And then the boos and cheers drowned out discourse for a while.

“We can disagree,” Dinkins started.

“You’re a traitor,” bellowed a man from the crowd, dissing the city's first black mayor.

Nearby my seat, two Harlemites, a black man and a black woman, revved up into a quick dispute over Columbia, with the man finally showing a trump card. “You weren’t back there in the ‘50s,” he charged.

Dinkins talked about Bollinger’s history, at the University of Michigan, of supporting affirmative action, urging the crowd to grant him “the respect and credibility” the university president deserved.

Bollinger on stage

When Bollinger took the mike (photo shows Dinkins in background), it again took a while for the noise to subside. He proceeded gamely, with a look of grim determination. I heard him mention his wife, and a previous stint at Columbia, and his aim to help the institution, and how it helped the community—one example was staffing a local hospital.

The rest was inaudible. He looked relieved when it was over. But it wasn’t. One of the first speakers, an environmental attorney, said, “I’d like to see that [former] Lee Bollinger stand up to this community,” criticizing Columbia’s failure to work with the community. Columbia recently hired veteran Democratic operative Bill Lynch, at $40,000 a month, to organize the community.

Eminent domain

But Columbia had some supporters. One man explained how Columbia relocated his 60-person company to the Studebaker Building, one of three major historic buildings in the project footprint, part of Manhattanville's automotive history, that would be preserved. (Opponents say more buildings deserve preservation; Atlantic Yards, by contrast, would involve no such preservation.)

“Columbia has been a very strong partner,” he said, adding, in a line echoing former ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano, “We cannot stop progress.” (Was this speaker, as with some Brooklyn property owners who sold to Forest City Ratner, obligated to testify in favor of the project?)

Columbia has committed to not using eminent domain to acquire the 132 apartments within the project zone. That’s a step forward from Atlantic Yards, but it leaves open the question: what if some people refuse to leave? Perhaps because all those units are in what would be the second phase of the project, Columbia can afford to wait it out.

The university now owns or controls at least 80 percent of the project site (clarification: if you consider expected public property that would be conveyed), but several major commercial property owners have resisted the threats of eminent domain and in fact have presented their own plans to develop new space over their properties.

The biggest landowner, Nick Sprayregen of Tuck-It-Away storage, has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the fight against Columbia. No such deep-pocketed local businessperson has emerged in the Atlantic Yards fight, as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn is funded significantly by donations from residents.

Sprayregen has a right to pursue his plans, but he's not what CPC was describing in last night's handout, which stressed that eminent domain “historically abuses communities of color and low and moderate income people.” Then again, his goals are in concert with the community plan, so he’s hardly an outrider, either.

When I exited, a man wearing a sticker saying “Coalition for the Future of Manhattanville” handed me a slick Columbia brochure about the project’s benefits. Dozens of people wore such stickers inside the hearing, and I was told they were recruited from a job training center. If so, they weren't all on message; at the hearing, a guy next to me wearing the sticker was booing Columbia.

(Update) The Columbia Spectator reports that the coalition has been formed by consultant Bill Lynch.

Some contrasts

Forest City Ratner claims that 22-acre, 8 million square-foot Atlantic Yards would take a decade, in two phases, but even project landscape architect Laurie Olin has said it could take twice that long. Columbia acknowledges that its 17-acre, 6.8 million square-foot project (with 2 million square feet below grade) would take 22 years, in two phases. (If that's their prediction, add extra time for contingencies.) Columbia’s first phase, according to the map at right, even is in wedge form, not unreminiscent of the AY footprint at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues.

Given that both Atlantic Yards and the Columbia plan could lead to indirect displacement of thousands of locals (2920 and 3293 respectively), why hasn’t such a fierce response to Atlantic Yards come from low-income Brooklynites? For one thing, the population most at risk--people in unregulated apartments subject to increasing rents--is a decent distance away, in Gowanus, or Crown Heights, or Bedford-Stuyvesant.

There’s no local equivalent of the Harlem Tenants Council to represent them; one potential group might be ACORN, which instead partnered with Forest City Ratner to include 900 low-income units, albeit over the life of the project, which could be ten to 20 years.

Also, there’s relatively little low-income housing bordering the AY footprint. While the president of the tenants council at the Atlantic Terminal 4B project has criticized Atlantic Yards, Forest City Ratner wisely recruited leaders from the Gowanus Houses and the Mitchell-Lama housing in Fort Greene for its CBA. (And Forest City has paid undisclosed sums to CBA signatories.) It got the fledgling job-training BUILD on board, thanks to Assemblyman Roger Green and his aide Randall Toure, who then went to work for Ratner. Some ministers of Brooklyn churches with mostly black congregations have opposed the project, but their flocks have not come out in force.

And Forest City Ratner lined up Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Senator Chuck Schumer and numerous other officials even before the project was announced. The arena proposal was meant to help restore Brooklyn’s identity for those of the Markowitzian generation (and others). It was pitched as something for the greater good of the borough, so the nearby communities got less attention—and the state’s land use review process enforced that.

And Forest City Ratner had the press. Starchitect-loving New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp, for example, upon the announcement of Atlantic Yards, declared it a "Garden of eden" replacing "an open railyard," a gross inaccuracy. Columbia has a starchitect, too, Renzo Piano, but there's not the same audience for starchitecture in Harlem.

Going forward

Columbia might argue that its project is for the greater good of the borough, city, and even world, but it’s got more to do, even with the help of go-to (as the New York Observer has noted) environmental consultants ARKF, who've also been working on Atlantic Yards. Forest City Ratner proposed affordable housing early on. Columbia’s plan did not at first include affordable housing, but the university is wising up.

It’s possible that the Manhattanville plan, with new housing guarantees, will win more local support. The New York Times has withheld editorial support, hinting that affordable housing would tip the balance. The Times has always in editorials supported Atlantic Yards, albeit calling for tweaks, but then again the Brooklyn project is being built by the parent company's business partner in the new Times Tower. (No, I don't think the business relationship causes biased news coverage, but I do think it affects the editorials. And, given the relationship, I do think the Times has an obligation to be exacting in its news coverage, and it hasn't done so, for whatever reasons.)

There’s a CBA to be negotiated with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, a body that’s been criticized but is nonetheless more representative than that which “negotiated” the CBA for Atlantic Yards. The ESDC is going to have to find the area blighted to pursue eminent domain. The designation of blight, as with the Atlantic Yards site, will, like other issues regarding the Columbia plan, be the subject of intense contentiousness.

In eminent domain case appeal, plaintiffs say AY sequence violates Kelo case

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis was emphatic in his June 6 dismissal of the Atlantic Yards eminent domain case. But the case is hardly dead, and the plaintiffs have fought back with a blistering appellate brief that, while it doesn’t fully refute Garaufis’s analysis, argues that he ignored a host of other factors, notably the sequence endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the controversial 2005 Kelo v. New London decision.

Garaufis said, essentially, that, the plaintiffs—originally 13 tenants and property owners in the Atlantic Yards footprint—erred in alleging that the benefits were a pretext. (A 14th plaintiff was added as Garaufis combined a second case.)

"Because Plaintiffs concede that the Project will create large quantities of housing and office space, as well as a sports arena, in an area that is mostly blighted, Plaintiffs’ allegations, if proven, would not permit a reasonable juror to conclude that the 'sole purpose' of the Project is to confer a private benefit,” Garaufis wrote. “Neither would those allegations permit a reasonable juror to conclude that the purposes offered in support of the Project are 'mere pretexts' for an actual purpose to confer a private benefit on FCRC.”

I thought Garaufis’s analysis was flawed regarding three of four counts, since he missed nuances and details in the plaintiffs’ argument. But the appellate brief, a prelude to an exchange of at least two more legal briefs before an October 9 oral argument, has bigger fish to fry.

The brief focuses on what the plaintiffs argue is the appropriate sequencing for the exercise of eminent domain, as affirmed in Kelo. In other words, even though the case has led to a backlash in some state legislatures and has emerged as a presidential campaign issue, the plaintiffs are arguing not that Kelo should be overruled, but merely should be adhered to.

The brief states:
This deal was struck: (1) without creating a comprehensive development plan or so much as considering a single alternative to Ratner’s plan for development of the area, including his selection of Plaintiffs’ properties for seizure; (2) without a true competitive bidding process for the purchase of Vanderbilt Yards owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA”); (3) with no bidding process at all for the remainder of the site, including Plaintiffs’ properties; (4) without local legislative review and approval by the City Council; and (5) without a process to allow for meaningful community input.

Who benefits?

The brief argues:
Defendants’ decision to take Plaintiffs’ properties serves only one purpose: it allows Ratner to build a Project of unprecedented size, and thus reap a profit that Defendants, tellingly, have attempted to conceal at every turn. This is not merely favoritism of a particular developer in the classic sense, although it is that. Here, the “favored” developer is driving and dictating the process, with government officials at all levels obediently falling into line.

While it may serve to allow Ratner to build such a project and reap an unknown profit, the city and state officials who are defendants can argue that, as stated in the Empire State Development Corporation’s General Project Plan and affirmed by Garaufis, that the project serves the purposes of establishing a sports arena, building affordable housing, and removing blight, among other things.

Special benefits

The brief points to favoritism:
The agreement to develop the Project and take Plaintiffs’ properties included express provisions bestowing atypical benefits upon FCRC. Under one written agreement, FCRC will receive a raft of special discretionary goodies not available as-of-right to real estate developers, including $200 million in capital contributions from the City and State,2 low-cost financing for the arena, extra property tax savings, a low-cost lease, and the guaranteed transfer of private property through eminent domain. Under a second agreement, FCRC is granted the unfettered right to develop other properties near the Project footprint including Pursuant to the pre-Project announcement agreement between Pataki, Bloomberg and Ratner, FCRC was gifted the rights to build over the MTA’s Vanderbilt Rail Yard. This was expressly confirmed, on more than one occasion, by MTA spokespersons in discussions with news reporters. Apparently embarrassed by the disclosure that a back-room deal had already been struck to convey the MTA’s property to FCRC, the MTA retracted its statements. The sham RFP was profoundly biased in favor of FCRC. Whereas FCRC had been working on its (pre-approved) proposal for purchase of the railyards with the MTA and other State officials for more than two years, the RFP gave everyone else forty-two days to generate proposals. Among other things, the RFP required proposers to submit a twenty-year profit and loss statement (pro forma). FCRC submitted a formal bid to develop over the railyards, offering to pay the MTA $50 million – $164.5 million less than the appraised value of $214.5 million. Notably, FCRC failed to submit a profit and loss projection as the RFP required.

What’s the standard?

The brief argues that Garaufis misread the standard on whether a case was plausible enough to survive a motion for dismissal. The relevant case at the time was Bell Atlantic v. Twombly. The brief states:
The court held that “Under [Bell Atlantic], Plaintiffs’ claims that the public use requirement has been violated must be dismissed” because, as in Bell Atlantic, “the facts alleged by Plaintiffs in the present case – the taking of property from some private parties and the resulting benefit to other private parties – are as consistent with lawful behavior as with unlawful behavior.”
(Emphasis in brief)

However, the brief argues, an appellate court case since decided in June, Iqbal v. Hasty, clarifies the standard, making it easier for the plaintiffs to state their claim. It requires "a flexible ‘plausibility standard,’ which obliges a pleader to amplify a claim with some factual allegations in those contexts where such amplification is needed to render the claim plausible.”
(Emphasis in original)

The brief follows up to argue that such a “notably permissive standard” is especially important in cases where “defendants have exclusive possession and control of virtually all of the evidence concerning the decisionmaking process” and “the immense power of government has been enlisted in service of seizing plaintiffs’ properties.”

The brief sets it out:
If the district court’s formula were correct, no complaint – not one – asserting a claim alleging an unconstitutional motive… could ever be sustained. It would matter not that the assertion of unconstitutional purpose, or motive, or intent, was supported by a welter of undisputed evidence, whether circumstantial (as is typical), or even direct. A reviewing court can always confidently proclaim, as the district court did here, that undisputed allegations, or allegations accepted as true, while fully consistent with an unlawful purpose, are also plausibly consistent with an lawful purpose.

Fighting facts

The brief also argues that “the district court misconstrued and/or ignored many of the detailed factual allegations that support the factual inference of improper purpose," pointing to the difference with Kelo, where the court’s opinion noted that the use of eminent domain was “executed pursuant to a ‘carefully considered’ development plan.”

In the case of Kelo, the brief draws on Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurrence [not, as I originally suggested, the opinion of the court]:
[T]he trial court considered testimony from government officials and corporate officers; documentary evidence of communications between these parties; respondents’ awareness of New London’s depressed economic condition and evidence corroborating the validity of this concern; the substantial commitment of public funds by the State to the development project before most of the private beneficiaries were known; evidence 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; and the fact that the other private beneficiaries of the project are still unknown because the office space proposed to be built has not yet been rented.
(Emphasis in brief)

In this case, the issue of motive or intent must be determined by trial rather than dismissed via an exchange of briefs, especially since new facts have already emerged thanks to press and political scrutiny:
Indeed, if facts emerge in discovery, as they have during the pendency of this action even without forced disclosures, this action will likely not be subject to resolution at the summary judgment stage.

Supplemental allegations

Indeed, should the case go back to trial, the plaintiffs say they’d amend the complaint to add supplemental allegations, noting that “additional evidence of Defendants’ improper purpose has come to light" since the suit was filed. See the Fed. Rules of Civil Procedure 15(d) (p. 44 of PDF).

The allegations include:
--the MTA’s July 13 RFPs soliciting proposals from developers interested in purchasing its Hudson Rail Yards contrast with the Vanderbilt Yards RFP, 1369 pages long vs. 42 pages, with 92 days to respond, rather than 42 days, with design guidelines and a planning process before any developer was selected or even solicited.
--the doubling of the city’s commitment to the project, from $100 million to $205 million –a judge’s findings that developer Forest City Ratner misrepresented its “control” of a building it had subleased
--the news that the ESDC never saw a business plan from the developer and the KPMG report it solicited failed to include Site 5, home to a condo building.
--a 7/19/07 report on the ESDC by consultant A.T. Kearney, which “confirms Plaintiffs’ general allegations and fears concerning ESDC. The report recommends that ESDC should ‘reject its legacy of regional patronage, a pattern of funding one-off solutions, and a perceived preference for practicing the economics of political convenience.’”

AY vs. Kelo

The brief compares the sequence preceding the use of eminent domain compared to the Supreme Court’s decisions, upholding eminent domain, in Berman v. Parker (1954) and Kelo. The brief notes:
--the identity of the private developer who would benefit from the transfer of plaintiff’s property was unknown
--the legislature considered and adopted a comprehensive plan for economic development or the elimination of blight
--the beneficiaries of the takings did not conceive of the project and drive it to completion
--the legislature “did not cut a back-room deal to convey a massive swath of government-owned property to a private developer and then try to cover up the favoritism by concocting a sham public bidding process.”

With AY, the brief argues, “the difference is stark”:
--Forest City Ratner determined the map of the project
--government defendants agreed to cooperate
--an MTA official told reporters in 2004 Ratner had the rail yards without any bidding
--the “sham RFP process” in 2005 covered up the fait accompli
--the government decided the blighted area was exactly what Ratner needed.

Appropriate sequence

The brief argues that there is an appropriate sequence:
--the project emerges from a legislative body
--the body, or one delegated by it, targets an area for redevelopment
--the beneficiaries of eminent domain "are identified through an open public process."

By contrast, courts have disapproved of cases driven by private parties, effectuated by “non-legislative governmental entit[ies],” and with outlines that match the property identified by the private party.

The brief sums it up:
The Complaint cogently explains the facts that support the conclusion that blight – and Defendants’ other proffered justifications – are a pretext. Surely Defendants cannot avoid the kind of meaningful review endorsed by the majority in Kelo, by merely mouthing the words “blight” (or “jobs” or “housing”) in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary.

The brief points to a recent California case in which a trial court denied the government’s motion for summary judgment and instead said a trial would be necessary to evaluate whether the “public purpose”--providing affordable housing–was a pretext, and the actual purpose was to bestow a private benefit.

The decision by a trial court wouldn't be binding in this case, nor even would be an appellate court decision covering California. But it certainly suggests that the law, post-Kelo, is in flux.

The AY template and its spawn, in Williamsburg, W. Harlem, and Coney

Atlantic Yards may seem sui generis, but themes and tactics from Forest City Ratner's megaproject have surfaced in other controversial developments. Just this week, three examples have come under discussion.

1) The recruitment of grassroots groups to support a significant chunk of affordable housing in exchange for a rezoning or override of zoning, as with the New Domino plan in Williamsburg.

2) The use of a slick flier to promise benefits and recruit support, as with the Columbia expansion in West Harlem. (The New York Observer notes that Columbia, at least, is more candid about calculating construction jobs.)

3) The support for a teenage drumline performing at public events like street fairs and parades, as with Thor Equities' entry in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, subject of a video posted on YouTube that has generated controversy.

City Limits sees AY housing echoes in New Domino plan; Yassky, DePaolo differ

The proposed New Domino development in Williamsburg, according to an article in City Limits headlined CULTIVATE THE GRASSROOTS: A NEW DEVELOPMENT MODEL, has taken a page from the Atlantic Yards project in the way developers have gained community support, promising significant chunks of affordable housing in exchange for project that requires a major rezoning or override of current zoning.

The New York Community Council's Phil DePaolo--who left the People's Firehouse, a Williamsburg group that is working with developers on another project--criticized the Rev. Jim O'Shea of Churches United, a supporter of the New Domino plan. City Limits reports:
"Jim O’Shea is always crying about how people are being priced out, so why team up with these developers? He’s allowing himself to be used just like Bertha Lewis and ACORN with Atlantic Yards," says DePaolo. "These projects aren’t encouraging the creation of stable communities. It’s really a land grab."

O’Shea counters that grassroots organizations should be flexible in negotiating with developers to obtain affordable housing. "Housing for 600 families isn’t crumbs," he says. "Either the housing gets built or it doesn’t."

The question: are the tradeoffs worth it?

Yassky on board

City Council Member David Yassky thinks so. Citing the provision of affordable housing, Yassky Friday submitted comments to the Department of City Planning (DCP) fully supporting the New Domino, which would bring some 2200 apartments, including two 30-story and 40-story towers each, to an 11.2-acre site on and near the Williamsburg waterfront. (Yassky isn't mentioned in the City Limits article.)

By contrast, Yassky's position on the Atlantic Yards project has always been closer to the fence: supportive of some aspects, especially the affordable housing, but concerned about the environmental impact, especially traffic. It's interesting to note that Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the Brooklyn Democratic leader, has withheld his support for the project, citing Jane Jacobs and the need for more balanced development. After all, Lopez considers affordable housing one of his main issues.

Yassky's 33rd District includes the zone where the project would be built, just above the Willamsburg Bridge. He did not, for example, urge any historic preservation beyond the main Domino building expected to be landmarked. Yassky in 2005 led the Council to overrule the Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation of a Williamsburg waterfront building as a landmark.

Positions differ

Council Member Diane Reyna, whose 34th District includes a significant chunk of Williamsburg, has not endorsed the plan as presented but instead requested 1000 rather than 660 units of affordable housing, according to the Brooklyn Paper. (That would invariably require larger subsidies.)

And local housing activist DePaolo, whose New York Community Council recently co-sponsored a report on Williamsburg gentrification by Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, has withheld support until "density, zoning, public safety and neighborhood identity and preservation are addressed alongside affordability."

DCP is not voting up or down on the project, rather refining the scope of work, a prelude to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Supporters and opponents have generally expressed themselves in broad strokes, though DePaolo's testimony addresses specific tasks within the draft scope.

DDDB's perspective

There's a quote in the City Limits article from Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn:
Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy doesn't see much unity ahead, however. "It’s to the benefit of the developers to divide communities," he says. "Affordable housing has become the leverage to get out-of-scale rezoning. You can see it with Atlantic Yards and in Williamsburg. Community groups should unite and not just quickly settle for terms that a developer offers."

Goldstein, I'm sure, knows that Atlantic Yards is an override of zoning rather than a rezoning, so he was apparently using sloppy shorthand (for which I've criticized the New York Times in the past.) Zoning is a political issue. It's understandable that a group committed to affordable housing would focus, as Bertha Lewis of ACORN has explained, exclusively on housing. But that's why political leaders should try to see the issues in all their complexity.

[Update] Goldstein sends me a clarification:
I'm pretty sure I did not call Atlantic Yards a rezoning. I specifically explained that the key difference between Atlantic Yards and the Domino plan is that for Atlantic Yards the state enacted a zoning override, whereas the Williamsburg project is going through ULURP and in the end will receive a negotiated rezoning.

Yassky's testimony

I am writing to express support for Community Preservation Corp’s (CPC) plan for the former Domino Sugar Plant. The site is a complex area to develop since there are a number of community wishes for area, including affordable housing and preservation. These do not easily go hand in hand due to several issues, financial and other, but I feel that CPC has stuck a balance.

I submitted testimony several weeks ago in support of landmarking the Domino refinery. I would like to reiterate the historical significance of this building in our City. Williamsburg has been one of the centers of industry in New York for centuries, and was the center for Brooklyn’s sugar production during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Domino Plant is the largest and most imposing reminder of this past that remains on our Waterfront today. In addition to representing North Brooklyn’s history, the Domino Sugar Processing Plant is a landmark in the traditional use of the word: every pedestrian, cyclist and automobile driver that crosses the Williamsburg Bridge sees the Domino Sugar Plant as a beacon on the Brooklyn waterfront. It is an imposing visual, and is among the most recognizable buildings in New York.

CPC’s commitment to include 30% affordable housing in their design is laudable. I have worked hard throughout the years to create and increase affordable housing along Brooklyn’s East River waterfront. During the rezoning we succeeded in creating a program that achieved 20% affordable housing in many of those buildings, and I am happy to see that CPC helping to preserve current Williamsburg communities by including 30% affordable housing.

Lastly, Community Preservation Corp. has pledged to create public access to the waterfront. The Mayor’s PlaNYC set goals to ensure that all New Yorkers have easy access to public open space, and I strongly support this goal. I applaud CPC’s commitment to enhance this goal.

Community Preservation Corp. has created a plan for the Domino Sugar site that will benefit the neighborhood. No plan can perfect for everyone, but I believe that CPC has done a competent job of creating a good balance between competing wishes for the site. This is a significant and positive step towards the continued development of Brooklyn’s waterfront.

DePaolo's testimony

Task: Land Use, Zoning and Public Policy

The draft EIS should study, as an alternative, a reduction of units to 2000 with 800 units set aside as affordable housing. The Bloomberg administration's failure to downzone the Southside of Williamsburg during the 2005 rezoning call for a close look at the impact of the proposed 400-foot towers.

Northside Williamsburg was downzoned with R6a or R6b zoning to offset some of the increased density of the towers now being built on the Northside of Williamsburg. These important protections were not granted to the Southside of Williamsburg.

Task: Socioeconomic Conditions

The draft EIS should study the economic feasibility of 40% affordable housing with 1/2 low-income ($18,000 to $35,000), and 1/2 moderate-income ($35,000 to $57,000) The Draft EIS should examine the effects of the action on socioeconomic conditions in the study area, including population characteristics, increase in economic activity, and the potential displacement of businesses and employment from the proposed action area. The analysis should follow the guidelines of the 2001 CEQR Technical Manual in assessing the proposed actions effects on socioeconomic conditions within ¼- and ½-mile study areas The principal issues of concern with respect to socioeconomic conditions are whether a proposed action would result in significant impacts due to: indirect residential displacement; and indirect business displacement. In conformance with the CEQR Technical Manual guidelines, the assessment of these areas of concern should begin with a detailed analysis.

Task: Historic Resources

The New York Community Council is pleased that the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has calendared a significant north Brooklyn industrial site for designation as a New York City Landmark. LPC voted unanimously to designate the processing house of the Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg Brooklyn. The processing house, which dates to 1883, is an icon of the Brooklyn waterfront. The structure housed three separate sugar refining operations in one vertically-integrated factory: the Filter House; the Pan House; and the Finishing House.

The calendaring focuses on only one building in a six-block site located on either side of Kent Avenue between Grand Street and the Williamsburg Bridge. While much of the remainder of the site consists of more recent structures of lesser architectural value, the calendaring omits the Adant House at South 5th Street, an 1883 building in which sugar cubes were manufactured, and a smaller 1883 power house located adjacent to the processing plant. The New York Community Council has advocated for the preservation of these two structures, and will continue to do so.

Task: Public Safety

The draft EIS should consider the impact on response times to Fire, Medical and Police emergencies. With a 45-second increase in response time to structural fires in the area formerly served by closed Engine Company 212 at 136 Wythe Ave., what impact will 2400 residential units and 220,000 square feet of retail have on response times? Response times increases for medical emergencies and police incident [sic] must be included in the draft EIS.

Task: Energy

The draft EIS should consider requiring new or rehabilitated buildings that comply with green building standards as set forth by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), minimum silver standards.

Task: Traffic, Parking and Mass Transit

The draft EIS should consider the impact of up to 2400 residential units and 220,000 square feet of retail on traffic and parking. What will the impact of this proposal have on our already stressed roads and lack of parking for current residents? 1,450 accessory parking spaces would be located on the project site, in below-grade parking. With the L train already severely overcrowded, and the J and G trains overflowing during rush hour, drastic population increase can have only one of two results: a greater number of people driving through Williamsburg, or a significant increase in rider-ship on public transit lines.

Task: Air Quality

Williamsburg, which is in Brooklyn Community District 1, has one of the highest asthma rates in the City. Asthma, which causes wheezing, coughing and shortness of breath, is the most common chronic disease among the children of Williamsburg. Air pollution and high concentrations of traffic in a densely populated area are factors contributing to the asthma problem. Approximately 5-10% of fine particle pollution is from soot from diesel exhaust, which seems to have the worst effect on the children’s asthma. Williamsburg is one area of the City that exceeds current federal air quality standards for fine-particle pollution. New York State will be required to submit a plan to the federal Environmental Protection Administration by 2008 detailing how it will bring its fine-particle pollution levels into compliance with federal clean air standards. Therefore, consideration should given in the draft EIS to limiting truck access to the proposed site, for morning delivery and pickup only, limit diesel-fueled buses and encourage electric-operated buses.

Until concerns regarding density, zoning, public safety and neighborhood identity and preservation are addressed alongside affordability, The New York Community Council cannot lend its support to CPC’s development of Domino Sugar.

Dailies fall down on Ward Bakery incident follow-up

The news that the Department of Buildings (DoB) had investigated the collapse of the Ward Bakery parapet on April 26 and issued violations was a scoop last Friday for the Daily News; I quickly followed up.

But where's the rest of the press? Why was it news for one publication and not another? After all, the initial incident was covered by the Times, the Daily News, the Post, NY Newsday/AM NY, Metro, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and a gamut of weeklies and blogs. Oddly enough, the New York Sun missed the story.

When work was halted a day later, the Times did a follow-up, as did the Post. More than a week later, the Daily News, alone among the Manhattan-based dailies, covered measures by the Empire State Development Corporation, said to be in process before the parapet collapse, to better monitor the situation.

The DOB's report is news; just because the Daily News got there first, doesn't the public still deserve to be informed?

Beyond the exclusive

As then-New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame wrote in March, in a column headlined Reporting the News Even When a Competitor Gets There First:
Editors at The Times are far from alone in their lack of zeal for the pursuit of even the vital scoops of competitors. It’s a tendency common to top editors in many American newsrooms, one reflected in the way Time’s Haditha exclusive was largely ignored for two months by most other publications as well.

“News organizations are habitually slow at responding to stories broken elsewhere,” Mr. Keller said.“The easy explanation, and one that contains a good measure of truth, is pride,” he acknowledged. "Reporters (and editors) don’t enjoy being beaten.”

...“But it’s not just pride,” Mr. Keller stressed in his e-mail. There is, I agree, the nagging and legitimate question of how much a competitor’s sensitive scoop can be trusted...

In this case, the competitor's scoop was easily verifiable; while the DOB did not issue its report as a press release--which might have led to a round of simultaneous reportage--it was readily available on request after the publication of the Daily News article.

Shortchanging the readers

Calame continued:
Readers would benefit if The Times could swallow a bit of its pride and make use of two readily available approaches to dealing with the important news in the scoops of competitors.

The Web version of The Times could link more often to complete versions of vital exclusives in competing publications, such as the Post series on Walter Reed. And editors could be encouraged to use solidly reported wire stories, such as the March 20 A.P. article on the killings in Haditha, to let readers know about significant exclusives in other publications. In February 2004, my predecessor wrote a column chiding the paper for failing to pursue the exclusives of others.

During my almost two years as public editor, I have continued to see this problem that directly affects readers. The reality is that when significant news breaks — even in the form of an exclusive in a competing publication — The Times must be committed to getting on the story. Anything less seriously damages the paper’s value to readers.

In that February 2004 column, then-Public Editor Daniel Okrent wrote:
But maybe The Times's insistence on stamping its own brand on everything it touches ends up diminishing what it delivers. If the goal of newspapering is to inform the readers and create a historical record, shouldn't the editors be telling us about everything they think is important, no matter where they find it?

The same can be said for the rest of the press. Just because the Daily News beat them to an important update on a widely-reported controversy doesn't mean they should shortchange their readers.

Volleyball tournament returns; Barclays is on board

Last year, the inaugural AVP Brooklyn Open, the pro beach volleyball tour stop in Coney Island, was a "Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Event, in Partnership with Atlantic Yards." I noted that the AY promo was a little odd, since it hadn't been mentioned in the initial press release. And they're both part of Forest City Ratner.

This year it's just a "Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Event," according to a promo I received in the mail. Now that Atlantic Yards has been officially approved, does it no longer need the plug? Maybe not: a Forest City Ratner press release repeats the "partnership with Atlantic Yards" language.

Now the Barclays Center, announced in January, is a sponsor, as noted on the AVP event web site. Ever heard of Brooklyn Burger? Apparently there's no end to capitalizing on the Brooklyn connection. The tournament will be Aug. 23-26.

AY the "Manhattanization" poster child for L.A. commentator

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed today headlined Why the rush to Manhattanize L.A.?, Joel Kotkin cites Atlantic Yards as the poster child:

Why is this happening? One reason for the city's apparent lock-step march to Manhattanization is that big developers are increasingly dominating and politicizing land-use decisions, much as they do in New York City. The $4-billion "Atlantic Yards" project in New York is an example. The proposal would add about 6,500 mixed-income residential units to the generally low- and mid-rise environment of downtown Brooklyn, making population density in the area among the nation's highest. Despite intense grass-roots opposition, developer Bruce Ratner and his ally, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have won at least $500 million in subsidies for the project.

"You can't stop [big developer] interests unless you have equally powerful interests on your side," said urban historian Fred Siegel.

Siegel's observation is appropriate; note that the West Side Stadium was opposed by both grassroots activists and the very self-interested Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden.

As for "the generally low- and mid-rise environment of downtown Brooklyn," that would be a better description of Prospect Heights, where most of Atlantic Yards would be located, and nearby Fort Greene. Downtown Brooklyn, especially given the recent rezoning, is a more mixed environment, with an increasing number of high rises.

As for the subsidies, the direct subsidies, as of now, would be $305 million from the city and state, plus a significant number of indirect subsidies and public costs. To reach $500 million, perhaps Kotkin was counting the estimated $200 million in subsidies from the "Atlantic Yards carve-out" in the 421-a revision.

Brooklyn Paper "Newspaper of the Year"? Yes, but "a," not "the"

The top news of the week, the Brooklyn Paper tells us, is that The Brooklyn Paper is ‘Newspaper of the Year’, according to the Suburban Newspapers of America trade association. The group praised the weekly's Atlantic Yards coverage, among other things.

The lead in the print edition:
The Brooklyn Paper has been named “Newspaper of the Year” by one of the nation’s largest newspaper trade associations.

It might lead to the impression that the Brooklyn weekly is the newspaper of the year. But that's not so; the trade association gave "newspaper of the year" awards to six newspapers: two dailies and four non-dailies.

More context

For more clarity, check the slightly longer article the Brooklyn Paper published online only. The lead began:
The Brooklyn Paper is a Suburban News­papers of America “Newspaper of the Year,” the group announced on Monday.
(Emphasis added)

Also in that article, but missing from the print story, was this context:
The Paper was cited for general excellence in its category of newspapers, the com­petitive class of larg­est circulation week­lies.

You'd think a "newspaper of the year" would want to get it right.

A closer look at the 421-a revision; can you figure it out?

So can you make sense of the revision of the 421-a tax exemption, produced in closed-door negotiations between city officials and state legislators, and which even left reporters confused?

It's hard to read. (Click to enlarge.) One key is that the section in brackets, which I've highlighted in red, was the original, more blatant, "Atlantic Yards carve-out," the one that even ticked off Mayor Mike Bloomberg and ACORN's Bertha Lewis. That would've provided an estimated $300 million in benefits to developer Forest City Ratner. (The underlined segments are new.)

Getting less blatant

The underlining is the new text, and Atlantic Yards would still get special treatment, worth $150-$200 million. The carve-out would have given a 25-year tax exemption for AY buildings that don't include affordable housing, just because they were part of a project that included an average of 20% affordable housing for households at 70% of Area Median Income (AMI), which at that point was higher than the 60% AMI in the state bill.

The AMI levels have changed, which I'll explain below, but the important thing is that Atlantic Yards buildings that meet the new standards--20% affordable housing--would get a 25-year tax exemption. Atlantic Yards buildings that don't meet the new standards would get a 15-year tax exemption, unavailable to other market-rate buildings in the same neighborhood. In other words, unlike other market-rate construction in Prospect Heights, they'd be grandfathered in.

The New York Times on Wednesday reported, the city's party line:
As for Atlantic Yards, city officials said the new agreement represents a fair compromise. To receive the maximum tax break, 20 percent of the units in any building will have to meet the new affordability guidelines, which are more stringent than those that originally applied. And the lower-priced units will have to be built at the same time as the market-rate units, to insure that they are not put off until the end of construction or never completed.

This fails to explain that Forest City Ratner would still be eligible for a special tax break. It sets up a false comparison. Yes, the new law is more stringent than that "originally applied," but it would be more stringent for everyone, so that's not the point. The point is that the affordability guidelines would be different for Atlantic Yards. That's why it's still a "carve-out."

The Times reported June 29:
But the bill would also provide what the city estimates are an additional $300 million in tax breaks for the vast Atlantic Yards complex being developed by Forest City Ratner Companies, the development partner with The New York Times Company in the Times’ new Midtown headquarters, without getting any additional affordable units in return. Mr. Lopez said it was a concession sought during negotiations with Mr. Spinola and the Senate over his bill.

So it all depends on how you spin it. The $150-$200 million would not provide "any additional affordable units" as well. Yes, Forest City Ratner, when it planned the Atlantic Yards project, expected to get it moving in 2004 or 2005, long before the tax break was revised. But any other developers whose projects were delayed would now have to provide affordable housing in exchange for the tax break.

Looking at the tax break

The Sun and the Post and a blogger or two figured out that Atlantic Yards would receive a special tax break unavailable to other projects. Here's the key text, which needs a decoder ring:
With respect to any multiple dwelling in a UDC Large Scale Project that meets the requirements of paragraph (c) of subdivision seven of this section, the period of tax benefits awarded to such multiple dwelling shall be the same as the period of tax benefits awarded under clause (A) of subparagraph (iii) of paragraph (a) of subdivision two of this section. With respect to any multiple dwelling in a UDC Large Scale Project that does not meet the requirements of paragraph (c) of subdivision seven of this section, the period of tax benefits awarded to such multiple dwelling shall be the same as the period of tax benefits awarded under clause (A) of subparagraph (ii) of paragraph (a) of subdivision two of this section.
(Emphases added)

Those sections relate to the state's law CONSTRUCTION OF CERTAIN MULTIPLE DWELLINGS (search on 421-a) The first section offers 25 years of tax breaks; the second, 15 years. Current 421-a law, before revision, offers 10-year and 20-year exemptions in the Manhattan core; the longer period is for projects that contain affordable housing.

The 15-year and 25-year exemptions apply to projects outside the Manhattan core; the 15-year exemption is as-of-right, with no affordable housing required, while the 25-year exemption goes to projects that either include affordable housing or are in areas targeted for revival. (See reports from the Independent Budget Office and the Pratt Center for Community Development.)

In other words, a 15-year tax break means Forest City would get the status quo grandfathered in.

Section iii sets out this schedule of exemptions:
During Construction (max. three years): 100%
Following completion of work, by year
1-21: 100%
22: 80%
23: 60%
24: 40%
25: 20%

Section ii sets out this schedule of exemptions:
During Construction (max. three years): 100%
Following completion of work, by year
1-11: 100%
12: 80%
13: 60%
14: 40%
15: 20%

Changing AMI

The AMI figures have changed, and now that I've seen the text of the bill, I can update and correct Wednesday's post. The definition of affordable housing is not being raised across the board from 60% AMI to 90% AMI, as I'd suggested, from my reading of press coverage.

Rather, projects built by private developers without "substantial government assistance" would be required to include 20% affordable housing at 60% AMI. Projects built "with substantial assistance of grants, loans or subsidies from any federal, state or local agency or instrumentality," with that assistance aimed to provide affordable housing would have a different standard.

Those projects, which would include Queens West and Atlantic Yards, would be required to either offer 20% for-sale units at up to 125% AMI or 20% rentals at rentals at an average of up 90% of AMI. Projects with fewer than 25 units could include 20% rentals at up to 120% of AMI.

It seems odd that government-assisted projects would have more expensive affordable housing than that required of projects built by private developers on their own. However, the 90% AMI ceiling is apparently aimed to give the city flexibility in major projects like Queens West.

DOB says Ratner should've anticipated Ward Bakery danger & also used shed; violations assigned

Forest City Ratner and its contractors should’ve been much more careful. That’s the conclusion of a report by the Department of Buildings (DOB) on the April 26 collapse of a 200-foot section of the parapet of the 100-year-old Ward Bakery on Pacific Street. The fallout was alarming, as the 55-foot drop spread terra cotta and rubble around a sidewalk not protected by a shed, but fortunately was not fatal.

(Photos from DOB report except as marked.)

DOB’s report, dated “July 2007,” first surfaced in a Daily News exclusive this morning, headlined Building's collapse no surprise: Ratner knew of damage to Ward building, but didn't halt demolition - report. (The headline is overstated, because it was the parapet, not the building that collapsed, and it was asbestos abatement rather than full-scale demolition.) The Daily News says the report was issued July 25.

The department’s Forensic Engineering Unit concluded that the parapet had suffered extensive structural deterioration:
Forest City Ratner had been apprised of the deterioration of the façade and the parapet, but the extent of the deterioration and the risk of collapse had apparently not been communicated to the crew that had been assigned the task of removing tar and asbestos coatings from the rear of the parapet. As a result of the deteriorated conditions, even the relatively passive construction activities involved in removing the coatings precipitated the collapse of the terracotta tiles and the bricks on which they were mounted.

Violations

[Updated] The DOB reports the following violations:

(Owner) Forest City Ratner Companies, LLC: Failure to maintain the exterior building wall. Approximately 200’ long by 7’ high section of parapet wall at Pacific Street side of building collapsed and fell approximately 55 feet to grade level. DOB Forensic Engineer Report dated July ’07 shows that collapsed parapet structure and related building area was deteriorated and structurally defective before the collapse and contributed to the collapse. Chipping hammer observed at ground near collapsed debris.

(Owner) Pacific Vanderbuilt Development Company, LLC: Failure to maintain exterior building wall. Approximately 200' long x 7' high section of parapet wall at Pacific Street side of building collapsed and fell approximately 55 feet to grade level. DOB Forensic Engineer Report dated July '07 shows that collapsed parapet structure and related building area was deteriorated and structurally defective before the collapse and contributed to the collapse. Chipping hammer observed at ground near collapsed debris.

(Demolition Contractor) Gateway Demolition Corporation: Failure to safeguard persons and property during building work. Work to remove asbestos-containing material with scrapers and electric chipping hammers observed to be 90% complete. Approximately 200' long x 7' high section of parapet wall collapsed and fell approximately 55 feet to grade level. DOB Forensic Engineer Report dated July '07 states that collapsed parapet structure and related building area was deteriorated and structurally defective before the collapse AND no steps were taken to secure already compromised structure before the parapet work began.

It's not clear from the DOB's violation page what the maximum penalty is, but it's typically a $2500 fine. The penalty will be determined by the Environmental Control Board, according to DOB.

The Daily News quoted an opponent:
Forest City Ratner "should be heavily fined for this," said Daniel Goldstein, a member of the opposition group Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. "Ratner's negligence is stark evidence that the community desperately needs the ombudsman promised by [state officials] over 93 days ago."

An FCR spokesman was quoted:
"Our contractors were engaged in necessary predemolition asbestos-abatement work," [Bruce] Bender said. "We believed at the time that all safety measures were being taken."

What about the shed?

[Updated] It wasn't clear to me that the report says the developer was cited for removing the shed. DOB spokeswoman Kate Lindquist had said in April that a sidewalk shed was not required for asbestos abatement, the report suggests that the failure to reinstate the shed was wrong:
Given the deteriorated condition of the façade and parapet, the asbestos removal should not have proceeded without protective measures in place.

Lindquist today confirms that both her previous qoute was correct and that a violation was issued:
The Building Code does not require a sidewalk shed to be installed during asbestos abatement work. However, the Code does require the contractor to safeguard the public and property during construction work and the property owner to maintain his or her building in a safe and lawful condition. Knowing the condition of the parapet and façade, as outlined in the engineering report prepared by Thornton Tomasetti, Gateway and the owners were made aware of the condition but failed to take appropriate action to safeguard the public and property during construction operations.

(Top two photos by Robert Guskind of the Gowanus Lounge. Bottom photo by Jonathan Barkey. Composite by Lumi Rolley of No Land Grab.)

In April, I noted that a shed had existed for years—18 months, the DOB clarifies--but apparently was removed at some point after March 3. On March 21, the developer filed for a permit to build a new shed, but it had not been installed, as sewer work took precedence.

New measures

The asbestos abatement work resumed in early July. That announcement promised "new protective measures, such as additional site safety engineers to oversee demolition operations and the installation of sidewalk sheds and netting at all abatement and demolition sites." Also, "the developer has revised its means and methods plan for abatement and demolition operations to ensure the sequence of both types of work do not interfere with one another."

The new report states:
Based on the parapet failure, the owner’s engineer and demolition contractor are now “front ending” removal of the remaining portions of the parapets prior to the remaining asbestos abatement. This procedure should have been adopted earlier. The remainder of the building can be safely demolished with usage of standard demolition techniques and safeguards.
(Emphasis in original)

This isn't the first unsafe demolition performed by Forest City Ratner contractors; the use of a backhoe last year, when use of hand tools was mandated, was the first.

Building history

The report explains that the 4- and 5-story "through block" building has multiple sections and wings, serving as Pechter’s bakery for 90 years. Constructed from steel beams and columns supporting cinder concrete slabs, the complex was ornamented with white glazed terracotta blocks, clay made to simulate cut stone.

The report states:
Based on Italianate architecture, the bakery was designed to have a monumental appearance when viewed from afar. Ornamental white glazed terracotta blocks were used to frame the large windows. Steel angle frames were placed behind the 7’ high parapet to support signage announcing the bakery.

Indeed, a photo from 1955 shows that sign proudly proclaiming the building’s identity.

Deterioration

Though preservationists have called for saving the building, slated to be razed for interim surface parking, and developer Shaya Boymelgreen was said to have plans to turn it into a hotel, DOB cites “long term structural integrity problems with the exterior walls” and says “structural deficiencies with the façade date back at least to the early 1990’s.”

A report developer Forest City Ratner commissioned and submitted to the New York State Office of Historic Preservation in August 2006 said a majority of the façade’s glazed terracotta is damaged and would have to be replaced, not repaired. With the cost of lowering window sill heights to meet current code requirements, a renovation would be technically feasible but “impractical and unrealistic.”

The report calls 800 Pacific Street “a vacant and deteriorated warehouse;” that may be so, but a segment of a connected structure at 808 Pacific--a warehouse, according to DOB--still operates as Pack It Away Mini Storage.

Causes of collapse

The report explains that that structural steel became corroded because of “long term water infiltration through the terracotta and brick.” The development of rust led to an increase in volume, pressuring the adjacent brickwork, eventually snapping the exterior brickwork.

Such deterioration “is frequently encountered (and repaired) with similarly constructed steel framed buildings in New York City,” the report states. However, “parapets and cornices are especially susceptible to failure” because they experience weather effects “on both interior and exterior faces.”

Should've been foreseen

The report concludes:
Based on the steel and concrete building’s nearly one hundred years of exposure to the elements, the corrosion of the roof support steel, and the building’s decades of deferred maintenance, it is not surprising that the entire 200’ length of the Pacific St parapet fell to grade under the stress of the relatively passive construction procedure of removing tar and cementitious coatings from the parapet’s rear. The potential for an imminent failure of the parapet and façade should have been apparent to the owner and the demolition contractor from the façade’s deteriorated condition and/or from the Thornton Tomasetti report that documented the condition of the façade and the parapet. Review of the asbestos and tar abatement procedure leads us to conclude that even the light loads of the scrapers and chipping guns were sufficient to propagate losses of large areas of the façade.

BrooklynSpeaks, pols propose new AY governance structure; ESDC wary

The BrooklynSpeaks coalition, which has taken a “mend it don’t end it” posture toward Atlantic Yards and thus gained the support of several local elected officials, yesterday proposed a new governance structure for the project, which, under the best scenario, could take a decade to be built, but might last 20 years, according to the project landscape architect.

The coalition, spearheaded by the Municipal Art Society along with several Brooklyn neighborhood groups, citywide groups, and even a couple of national ones, recommends that a Planning and Oversight entity, involving government agency representatives and local elected officials, be set up to oversee implementation of the project, including future changes. Also, a Stakeholder Council involving local groups would play an advisory role. (See diagrams from BrooklynSpeaks.)

However, there's no assurance that such a structure could actually impose changes (like a significant reduction in the project's size)--that would depend more on political forces--and the initial response from the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), was lukewarm.

“We’re going to review what’s proposed, but I think the sense here is that the form of governance isn’t as important as the substance of that governance,” spokesman Errol Cockfield said. “Since we’ve come into office, we’ve put several efforts in motion to make sure this project is closely monitored.”

While Cockfield is mindful of the criticism that the ESDC's plan for an ombudsperson was announced more than three months ago, he said, “Given the demands of the position, we want to make sure we choose the right candidate.” (Atlantic Yards critics, of course, would point to the ESDC under the previous administration of Gov. George Pataki, which rushed the approval of the project.)

Official backing

The Regional Plan Association's Rob Lane in May criticized AY as an example of the government's unwillingness to oversee "city-making," major projects that extended over several administrations, and several elected officials yesterday essentially made that point.

“One of the most alarming aspects of the Atlantic Yards process over the last few years has been Forest City's lack of accountability to the public,” said Brooklyn City Councilman David Yassky in a statement. “This must change. An appropriate governance structure should be put in place to actively monitor any developments in the Atlantic Yards Project.”

Yassky, though he wasn’t present at the press conference at Borough Hall, is among several elected officials supporting the proposal. Assemblyman Jim Brennan, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, and City Council Member Letitia James attended. Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and State Senator Eric Adams sent representatives. (James and Montgomery, the clearest Atlantic Yards opponents, clearly are willing to maintain pressure in an alternate mode.)

I couldn’t make the press conference—there were infrastructure issues with the subway after yesterday's storm—but did gather reactions from a variety of stakeholders.

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), which includes members of BrooklynSpeaks and Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), supports the process, stating: “CBN was formed to facilitate the community’s role in the environmental review of a proposed development over the Vanderbilt rail yards, as required by legislation. At that time it wasn't imagined that the community would have to insist again and again on its rightful and traditional role of oversight in the development of the Yards!”

CBN, unlike BrooklynSpeaks, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the project's environmental review.

DDDB: remember the lawsuits

DDDB, in a statement, made reference to pending lawsuits it has spearheaded: “The State has a responsibility to the public vis-a-vis Atlantic Yards, which it currently is not fulfilling. So of course there needs to be a governance structure in place which includes community stakeholders, community boards, and local elected officials if Atlantic Yards goes forward. A well-organized governance structure should have been in place and acting months ago. Having said that, we are optimistic that the eminent domain lawsuit and the community's legal challenge to the project's approval will stop the misguided Atlantic Yards project.”

“Then we can start over, and we can move forward with the revived and revised community plan for the rail yards, known as the UNITY Plan. That plan would start with a democratic process to achieve responsible development over the rail yards, with government and community input and oversight from the beginning, instead of tagged on, as an afterthought, at the end.”

What’s the precedent?

BrooklynSpeaks suggested that the Project Planning and Oversight Entity “could be established as an ESDC subsidiary, comparable to Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation or Queens West, both of which were created specifically to involve local representation in the decision-making for those projects.”

As for the Stakeholder Council, it would include representatives from local community groups, including supporters and opponents of the current project: “Similar stakeholder groups in other projects–such as the Gowanus Expressway Stakeholders Group–have demonstrated how the State and local communities can work together successfully.”

CBN agreed, saying, “In every major development in New York City, community participation and oversight have been the norm,” citing Battery Park City and Riverside South, and calling Atlantic Yards “a singular aberration.”

Not so fast, according to the ESDC. The agency's Cockfield suggested a distinction, that LDCs—local development corporations—have more typically been created for projects in which a governmental entity has taken the lead. However, Atlantic Yards, he said, is more comparable to a project like the Columbia University expansion, in which a nongovernmental private entity has taken the lead.

(There would be a local development corporation formed to issue bonds for the arena, but the ESDC in the AY General Project Plan did not suggest any oversight role.)

More officials comment

From the BrooklynSpeaks press release:
“We still have no real governance structure in place, no ombudsman, and no place for the community to voice their concerns,” said Councilmember Letitia James. “The 421-a tax abatement carve-out for the Ratner project is beyond unacceptable. It shows yet again that this project is not, and has never been, about the community benefits.”

"There needs to be a conversation between the State and the communities affected by this project that rationalizes, i.e. downsizes the project, while assuring that the affordable housing gets built. The current plan and structure will not accomplish these desired results and that’s why I am endorsing the community-based governance structure proposed by Brooklyn Speaks," said Assembly member Jim Brennan.

“Local elected officials, community organizations, civic groups, and individual residents have been afforded no significant, consequential input during the decision-making process for what is by far Brooklyn’s most ambitious development proposal, Atlantic Yards. The governance design unfolded today will provide a means for comprehensive oversight of all phases of this project and a mechanism for the people of Brooklyn and their representatives to have a meaningful voice in an endeavor that will so profoundly affect our borough,” said State Senator Eric Adams.

“We hope to start a serious conversation about how the public can be involved in the governance of this project. The impact of this project if it moves forward is simply too big for New Yorkers not to be listened to.” said Jo Anne Simon, Democratic District Leader for the 52nd Assembly District.

Among the dailies, only the New York Post covered the story, in a brief article headlined POLS SEEKING SAY ON ARENA.

The governance paper

“Reforming the governance of Atlantic Yards: A roadmap”, still in draft form, states:

Since the time Atlantic Yards was announced in December 2003 until now, local residents, civic and community organizations and local elected officials have been excluded from meaningful involvement in the decision-making process for Brooklyn’s biggest development project. While the announcement in May from the Empire State Development Corporation of new measures to increase government oversight and coordination over the Atlantic Yards project is a positive step, the State has yet to propose how the local community, local elected officials and the general public will be meaningfully engaged in the planning for a project that is likely to be built out over several decades.

No involvement

The report argues that the public has been excluded from meaningful involvement in project decision-making because “the state and city chose to use the land use approval process set out by the Urban Development Corporation act of 1968, which required only votes by the ESDC board and the Public Authorities Control Board, rather than the review mandated by the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP)."

By contrast, other nominally state projects, like Battery Park City, have gone through ULURP, which requires input from the local community boards, Borough President, City Planning Commission, and the City Council.

Despite the opportunity to participate in the environmental review, “no significant changes to the project to the project resulted from the public’s participation,” with a limited period for public comment, and the only significant changes “were made in response to comments submitted by the Department of City Planning and the Borough President of Brooklyn. According to press reports, many of these changes were agreed upon well in advance of the public comment period.”

The Public Authorities Control Board approved the project last December “after a minimum of review.” Moreover, the report states, “Only recently have financial assumptions concerning the project been made public.”

Existing governance

The report states:
Under the governance structure in place before the ESDC’s May 7 2007 announcement, the State and the City were technically responsible for overseeing the project, but neither entity had established specific mechanisms in order to do so. It was anticipated that construction work, traffic mitigation and other issues would be monitored by the responsible city agency, such as the Department of Buildings or Department of Transportation. However, no mechanism was in place to coordinate between the different agencies, liaise with the public, or continually review the planning and design of the project over its lifespan.

The report points out that the developer’s Community Liaison Office can’t represent the public and that Community Benefits Agreement signatories assigned to monitor the project aren’t accountable to the public.

The ESDC on May 7 announced some new initiatives, not yet all in place, including the ombudsperson, an Owner’s Representative to monitor construction activities; an interagency working group; a transportation working group, and regular meetings “to update and inform elected officials.” While the governance report says that’s progress, the measures “fall short of providing meaningful local participation and public accountability.”

Why? The only policy-making entity established by the ESDC appears to be the transportation working group. Other issues, including construction impacts, environmental impacts, secondary displacement, public services, safety and security, workforce development, and project phasing all deserve scrutiny.

Also, there’s no role for local elected officials in project decisionmaking, nor any role for Community Boards, and “no mechanism for the public and the local community to have a meaningful voice.”

And over a decade or two, that won’t work, especially given the inevitable turnover in governmental personnel: “Given that almost every aspect of the project is likely to change during the project’s life cycle, it is unacceptable for the public to continue to be unrepresented in the decision-making process for Atlantic Yards.”

New entities

The Planning and Oversight Entity would be responsible for reviewing and approving all changes to the project and policy surrounding it, monitor mitigations and ensure delivery of public benefits. The Stakeholder Council “could establish working committees to address particular categories of project issues (e.g., transportation, public services, open space, urban design, workforce development, etc.).” The council, however, would be only advisory.

Can they effect change? The report suggests they can:
The establishment of representative decision-making and community advisory bodies would help make the Atlantic Yards project a genuine public/private partnership. However, their simple establishment alone will not resolve the flaws in the project, including its overwhelming density and height of its buildings; its lack of a transportation plan; and its failure to address the housing needs of thousands of local families whose incomes would not qualify them for housing in the new project. These flaws are the direct result of Atlantic Yards having been conceived and planned without adequate public participation, and can only begin to be addressed as Atlantic Yards moves forward if public is meaningfully engaged in the decision-making for the project.

But there's a big "if" in that statement. Changes likely would depend more on politics than structure; there's no reason for the ESDC to shrink the project, for example, and certain changes might raise questions about opening up the environmental review, thus generating delay.

If the structure would delay the project, rather than smooth its implementation, then the Spitzer administration would be unlikely to welcome it. On the other hand, if the project proceeds but generates more local conflict, new structures might take the heat off.

Back in Brooklyn

Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6, said yesterday that the CB has not officially responded, but noted he personally welcomed the initiative. “The reality is, the deeper we get into this, the more we’re going to have to pull together,” he said. Robert Perris, district manager of Community Board 2, said the CB had only seen a draft.

And has Borough President Marty Markowitz, an Atlantic Yards booster, weighed in? Not yet, according to BrooklynSpeaks.

Jeffries offers measured criticism of "carve-out" compromise

Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, who two weeks ago called the original iteration of the “Atlantic Yards carve-out” “offensive,” yesterday offered measured criticism of the compromise that would give Forest City Ratner $150 million, or $200 million, of the $300 million bonus it had sought.

While new construction around the city, except a significant chunk of Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront in Greenpoint-Williamsburg, currently gets a 25-year tax break as of right, the belated revision of the 421-a law would require 20% affordable units in exchange for the tax break for construction in the “exclusion zone,” which has been expanded to include Prospect Heights and several other neighborhoods.

The original “carve-out” would’ve given four or five Atlantic Yards condo buildings the 25-year tax break with nothing in return—in effect, grandfathering in Atlantic Yards while treating other developments in Jeffries' Prospect Heights district (and beyond) differently. The “compromise” shortens the tax break to 15 years.

"While the modification of the Atlantic Yards carve-out provision is a step in the right direction, I remain concerned that this project is treated differently than any other in the city,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Given the need for increased affordable home ownership opportunities in our community, I will continue to push the developer to build at least twenty percent of the apartments in each on-site condominium building in a manner that is affordable to working families and moderate income households.” Two weeks ago, he had called it “economic segregation.”

DDDB's criticism

The bill seems like a done deal, expected to be signed next month by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. But Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn argued, "Governor Spitzer should veto this bill as long as this indefensible, special and exclusive tax break for Forest City Ratner remains in the bill."

HPD lets it go

In an interview in this week’s New York Observer, conducted before the compromise was announced, Housing Preservation and Development head Shaun Donovan was asked about 421-a. His response:

We are in continuing discussions over that. The concern, one of the concerns that we have about the bill that was passed, is that it removes all of our flexibility to do moderate-income projects. It would require that every single project that gets 421a benefits, within the exclusion zones, to have a low-income component; and while our focus has been on low-income, we also have a significantly expanded middle-class housing initiative. Queens West is one example.

We’re also concerned about the exclusion zones. The South Bronx, for example, is clearly not an area where we think it’s appropriate to expand the exclusion zone. And then, third, we’re concerned about the level of benefits that the bill would provide to a hand-picked group of developers—the Atlantic Yards provision, which, by our count, gives $300 million in tax benefits to Atlantic Yards. Now, if we could solve the broader issue around middle-income housing, we could get to a solution that would reduce their benefits but also allow the project to proceed.

That’s a bit of a non sequitur. Yes, some 900 of the 2250 subsidized Atlantic Yards units would be middle-income housing, for families of four earning from $70,900 (100% of Area Median Income, or AMI) to $113,440 (160% of AMI).

But Donovan sounds like he’s saying Atlantic Yards would’ve been stalled without the tax break. If that’s the argument, then: show us the numbers. He still hasn’t justified why Atlantic Yards would get special treatment.

Lopez speaks

The busy Matthew Schuerman of the Observer got hold of Assemblyman Vito Lopez, architect of the 421-a revision, who declared himself “happy—not ecstatic—on the compromise,” which significantly extended the exclusion zone beyond the city’s bill.

“My objective in passing this bill was to provide some form of defense against gentrification of poor and working-class neighborhoods. I believe we have accomplished that,” Lopez told the Observer.

(The maroon area, in Manhattan, was added in the 1980s to require affordable housing--achievable via a certificate program in low-income neighborhoods, typically in the Bronx--as a tradeoff for new construction The rust color indicates the areas--notably Brownstone Brooklyn, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, the Queens waterfront, Lower Manhattan, and parts of Harlem--added last December by the City Council, which eliminated the certificate program in exchange for onsite units. And the zones in yellow were added by the State Legislature, extending through the five boroughs.)

Schuerman also noted that, while the tax break would last 25 years, the low-income units would be kept affordable for 40 years, a jump from the previous 25 years, but HPD scaled it back to 35 years in the compromise.

AY carve-out shrinks, value halved (?), in city-brokered 421-a reform

[Updated August 11] A compromise on the reform of the 421-a tax break reached yesterday, according to Crain's New York Business, eliminates the "Atlantic Yards carve-out" that would've given a special $300 million break to Forest City Ratner's project and even generated criticism from Mayor Mike Bloomberg and ACORN's Bertha Lewis, both project supporters.

Not quite. Forest City Ratner still gets a deal. Ten days ago, an FCR spokesman had declared a modified carve-out a done deal. The Daily News reported that the tweak would reduct to 15 years the tax break for the 1930 market-rate condos.

And that appears to be the deal, worth $200 million according to the Post and $150 million in the Sun, even though it's been couched differently in some reports. First, Forest City Ratner would still get its tax savings in most buildings without having to change the income mix, thanks to an upward tweak in the bill's definition of affordable housing.

And the developer would still get a tax break for the condo buildings without having to provide affordable housing. That's the premise of the current law, as applied to Prospect Heights, and certainly part of the developer's economic projections when Atlantic Yards was hatched. But no other similarly-situated developer, who planned a project but then saw the law come up for renewal and revision, would get the same deal.

Four or five AY buildings would contain only condos; the "carve-out" would have allowed them to qualify for a 15-year tax break even without including affordable housing--[updated] which is better than the current 15-year as-of-right tax break. The compromise allows a 15-year tax break but would allow the 25-year tax break if those buildings included 20% affordable for-sale units--a provision that likely would be applied to at least one of those condo buildings.

Obfuscation in the Times

The New York Times reported:
As for Atlantic Yards, city officials said the new agreement represents a fair compromise. To receive the maximum tax break, 20 percent of the units in any building will have to meet the new affordability guidelines, which are more stringent than those that originally applied. And the lower-priced units will have to be built at the same time as the market-rate units, to insure that they are not put off until the end of construction or never completed.
(Emphasis added)

The Times failed to mention that AY condo buildings could still receive a special tax break.

And what does "originally applied" mean? The new affordability guidelines are more stringent than those currently in place, but they are less stringent than the bill as passed by City Council and as originally passed by the State Legislature.

In other words, Forest City Ratner now would have to include affordable units in every building to get the maximum tax break. But it would still get special treatment.

The 421-a revision passed by the city and originally by the state would have required FCR to reconfigure the income ranges planned for the entire project--hence the carve-out.

Now the developer is faced with the option of doing nothing, and getting the 15-year tax break for the four or five buildings that would include only condos, or tweaking the income ranges in some of those condo buildings to get the 25-year tax break. (That might mean lower prices for market-rate condos, now that they wouldn't be in exclusively luxury buildings.)

Configuration questions

Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries had criticized the carve-out as "offensive", though he and others who supported at least the affordable housing element of Atlantic Yards last year had not criticized the condo buildings for "economic segregation," as he recently dubbed the carve-out.

The project as of now would be 4500 rental apartments, with half at various levels of affordability, and 1930 condos. According to a Forest City Ratner document (right) obtained as a result of a lawsuit filed by Assemblyman Jim Brennan and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, at least four buildings were planned to contain condos and not rental units. (One of those four would contain office space as well.)

However, that document left out one building, at Site 5, which apparently would contain 322 condos.

Raising AMI

The Times's online headline today, "Bill Aims to Spur Housing for the Poor in New York," was off the mark. It would better have said: "Bill Would Spur Subsidized Housing in New York" or "Compromise Loosens Affordable Housing Definitions." (Update: in print, the headline more accurately said "Deal May Spur More Housing At Lower Cost.")

One key to the change, apparently, was raising the Area Median Income, or AMI, regarding affordable units. That was the request of the Bloomberg administration. In exchange, the city apparently agreed to Assemblyman Vito Lopez's stipulation that the "exclusion zone"--the areas where affordable housing would be required in exchange for the tax break--be that in the state bill, rather in the more narrow city bill. However, that zone will be reviewed later this year, according to the Times.

The idea behind expanding the zone was that 421-a was spurring market-rate development in prosperous or gentrifying neighborhoods without any commensurate provision for subsidized housing. (Click on graphic for larger view.)

The city's bill, passed at the end of the December, would've required 20% of the units be affordable to households with AMIs of 60%-80%. The first version of the state bill would've set AMI at 60%.

That was accompanied by the carve-out, because Atlantic Yards wouldn't qualify with 20% units at 60% of AMI--and some buildings wouldn't have affordable units at all. The developer was estimated to be eligible for $300 million in tax breaks others similarly situated couldn't get. However, the state's bill also generated pushback from the city, which argued that it couldn't build the planned Queens West middle-income development.

[Updated] The new bill maintains AMI at 60% for projects built by the private sector without "substantial governmental assistance," but raises it to 90%, with a cap of 120% for any unit, for projects with such assistance, apparently because the city is concerned about moderate-income subsidized housing like Queens West.

Under that definition, 1350 of the 2250 planned Atlantic Yards affordable rentals would qualify and thus ensure that the project as a whole meets the state's definition of 20% affordable housing. Here's the tally: 20% of the Atlantic Yards rentals, 900 units, would be at 50% AMI and below. Another 450 would be at 60%-100% AMI.

Affordable condos?

Crain's reported:
Developments that use substantial government assistance must provide 20% of their units on-site to people earning no more than 125% of area median income for homeownership.

That refers to specific buildings. So the "affordable" for-sale units would go to households (of four) with incomes up to $88,625.

Forest City Ratner has pledged that there would be 200 onsite for-sale affordable units, or about 10%. (This is part of an announced, though not formally pledged, plan to build 600 to 1000 affordable for-sale units, onsite or offsite.) Jeffries has asked the developer to double the number of onsite units.

But the 200 units could be applied to some of the condo buildings to qualify for the 25-year tax break.

Quick criticism

The change in AMI spurred quick criticism from Williamsburg housing activist Phil DePaolo, of the New York Community Council: "I believe that this new bill will not create substantial amounts of real affordable housing. At this time, market rate housing development is clearly occurring and will continue to occur in the city without the benefit of the 421-a tax abatement. Therefore, the tax abatement is no longer needed as an incentive."

Because AMI is calculated regionally, the median income for a family of four, $70,900, is nearly twice the Brooklyn AMI and more than twice the community AMI of $30,000 in Greenpoint and Williamsburg.

"Even at 60% of AMI most residents in Williamsburg and Greenpoint will not be able to afford the units proposed under Chairman [Vito] Lopez's bill," DePaolo said. "We also worry about the fine print in the new HDC [Housing Development Corporation] programs, which now has affordable housing rent to income ratios going all the way up to 35%, when the entire country uses 30% as a standard. It seems like it might not be much, but if you do the math, that extra 5% really squeezes working families!"

He added, in an echo of the recent Rutgers report on gentrification in Williamsburg, "It's very important to focus on the luxury units which invariably change the economic demographics of less affluent communities and have the effect of forcing out the less affluent. The wealthy residents that move in have larger incomes putting pressures on local retail outlets to change the mix of amenities. Instead of hardware stores, affordable supermarkets and Laundromats, the commercial core changes to noisier bars, expensive restaurants, boutique food markets and so on. Stores offering less expensive goods can no longer pay the cost per square foot of the gentrified neighborhood."

A first in-depth (but still brief) look at AKRF, in the Observer

The New York Observer's Matthew Schuerman today offers an article that was waiting to be written, the first in-depth look at the ubiquitous environmental consultant AKRF, in an article headlined The Enviro-Consultants Everyone Calls, with the subtitle, "Atlantic Yards, Yankee Stadium, Ground Zero—AKRF gets paid handsomely to gauge the impact of big developments. Is the firm too powerful or just too good?"

While the piece is a fair-enough introduction to AKRF, it doesn't quite answer that question and, while criticisms of the company's role in the analysis of Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn and the Columbia University expansion get aired, some other issues fall by the wayside.

So there's no mention of the company's successive work for Forest City Ratner and then the Empire State Development Corporation on the Atlantic Yards project. Nor is there mention of the Manhattan Institute report that (updated) criticizes the way environmental impact statements can be gamed, describes how AKRF wrote the City Environmental Quality Review Technical Manual, and suggests (secondhand) a revolving door between government agencies and the consultant.

Nor do we hear from the lobbyist Richard Lipsky, who has termed AKRF "accommodating consultants" and "trained in the abject aping of its master’s whims."

And what of that simultaneous or successive representation? Schuerman writes:
The practice of advising both sides of a transaction—the developer and the regulator—is not on trial, here, however. AKRF officials, while refusing to comment on the particulars of the Columbia case, disputed the idea that their findings would be skewed to favor a developer who was paying them.

“When we work for a developer, we are actually working really more for the lead agency,” [AKRF's] Ms. Allee said. “When they declare an environmental impact statement to be complete, it’s theirs. They have to agree with everything that’s in it and they have to be satisfied that the work has been done properly. They don’t say, ‘Oh, great. This looks good. We are going to weight it on our scale.’”

So blame the ESDC, apparently, for one of the biggest whoppers in the Atlantic Yards environmental review:
The project site is not anticipated to experience substantial change in the future without the proposed project by 2016 due to the existence of the open rail yard and the low-density industrial zoning regulations.

The Brooklyn blogs, AY, and the class issue

Yesterday's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC included a segment titled Welcome to Bloglyn, featuring the bloggers behind Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (OTBKB), BushwickBK, and Bed-Stuy Blog.

Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab called in to explain what NLG does--an information portal taking a critical position on a controversy rather than a neighborhood-centric blog.

OTBKB's Louise Crawford observed, "I think when the history of Brooklyn blogging is written, it will be noted that the rise of Brooklyn blogging and the Atlantic Yards issue, and the use of the blog in that issue--

Lehrer interjected, "--happened at the same time."

Crawford continued, "It was just sort of a confluence of events--there were a lot of emails going out, initially, emails of information, and then the blogs."

(I've written that AY is the likely source of Clinton Hill's dubious designation as the country's "bloggiest" neighborhood.)

Who blogs?

Lehrer observed, "One of the criticisms people have, or observations, of the concentration of bloggers in inner Brooklyn, is, well, who generally has the time or the resources to be a blogger, they tend to be mostly white, mostly middle-class people.... It doesn't break down completely neatly in the Atlantic Yards controversy, but, to some degree tends to break down along those lines. It would tend to be the anti-Atlantic Yards people who would be blogging a lot."

Crawford went on to explain how bloggers have begun a roadshow, meeting in various neighborhoods to try to encourage a wider spectrum of bloggers. Still, I think Lehrer's analysis is simplistic.

First, there's a lot more to criticize and analyze about AY than to praise. My critical take on Atlantic Yards emerged not from knee-jerk opposition to the project but from an immersion in the details. A pro-Atlantic Yards blog might simply copy the infrequently updated AtlanticYards.com.

Second, if Forest City Ratner wanted more pro-Atlantic Yards blogs, it could pay to create them, as it paid for the Brooklyn Standard and helped support Brooklyn Tomorrow, both "publications" more than newspapers. Given the large sums spent on by the developer on p.r., much of which gets some media coverage, is the playing field really level?

Third, whether or not those of us using the blog format--both seat-of-the-pants bloggers and veteran journalists--come from a specific class background, we're still democratizing the flow of information compared to the constrained media attention to Brooklyn and its controversies.

And I don't see Lehrer and others who repeat the class criticism doing a head count of the reporters in, say, the New York Times's Brooklyn bureau to make sure they accurately represent the borough's diversity.

Obviously, specific identities--including race, class, language, religion, ethnicity, political outlook, geography, and age--can help a journalist gain understanding of certain worlds. But identity does not dictate analysis. As with all journalism, the challenge for bloggers is to do research and analysis to try to understand the issues.

Beyond gentrification: the contributing factors to the housing crisis

Gentrification is one of several forces limiting the availability of affordable housing, as Brad Lander of the Pratt Center for Community Development explained at a discussion held in June 2006 on housing displacement, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn. (The issue persists today, so his slides--some of which I've reproduced--and explanations remain pertinent.)

Lander cited several factors contributing to a "broad housing crisis": a "broad shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy," along with "substantial immigration leading to rising population," all pressuring a constrained housing supply.

Polarized economy

After World War II, the city had more than one million manufacturing jobs, many of them unionized, but now fewer than 250,000, and a nonunion service economy. (In his 1993 book, The Assassination of New York, Robert Fitch argued that the shift from manufacturing to office space was not merely a result of national trends, but pushed by property owners seeking higher value for their land. Of course, in the last decade, the shift has been from manufacturing to housing.)

Over the last quarter-century, New York City has lost middle-class families but gained wealthy and poor families. The city gained more than a million people since 1980 and may gain another million, so supply can’t keep up with demand.

So land has been rezoned from manufacturing to residential—Lander cited the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront and Atlantic Yards, though of course the latter was not a rezoning. Meanwhile, some neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens have fought overdevelopment with downzoning, essentially freezing density.

Worrying trends

From 2002 to 2005, tenant incomes went down, almost 6%, while median rents rose more than 8%, and the number of households paying more than 50% of their income for rent nearly doubled. The definition of affordability is 30%. “This matches the statistic that [academic] Lance [Freeman] mentioned that in those gentrifying neighborhoods, lower income households tend to pay something that is astronomical.” (I wrote about Freeman's work yesterday.)

Where are the people going? “So, some set of people are being displaced," Lander noted. "An enormous set of people are paying much more of their income for rent, which obviously has all kinds of consequences. People are crowding much more–-that, actually we don’t have stats here, but the crowding stats are up dramatically. Or, some kind of public policy is mitigating their need to move…."

Lander suggested that the statistics provide "really good evidence that rent regulation in New York City enables people in gentrifying neighborhoods to stay in those places.” He also cited the presence of public housing or subsidized housing like buildings in the Mitchell-Lama program.

Targeting neighborhoods

Government policies for affordable housing have typically addressed poor rather than gentrifying neighborhoods, but the advance of gentrification has led to new, now familiar tactics: “inclusionary zoning which lets people build more and more market rate housing if they include affordable housing, tax increment financing, tax incentive programs, and on specific projects, community benefits agreements which could bring in the inclusion of affordable housing and accountable development standards on those projects.”

It's arguable that the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement brought more housing--or a better development--than might have been achieved via a more public rezoning. Indeed, Lander acknowledged there are tradeoffs between market forces, issues of equity, and issues of livability.

During a February 2006 debate between Bertha Lewis of Atlantic Yards advocate ACORN and Candace Carponter of AY opponent Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, Lander observed that “equity advocates” accept more market-rate housing if it brings benefits, while “livability advocates” want less development because it inflicts less environmental harm.

"It sets up a painful and challenging conflict," he mused. “Maybe other land use procedures--ones that put planning earlier and up front wouldn’t lead to this dynamic, but we wind up in it an awful lot of the time."

What can be done

So, what's the answer? Lander in his presentation could only outline the tensions: “I’m not persuaded that stopping development will solve the problems we’re talking about today, honestly. I do really feel these tensions and on the one hand feel like we’ve got to try to have the market do more to benefit a wider range of people, and then on the other hand see all the places where if we don’t invest in more regulatory and preservation oriented strategies, our market leveraging strategies won’t be enough either.”

Indeed, as Jerilyn Perine of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council has pointed out there's been a significant dropoff in federal subsidies.

But there's more that the city could be doing, as critics from both the left and right argue, and I'll address that shortly.

Who loses?

The housing squeeze is significant, as shown in the State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods 2005 report, issued in June 2006 by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

A 6/16/06 Times article headlined Housing Tighter for New Yorkers of Moderate Pay reported that the number of apartments affordable to some 40% of New Yorkers, households earning about $32,000 a year, or 80 percent of the city’s median household income, dropped by 205,000, or 17 percent between 2002 and 2005. The median rent for unsubsidized apartments went up 20 percent while household income declined.

"The market will work through this, but there are people who really lose," said Chris Mayer, director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Business School.

The article echoed some of the issues Lander raised as contributing to the rise in rents: a growing population that outstrips new construction; construction geared to higher-income households; and an influx of higher-income residents.

Much of that construction has been fueled by the 421-a tax break that subsidizes market-rate construction and only belatedly has been up for reform. (We're still waiting for a revision to be put before Gov. Eliot Spitzer.)

The pressure continues

The most recent Furman Center report, issued April 11, the State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods 2006, showed that the median home sales price in New York City rose by 68 percent from 2000 to 2005, adjusting for inflation, but that fewer than 5 percent of home sales in 2005 were affordable to New Yorkers earning the City’s median income ($43,434). That’s a significant drop from 11 percent in 2000.

The report painted a picture of a city deeply divided, but some press coverage focused on the positive news it included. In a 5/27/07 article headlined In a City Known for Its Renters, a Record Number Now Own Their Homes, the Times reported that one in three households now own their dwellings. Only well down in the article did the newspaper discuss the growing rate of foreclosures and the fact that only a tiny fraction of homes are affordable to average households.

In an upbeat 4/15/07 Real Estate section article headlined A Most Exclusive Club, the Times praised “the unsung heroes of the effervescent Manhattan real estate market.”

Lower in the article, the Times shifted gears and cited the Furman Center report, noting, “But unfortunately, not all New Yorkers can contribute to this high end of the real estate market.” Those New Yorkers, it's safe to say, are not looking for housing in the Sunday New York Times.

There Goes the ‘Hood: a nuanced take on gentrification

It was May 6, the day of the bi-annual Clinton Hill House Tour, an emblematic sign of gentrification, as visitors paid $20 to troop into lovingly restored mansions and converted industrial spaces in a neighborhood that still houses many lower-income residents. Those collecting tour maps could also pick up a brochure for the new Forté luxury tower rising in nearby Fort Greene.

The final stop on the tour was in the southeast portion of Clinton Hill, not far from the official (though shifting, in the eyes of some real estate promoters) border with blacker, poorer Bedford-Stuyvesant. Nearby, outside a laundromat on Fulton Street, a black woman and a black man, middle-aged and apparently working class, were having a conversation loud enough to overhear.

W: I’m not coming back. They assholes.

M: People that work here?

W: No. The others. They new to the neighborhood and they acting like we visiting.

Race and class

The racial identity of their antagonists was unclear, but the class identity was not, and the episode encapsulated some tensions explored by Lance Freeman, a Columbia University academic, in his 2006 book, There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up, based on interviews in two mostly-black neighborhoods, Harlem and Clinton Hill, where in recent years higher-income residents, black and white, have moved in.

(Here’s an NPR interview with Freeman. For another take with a similar title, note the recent exhibit on gentrification in Crown Heights, titled There goes the neighborhood!, at Five Myles.)

Freeman, who is black and teaches in Columbia’s graduate school of urban planning, is no apologist for gentrification, though some of his previous research has been criticized for too sanguine a take on displacement. His interviewees present a mixed view. (Crucially, in Clinton Hill, all are either homeowners or residents of rent-regulated housing, so they're not at direct risk of displacement.)

He writes:
Residents of the 'hood are sometimes more receptive because gentrification brings their neighborhoods into the mainstream of American commercial life with concomitant amenities and services that others might take for granted. It also represents the possibility of achieving upward mobility without having to escape to the suburbs or predominantly white neighborhoods.

Yet the long history of disenfranchisement, red lining, and discrimination also inspires a cynicism toward gentrification that might not be evidenced elsewhere. Though appreciative of neighborhood improvements associated with gentrification, many see this as evidence that such amenities and services are only provided when whites move into their neighborhoods. Moreover, many see these improvements as the result of active collaboration between public officials, commercial interests, and white residents.

Indeed, they appreciate some new everyday stores, the neighborhood’s physical appearance, and the government’s responsiveness in providing services such as trash pickup and public safety (and, if homeowners, the steady rise in the value of their homes). DeKalb Avenue, now a restaurant row in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, was “kind of scary,” one resident observes, and Myrtle Avenue until recently merited its “Murder Avenue” moniker.

Potential threats

On the other hand, even if they don’t feel personally threatened by displacement, residents recognize that friends and relatives, who might have previously wanted to stay in the neighborhood, have been priced out, and may feel that longstanding institutions, like local churches, are threatened. So there's a role for government in managing that change, as noted below.

And, as with the episode I observed, they feel less comfortable in public, wondering at shifting norms and who controls public space, even alienated by upscale retail outlets that clearly cater to "new" people.

In his book and at public events, Freeman has provided examples of that: what middle-class homeowners see as unsavory loitering may just be longtime residents hanging out on the block (though the cops are more responsive to the former); what the law considers an open-container violation, a man drinking from a beer can on the stoop, is seen by some residents as hypocritical when down the block wealthier newcomers can sip their more expensive beer at a licensed sidewalk café; and, at a building divided into rentals and increasingly-expensive condos, barbecuing in the public spaces becomes forbidden.

Yesterday, in a New York Times Real Estate section feature (LIVING IN/Central Harlem) that somehow managed to omit mention of the neighborhood's housing projects, we learned of another such conflict, in which a group of musicians jamming in a nearby park, as they have done since the 1970s, caused residents of a new co-op nearby to complain to the cops. A compromise was reached; the musicians agreed not to play near the street.

Displacement effects

Freeman’s previous study had shown that poor residents and those lacking college degrees actually were less likely to move if they lived in a gentrifying neighborhood. As Daniel Treiman wrote in his review of the book in City Limits, “While this piqued his curiosity, the book unfortunately does not shed much additional light on this counterintuitive finding.”

That 2004 paper, co-written with Frank Braconi of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, is called Gentrification and Displacement, and it covers several New York neighborhoods during the 1990s. I suspect that the study downplays signs of impending, if not actual displacement.

While affordable housing—remember that term?—is defined as costing 30 percent of household income, many in the city pay half their income in rent. Indeed, Freeman and Braconi point out that the average rent burden for poor households in gentrifying neighborhoods was 61%, nearly 20% higher than those outside the neighborhoods, at 52%.

They refer to that latter number as “still problematic” and, at a panel discussion last year, Freeman called the 61% figure "astronomical."

So there may be a tipping point of sorts. Even if a poor household wants to stay in a gentrifying neighborhood, and sacrifices to do so, doubling up or making an arrangement with a sympathetic landlord, at some point they just can’t afford it—and, since 1999, unregulated rents and housing values have risen steadily in neighborhoods like Harlem and Clinton Hill.

I asked Freeman whether he thought that ever-increasing rents would lead to more displacement. He responded, "I think there probably is some tipping point, although I’m not sure what it is. I too have wondered whether I would get the same results if I repeated the study with later data. When I get a chance, I plan to pursue this question."

Larger meaning

A Boston Globe review of Freeman’s book and others on the topic, by Columbia professor Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, points out, “The long-held truism of gentrification -- namely that inner-city residents and their leadership will vocally oppose the redevelopment of their neighborhoods -- needs revision.”

He notes, “The popular lament over the horrible living conditions in the ghettos of the 1980s and 1990s failed to take into account those who were buying up property and establishing a productive presence during these tough years -- the working class, immigrants, and unionized workers who had well-paying jobs in transportation, parks, law enforcement, and other city agencies.”

Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block, written by a black sociologist who moved into a “historically poor and predominantly African-American community rapidly gentrifying,” shows how Chicago is behind Brooklyn. Pattillo and fellow gentrifiers are often “sandwiched between empty lots and dilapidated, low-income housing projects,” but such luxury of space no longer exists in Brooklyn.

While in Chicago, most whites won’t move into a black neighborhood, in New York, that depends on the housing stock; Harlem and Bed-Stuy, for example, have become places to buy. (The Times's headline on the Central Harlem article was "A Neighborhood Worth the Big-Ticket Investment.")

Reviewer Venkatesh points out that, while “it is the black middle class moving in and buying real estate, the physical infrastructure of their neighborhoods is being rehabilitated by white-owned firms that get the lion's share of the city contracts. Thus, the net result is that middle-class blacks have become brokers, helping to ease the path of mostly white-controlled real estate firms that wish to reclaim undervalued inner-city neighborhoods.”

What to do

Freeman suggests that the wave of gentrification needs management “to help us achieve a more equitable and just society.” He notes that it “would be a supreme irony if those who were once confined to neighborhoods like Harlem can no longer afford to live there,” especially since they endured the bad old days. Also, he suggests that housing security is a value unto itself, and wholesale gentrification in neighborhoods like the ones he studied can generate cynicism and resentment.

That all suggests that gentrification is much easier when there’s vacant land to add buildings. Otherwise it can turn into a zero-sum game. Unmentioned, but another potential zero-sum effect, might be adding affordable housing but with the tradeoff of "extreme density," as with the Atlantic Yards plan.

Freeman’s wary of extremes:
One doesn’t have to be a Marxist, however, to recognize that whatever its efficiencies, the market can produce outcomes that are not socially desirable. Conversely, one doesn’t have to be a libertarian to realize that the market produces choice, dynamism and wealth. The most pertinent debate seems to be how to strike a balance between allowing the market to do its thing while correcting for some of the undesirable outcomes inherent in market capitalism.

Thus he suggests two strategies, one quite familiar to New Yorkers, one not. In inclusionary zoning, which has been deployed already, new housing developments must set aside some units for low- and moderate-income households. The idea is to share the wealth allowed by upzoning for increased density.

His more unusual idea concerns tax-increment financing (TIF), which is usually an economic development strategy and, in fact, has been applied to the financing of sports facilities. The idea is that new taxes generated should be plowed back into the neighborhood to subsidize housing and ensure that gentrifying neighborhoods maintain socioeconomic diversity. The design of such a program, however, might be complex.

Where has that worked? Freeman pointed me to the Illinois Tax Increment Association, which may be a partial model, but seems to be focused on overcoming blight, conserving old structures, or creating industrial jobs--not capturing increased housing value generated by gentrification.

As Freeman writes;
What gentrification can do is help minimize the extent to which various aspects of quality of life are dependent on one’s class. Because so many things are dependent in part on where one lives—primary education, exposure to crime and environment. Hazards, access to decent and healthful food—the quality of one’s neighborhood can affect life outcomes.

Focusing on the neighborhood

At a discussion held in June 2006 on housing displacement, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, Freeman suggested that the change was more noticeable because those who moved--as people often do, for various reasons--were replaced by people who did not necessarily share their race and class.

He reiterated a theme of his book:
In general, affordable housing policy has not necessarily tried to focus on those neighborhoods that are experiencing gentrification. They are either focused on neighborhoods that are already very poor, or there might be some policy described to de-concentrate poverty, but I think if we’re concerned about displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods or preserving affordable housing opportunity in those neighborhoods, I think we need to think about targeting affordable housing to those neighborhoods.

Another tactic might be the belated revision of the 421-a tax break, which has subsidized luxury construction in most parts of the city without requiring affordable housing and, in those areas where affordable housing was part of the tradeoff, did not require it on-site.

Architecture and the "historical continuum"

In a review essay yesterday headlined Modernist Master’s Deceptively Simple World, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff champions the little-known Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, who rarely builds outside Europe and thus has no chance of becoming a globetrotting figure like starchitects Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas.

While Ouroussoff generally likes Gehry's work, he's expressed qualms about the Atlantic Yards project (right). And his essay on Siza might be seen as an implicit rebuke to city-making projects like AY.

He writes:
Whatever his doubts, his vision of an architecture rooted in a historical continuum seems vitally important in a world fractured by political conflict and ethnic hatreds. If an earlier generation of Modernists believed that architecture could play a vital role in spurring us along the road to utopia, we now know that progress is no longer a guarantee. Almost any society, it turns out, can quickly and unexpectedly descend into darkness and savagery.

At the same time the march of global capitalism has made faith in technology, a Modernist dogma, seem less and less attractive. And if the bold and delirious forms churned out by celebrated architects today mirror social upheavals, they can also serve to camouflage the damage.
(Emphasis added)

The Atlantic Yards design may not mirror social upheaval, but it wouldn't be rooted in a historical continuum, despite plans to use brick and other locally-evocative materials for some portion of Gehry's skyscrapers.

Council Member Avella: community plans, rezonings needed

Would we have as much "zoning without planning" under a different administration? The July/August issue of the Brooklyn Rail carries an interview, by Theodore Hamm, with Queens Council Member Tony Avella, a declared mayoral candidate for 2009, headlined A Ground-Level View of the City. Some excerpts below.

(The photo, by Jonathan Barkey, comes from the June 27 rally against the abuse of eminent domain.)

Fear of the real estate industry

Rail: What do you think other council members are afraid of?

Avella: A few things: one, the real estate industry controls the agenda in the city. Not me as an elected official, not my colleagues—it’s the real estate industry because they give a lot of money to local politicians. The other aspect of it is that there’s very little independence in the council because of the power of the speaker [currently Christine Quinn]. If you go against the speaker, there are ways that she can get back at you.

Rezoning needed

Rail: If you were elected mayor, how would you counteract the overdevelopment seen in many neighborhoods during the Bloomberg years?

Avella: Well, first of all, we’ve got to do a comprehensive re-do rezoning in the city of New York. We need to make sure that we accurately reflect the residential character of the neighborhoods. At the same time, we need to work with neighborhoods and communities to see where development can go. We need to eliminate all of the illegal construction and put some real teeth into the problem of the Department of Buildings. That agency is in total chaos. I mean, if you are a homeowner and you do the simplest little thing wrong, they’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks—but developers get away with anything. We also need to take control of the little-known, quasi-judicial agency called the Board of Standards and Appeals, which is made up of five commissioners appointed by the mayor who really have almost total power, but there’s no oversight of that agency whatsoever.

Community plans needed

Rail: And no one really knows what they do.

Avella: Exactly. No one knows what they do, but they give the variances that allow the developers to obviate any part of the zoning codes. It is amazing to me that they’re supposed to have five criteria by which they approve of a variance, but they really can do whatever they want. For example, a developer buys a piece of property and goes to the Board of Standards and Appeals. He’ll tell them, “I can’t build a 12-story building on it because the zoning’s different” or “I paid too much money for it and the only way I can make it back is to build a 12-story building.” And they’ll give him the variance. It’s insane. In addition to changing this process, my other main plan regarding development is to go out in every neighborhood and do comprehensive planning. In every neighborhood, community leaders will get together and determine what’s wrong or what’s right with their neighborhood now, what needs to be done, and where they’d like to see their community five, ten years down the line. Those plans would get put together into borough-wide documents, which would be compiled into a city-wide document that becomes the planning blueprint for the city.

"The Last Three Miles" and the Atlantic Yards experiment

There are some indirect lessons for Atlantic Yards watchers, I think, in New Jersey journalist Steven Hart's recent book about the construction of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey.

The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway, covers the story behind the 1932 opening of the final link that would connect New York City and the Holland Tunnel (1927) with the mainland highway system, thus diverting traffic that had clogged local roads and Jersey City streets for five years.

As the subtitle indicates, there's a rich story of conflict between labor and business, as well as the overarching role of Jersey City political boss Frank Hague.

Failures in design

But for those of us in Brooklyn, it's useful to consider Hart's suggestion that this project be included in courses concerning failures in design.

Hart writes:
The Pulaski Skyway should also be a part of those classes, if only as an example of a quieter kind of failure--a failure rooted not in recklessness, but lack of background knowledge. The designers of Route 25 and the Skyway that is its most visible section were visionaries doing something that hadn't been done before. They weren't the only ones thinking in terms of superhighways--the first German autobahn was completed the same year the Skyway opened--but they were under the gun, and they had little experience in the field of traffic engineering to draw upon. The result was one of the most visually spectacular and functionally impaired mistakes ever made.
(Emphasis added)

"It was hailed as the highway of the future," Hart said on the July 6 Leonard Lopate Show. "It's design flies in the face of everything."

The AY experiment

Would Atlantic Yards succeed? Maybe, or maybe not. Atlantic Yards landscape architect Laurie Olin raised some semi-analagous issues in the 2/27/07 New York Observer:
“One of the things that is hard for us to get across is that everything is an experiment,” he said. “We know a lot about how people live and sit and eat, but have never actually dealt with this here before in the year that it gets built.”

Could an arena work near the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, part of a project of unprecedented density? On the one hand, it would be near a transit hub. On the other hand, the area is already congested, and tactics to limit congestion have been proposed rather than implemented.

Demands on a builder

And Hart offers an observation that lingers as a truism about the pressure to complete major projects.

Hart writes:
The construction industry is uniquely vulnerable to outside pressure. Many different types of craftsmen are involved in the construction of a larger building, and their work must be choreographed with almost balletic precision. The builder has taken out large loans at high interest rates; quite often he has equity partners demanding a quick return on their investment. A delay in one area of the construction project translates into additional expense, and a longer wait before the building is finished and ready to generate income through rent-paying tenants.

We don't know exactly how much money Forest City Ratner has put up, but we can assume that the reward is more than commensurate to the risk. But there is money out there, and that's why U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, presiding over the Atlantic Yards eminent domain case, observed that "time is fleeting." Now, that timetable is an issue for an appellate court.

The "park" at Stuy Town--a harbinger of Atlantic Yards?

"Lots of New Yorkers visit parks, but not many live in one." So goes the promotion (click to enlarge) for Stuyvesant Town, the newly-privatized complex for which, along with neighboring Peter Cooper Village, developer Tishman Speyer agreed to pay $5.4 billion last October.

Now they've got to make it pay off, raising rents on the apartments that are no longer rent-stabilized. The tariff: 1 bedroom from $2975, 2 bedrooms from $3900, and 3 bedrooms from $5300.

And to sell it, the developer claims that the open space in the 80-acre, 110-building development is a "park." (A print ad further states: "Work out in an 80-acre park right outside your door.")

It's not. It's privately-managed, publicly-accessible open space and, as this City Council document (about access) shows, private interests do not necessarily match public ones.

AY warning

Stuyvesant Town's open space serves more as a private park than a public one, and thus has been targeted by Atlantic Yards critics as the poster child for what to avoid. "Would there be an invisible "keep out" sign, as in Stuyvesant Town or other apartment complexes with interior parks?" wrote Anne Schwartz last August in the Gotham Gazette.

Schwartz cited the analysis by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), which pointed to the importance of extending open space to the streets, so it is welcoming to the public.

MAS is part of BrooklynSpeaks, which has cautioned, "The problem is that the open space proposed won’t feel public, because it will be situated directly behind buildings. The park space is likely to feel more like a private backyard than a public park, similar to Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan."

BrooklynSpeaks goes further, arguing that the "open space should not only be publicly accessible, but be mapped as public parkland and designed to feel public."

AY open space

An October 2004 flier (right) from Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner promised that the open space would be "for the entire Brooklyn community to enjoy."

On the Atlantic Yards web site, the developer promises it "will transform portions of the exposed rail yards into publicly accessible open space that everyone can enjoy."

Of course, crucial to the Atlantic Yards open space would be the demapping of city streets, notably Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues, as the New York Observer noted in a 2/25/07 profile of landscape architect Laurie Olin.

Would they call it a park?

The developer has been careful, so far, not to call the open space a park. Others have been less cautious; in court on 2/7/07 for the Atlantic Yards eminent domain case, Douglas Kraus, an attorney for the Empire State Development Corporation, declared "the creation of public parks" to be one of the public purposes served by the project.

[Update: Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab points out how Bruce Ratner predicted "parks" in an interview with the Post's Andrea Peyser.]

Would the real estate agents marketing Atlantic Yards--the same ilk who identify Gowanus as Park Slope and Bed-Stuy as Clinton Hill--resist the temptation to deem Olin's creation a "park" to help sell luxury condos to new residents?

John Pinamonti's "The Burrow," now on YouTube

The hit of the May 24 Ratnerville Singout was John Pinamonti's haunting song, "The Burrow." Now that performance, with Pinamonti backed by the Atomic Grind Show, is finally on YouTube.



Sample lyric:
I said it's not about you and it's not about me
It's about what we do collectively
In the Burrow

(Full lyrics here.)

Pinamonti and his band will be playing the Rodeo Bar (3rd Avenue/27th Street) in Manhattan on Tuesday, August 7, at 9 pm and will be back at Freddy's Bar & Backroom, slated for demolition under the Atlantic Yards plan and where "The Burrow" was filmed, on Saturday, August 18 at 10 pm. (Schedule/web site)

Vito Lopez invokes Jane Jacobs, says New Domino should be scaled down

So this is a day late, because I missed the first segment of Tuesday's Department of City Planning (DCP) hearing on the New Domino plan, and no one else bothered to report on it for a daily publication: Assemblyman Vito Lopez, invoking Jane Jacobs and the recognition of neighborhood complexity, called for a smaller plan.

A Lopez rep, reading the testimony, praised the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) for its commitment to affordable housing, an issue dear to the Assemblyman's heart. But housing is just one element in the balance. So the battle isn't merely "class conflict," as hinted in the evening segment of the hearing and as summarized by Brownstoner.

The project--either 2400 units, as stated in the testimony, quoting the Draft Scope, or 2200 units as announced by the developer--would contribute to population growth sure to put a great strain on the already overburdened resources in the community such as sanitation, garbage collection, and transportation.

And the transit system would suffer:
With the L train already severely overcrowded, and the J and G trains overflowing during rush hour, drastic population increase can have only one of two results: a greater number of people driving through Williamsburg, or a significant increase in rider-ship on public transit lines. This coupled with Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed “congestion pricing” plan does not bode well for Williamsburg residents.

Questions of zoning

Lopez, the leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, is a savvy pol who's no stranger to backroom deals, as with the 421-a revision that includes the carve-out--the resolution of which has not been announced--for Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project.

So his stance on the New Domino should carry some weight. He does not assume that the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning should hold sway, noting that the City Planning Commission can limit height and call for lower density. Community Board 1 "has always supported contextual zoning both on the waterfront and upland sites," he stated, adding, "Commitment to moderate density and low-rise development is key to maintaining Williamsburg’s identity."

The Schaefer Landing project built on the former Schaefer Brewery site, according to testimony, includes nearly 40% affordable housing, while maintaining "a more reasonable height" of 25 stories. (Unmentioned: that was city land, so the costs were lower.)

The testimony continued:
Though much of the zoning allows for taller buildings along the waterfront, 40 story building should not considered the norm on the Brooklyn waterfront. Allowing for a drastic increase in height that blatantly ignores the contextual zoning of the neighborhood creates a dangerous precedent for inland Brooklyn neighborhoods that are committed to a low-rise, close-knit identity.

Paging Jane Jacobs

The testimony became Jacobsian, an implicit response to affordable housing advocates who prioritize one thing:
The tension between height, density, and affordability has persisted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It is the Assemblyman’s view that there should be a dialogue between the old, modernist sensibility and more organic urban theory espoused by planners such as Jane Jacobs. As much as affordability, space and the effect it has on place must be considered as we move forward. If there is anything that Jane Jacobs has taught us about cities, it is that we cannot simply solve problems through prescriptive measures but that neighborhoods behave like complex systems that communicate spatially, economically, culturally, and socially. We must ask ourselves if affordability must also come at the expensive of low-rise communities and if affordable housing must always be unusually high and dense to exist. While it is progressive and hopeful to imagine a new, economically integrated Domino, it may also be naïve to imagine that this can occur in extremely dense, spatially isolated ‘towers in the sky.’

Jacobs would not have called herself a planner--she attacked the profession in The Death and Life of Great American Cities--but she certainly has been an enormous influence on them since the book's publication in 1961. In the fall, the Municipal Art Society opens an exhibition on her legacy.

Make it smaller

Lopez called for "a major reduction in height to gain political and community support," saying the four planned towers, two at 300 feet and two at 400 feet, should each be reduced by ten stories, or 100 feet.

The testimony, however, didn't specify cuts in density--and shorter towers might redistribute, rather than reduce, buildable space--though the implication was that too large a population increase would strain services.

According to the testimony:
Until concerns regarding density, zoning, and neighborhood identity are addressed alongside affordability, Assemblyman Lopez cannot lend his support to CPC’s development of Domino Sugar.

More support

The New Domino plan has support not only from local activists concerned about affordable housing but some institutional heavyweights. Jerilyn Perine, Executive Director Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) and former Commissioner of the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), backed the project.

She said:
First the transformation of our derelict industrial landscape must be a priority for zoning and land use decisions. Areas originally created to meet the needs of our old industrial economy, are now critical to meet the needs for housing and jobs in the 21st century and to create access to a waterfront that most New Yorkers have rarely seen.

She pointed to her role, as HPD Commissioner, in which the city transformed and demolished the Schaefer Brewery site so it could become Schaefer Landing:
At that time, the City had to incur the costs of the demolition of the old derelict buildings, initiate the environmental assessment and investigation ourselves, prepare the site for development, and prepare and obtain approval for all zoning changes that the project would require. Only after eliminating all of that risk could we attract a developer willing to undertake the project.

More housing needed

Perine also spoke of the overall housing market:
The second reason to support this project is that it will increase the overall supply of housing along with a significant component of affordable units. Please note that the development of market rate housing is critical to our city’s future. Not only is housing construction a key economic driver, providing direct jobs and significant local spending, the demand for housing in NYC is extreme and shows little signs of abatement, despite troubling indicators in the country’s housing market. The higher ends of the housing market will find a place somewhere. It can bypass the City altogether or push further into the older and more fragile housing stock. High rise market rate new construction doesn’t create housing demand, it fulfills it.

Yes, but that's also an argument for more systematic assessments of density, rather than spot rezonings for specific projects.

Rezoning redux

Perine pointed to some precedent:
The inclusion of 660 affordable units is obviously a unique opportunity that is rarely seen in a single project in NYC. Most notably it is important to understand that had this site been included in the Williamsburg rezoning it would not have been required to provide housing affordable to so many lower income households and at such low income levels....
And if the proposed changes to 421-a passed by the State Legislature are signed into law by the Governor, this project again would not only meet the requirement but would exceed it by providing not only the required affordable units, but additional affordable units, for low income senior citizens and homeownership opportunities for moderate income New Yorkers.

Historic preservation costs

Perine suggested a tradeoff between historic preservation and cost--and thus affordability:
I would further note that had the project not been required to incur the significant cost burden of retaining the existing sugar refinery building, there would have been even greater flexibility to either provide more affordable units or reach more households at even lower income levels. In addition if this portion of the site were to be included for new construction, the bulk could have been distributed in buildings with a lower height.

Pointing to 2030

While Lopez's testimony pointed to the importance of sustainability in achieving growth, Perine's focused on the need to accommodate that growth, a population increase of nearly 1 million people by 2030:
How will we make room for them?
Only by increasing density that actually expands the entire inventory of housing and by government using its land-use powers to increase the availability of buildable sites for a range of housing options can we hope to house our growing population.

Affordable housing the focus at the New Domino hearing

In the post-Atlantic Yards world, will every megaproject be justified because it provides affordable housing? That’s one conclusion after yesterday’s hearing at the Department of City Planning (DCP) regarding the New Domino development proposed for the former Domino sugar factory site in Williamsburg, five blocks along the waterfront north of the Williamsburg Bridge, plus one square block across Kent Avenue.

Some longtime neighborhood residents decried the project’s size and density, while community and church groups endorsed the project precisely because it would be big enough (2200 units) that a 30% commitment could deliver a substantial 660 affordable units. And that affordability is aimed at a lower-income cohort than the AY plan.

Of course, the managing partner of the development, Community Preservation Corporation Resources (CPCR) has as its mission to build affordable housing, so the justification was hardly unexpected.

[Update: note Lumi Rolley's observation on NoLandGrab about Brooklyn Matters, Julia Vitullo-Martin, and megaprojects.]

Less controversy than AY

Though the New Domino may be half the footprint (11.2 acres) and about one-quarter the cost ($1 billion-plus) of the Atlantic Yards project, for now it’s generated far less controversy. I had questioned whether DCP’s meeting hall would be sufficient to house the scoping hearing—to develop a scope of work for the coming environmental impact statement.

(Yes, the ubiquitous developer-friendly consultant AKRF will be the author. Flashback to the October 2005 AY scoping hearing.)

The hall was indeed sufficient and the debate, as with the Atlantic Yards project, often bypassed the actual request to analyze the scope of environmental review. For the afternoon segment of the hearing, 79 people showed up, according to the sign-in sheet. In the evening segment, barely 30 people showed up, and their testimony took less than an hour, less than one-third of the allotted time.

Given DCP’s commitment to hold the hearing open to accommodate latecomers, the sparse turnout left ample time for breaks, which involved cordial but sometimes intense exchanges between advocates and critics.

I missed the afternoon hearing, which included City Council Member Diana Reyna and a representative of Assemblyman (and Brooklyn Democratic boss) Vito Lopez, as well as representatives from several city and state agencies. Perhaps because it was after hours, no elected officials, Community Board reps, or government agency officials testified in the evening. So far, no pro-project unions or organized opposition groups have emerged.

So this report is necessarily incomplete and, indeed, interested parties have another ten days to comment. But the evening session was essentially a rhetorical battle between middle-class white folks, many with decades in a neighborhood they helped stabilize before its later furious gentrification, and church/community group reps, advocating for the poor, many of them are people of color who also endured the bad old days and fought off depredations like a planned incinerator.

No one spoke for the large majority of New Domino residents, the folks who’d buy the 1540 (perhaps) million-dollar condos. The market will take care of that.

Opponents

“The greatest tragedy is that this is putting Williamsburg residents against each other,” lamented Bea Hanson, a 20-year resident. “Surely we have the ability to build affordable housing and preserve neighborhood character.”

Perhaps we do, but, in Williamsburg, the response has been way late.

“I am greatly disappointed, declared Nancy Buivid, a 24-year resident, noting that the city had promised that the site would remained zoned for manufacturing, and did not include it in the 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, even though developer Isaac Katan and CPCR had purchased the site.

She suggested, as have some others, that the 1883 refinery building, slated for preservation and renovation, could make an art museum like Mass MOCA or London’s Tate Modern--a plan that would take much more civic investment. “Our neighborhood is going to be in total darkness at sunset,” she said, in what was surely an exaggeration, “and it’s just not right.”

Planning and density

Other critics questioned whether the neighborhood could handle the new density. On the one hand, proponents could argue that the proposed density of the project and the planned height of the buildings—except for one block east of Kent Avenue—is not inconsistent with the 2005 rezoning. However, opponents might counter, the cumulative effect of such development was never considered.

In other words, the New Domino may be another example of zoning without planning. The site design, by architect Rafael Viñoly, indeed might be artfully planned. But it will not have been planned in conjunction with an overall look at the neighborhood, its infrastructure capacity, and its expressed values. The public aspect of that planning comes after the project proposal, massaged by AKRF.

Nearly a decade ago, those community values were expressed in the 197-a plan prepared for the Waterfront Committee of Community Board 1, titled "A Matter of Balance: Housing, Industry, Open Space." Last night, neighborhood architect and writer Leah Kreger urged DCP to consider the 197-a plan as an alternative.

But that plan was developed in 1998, eons ago in Williamsburg time, before the explosion of market-rate housing and attendant pressure on affordability. For example, it stated, “While the need for housing may warrant development to maximum allowable bulk and density under current zoning, we recommend in general that new residential development conform to the scale and density of surrounding buildings.”

The 2005 rezoning took care of that. Some similar community battles played out; residents concerned about neighborhood character were in opposition to Churches United, which prioritized affordable housing.

Proponents

Proponent Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente, a neighborhood group that helped turn the Southside around, invoked another aspect of the 197-a plan--which El Puente helped developed--to praise the New Domino. The project, he noted, would help achieve the community goal of waterfront access.

In the ideal world, Garden Acosta acknowledged, the delivery of basic necessities such as health, safety, and housing would be motivated by the common good, not profit.

“Sadly, that is not the reality of our policymakers,” he said. So if a market-rate development is necessary to deliver affordable housing, “we’d be hard put to find a better ally than CPC,” the parent of CPCR.

(What’s the difference between the non-profit CPC and its for-profit CPCR subsidiary? They have the same mission, but only CPCR can own property. Despite the for-profit status, “we are not bottom-line driven,” CPCR Senior VP Susan Pollock told me during a break.

Some CPCR partners do have profit goals, so “we are bottom-line conscious,” she said. Given that the New Domino is a partnership with Isaac Katan, known for out-of-context buildings in the South Slope, CPCR’s statement that the decisions are theirs doesn’t necessarily obviate an obligation to deliver certain returns to Katan--which may impact the project scale.)

The churches unite

Anita Dunbar, a housing project resident and a member of the group Churches United, which represents congregations from Bed-Stuy to Greenpoint in North Brooklyn, gave testimony reminiscent of some offered at the Atlantic Yards public hearing in August 2006. “I’m for the housing that’s going up,” she said, “because it will give us affordable housing, which we need desperately.” Her adult daughter, she said, would like to move out the family apartment.

Father Jim O’Shea, director of Churches United, spoke almost as if the New Domino would be public housing rather than a mixed-income development with a better-than-required slice of affordable housing: “We have no need of this project unless the principal focus is affordable housing.” In fact, he said, “If there are modifications to be made, make them on the side of a larger project.”

“The quality of life of a community is how it treats those in need,” he said.

That’s hard to dispute, but the hearing raised questions about how to steer such quality of life: a spot rezoning, as with the New Domino, or a more comprehensive plan to deal with neighborhood issues and also affordable housing?