AY vs. MSG: a larger tax break, but not for the arena

Even though the City Council is much more exercised about tax breaks for Madison Square Garden than Atlantic Yards, City Council Members Letitia James and David Yassky yesterday again called attention to the city's subsidies for AY. While the Council approved Resolution 90, which asks the state to end the 20-year-old property tax exemption for MSG, James and Yassky introduced an amendment that would withhold tax breaks and subsidies for Atlantic Yards.

"If the Council thinks subsidizing MSG is a bad deal for the City and State, they should take another look at the tax breaks and subsidies being offered to the proposed Atlantic Yards Development: they are even worse," James and Yassky said in a statement. It didn't make it past a council committee, but it may recur in the future.

Such tax breaks and subsidies may indeed be much larger, as MSG pointed out (graphic at right), but they are not quite comparable, because they include a whole suite of breaks.

In fact, the tax exemption that now saves the Garden some $11 million a year is much larger than the exemption anticipated for the Atlantic Yards arena, mainly because much of the land would be tax exempt for decades whatever was built on the arena site, thanks to an as-of-right tax break. And if MSG builds a new arena, well, some new subsidies likely would be on the table, as Metro reported today. (Here's more from the Times.)

IBO account

The Independent Budget Office's (IBO) September 2005 Fiscal Brief cited $100 million in city debt for Atlantic Yards. The amount of direct city subsidy for the project, though not necessarily all for the arena, has since been increased to $205 million.

IBO testimony January 9 regarding Madison Square Garden estimated that "the net present value (40 years with discount of 6 percent) of these city subsidies range from $140 million for the Nets arena..."

How did they get that figure, given that we now think of $205 million as the city's direct subsidy? It turns out the IBO is using only part of that sum, but adding other subsidies.

George Sweeting, deputy director of the IBO, replied, "The $140 million figure for Atlantic Yards that IBO used at the MSG hearing attributed only half of the city’s (now larger) capital contribution [$100 million] directly to the arena. We assume the balance will be supporting the other parts of the AY project. This is a change from our 2005 report." (Arguably, some of that additional $105 million could be attributed to the arena.)

The $140 million, he said, "is the 40 year present value of the items listed in the table. This list excludes certain as-of-right benefits that it is assumed any developer would get there such as ICIP for commercial development, and 421-a and other housing development subsidies," Sweeting said.

Indeed, most of those would be as-of-right, but the IBO's calculations don't account for the "Atlantic Yards carve-out," which provides 421-a benefits not available to other developers.

Foregone property tax

The Fiscal Brief states:
Although FCRC will make what the Memorandum of Understanding refers to as PILOT payments to the LDC, these payments are not the equivalent of city property tax payments. Instead they will cover the construction costs for the arena in the first 30 years—and some arena maintenance if the PILOTs exceed debt service. In a more conventional development model, a developer would need to make both construction financing payments and property tax payments for any property tax liability remaining after applying available abatements and exemptions. In the Atlantic Yards case, while the PILOTs are used to pay financing costs in the first 30 years, FCRC will save the cost of property taxes that would normally be due after as-of-right tax benefits expire.

If we assume that the arena would have a market value of approximately $100 per square foot, then the savings have a present value of $14 million in 2005 dollars.

That has now been recalculated to $19.2 million.

Why aren't the annual property tax savings something close to that saved by MSG--now $11 million+ a year? IBO's Sweeting responded, "We based our foregone property tax calculation on the use of ICIP [Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program] which is an of-right benefit. Because ICIP would be available to anybody building at that site, we did not count it in tally of special benefits being given to the arena project. ICIP in that part of Brooklyn provides for 16 years of full exemption followed by a 9 year phase-in towards full taxes. There is also 'inflation protection' in the first twelve years which means that the underlying assessment remains unchanged, which alters the value as the property becomes taxable. Our reported property tax subsidy reflects the full property tax that would be due beginning in year 26 (after expiration of the ICIP exemption) as well as the partial amount that would be due in years 17 through 25.

More details

Also, the value of the arena seems less than 15% of its $637.2 million cost. Sweeting gave the following calculations:

Market value = $100 per square foot x 850,000 square feet = $85,000,000

Assessed value = Market value x .45 = $38,250,000

Tax = Assessed value * tax rate of .10059 (2008) = $3,846,556

Sweeting noted that full taxes are not in place until year 26: "After accounting for growth in the market value beginning in year 13 (the ICIP 'inflation protection' wipes out the first twelve years of growth), the tax in year 26 would be $5.5 million in nominal dollars [not adjusted for inflation] and it would grow to $7.6 million in the 40th year, again in nominal dollars."

Over 40 years, the net present value of the foregone property tax would be $19.2 million, as compared with the $14 million over 30 years. The 2005 report used 30-year figures, but IBO recomputed the numbers to compare them with the 40-year estimates used regarding the stadiums for the Mets and Yankees.

What the difference?

MSG is totally tax-exempt right now. The difference between the estimates regarding MSG and the Atlantic Yards arena is due to two factors, Sweeting said.

First, the Garden’s market value is higher, given the location, estimated at $219 per square foot in 2005, when AY was estimated at $100 per square foot. Now MSG's market value is $250 per square foot, a 14% increase, which implies that the AY arena would be $114 per square foot--and a commensurate increase in taxes.

Second, the MSG is larger: 1,048,620 square feet, compared to 850,000 square feet for the AY arena.

But where do those numbers come from? Sweeting explained that the city's Finance Department lowballs some figures: "The market value we used in our analysis ($100 per square foot) was estimated in 2005. It was based loosely on the Department of Finance’s official market value for MSG at the time, discounting for differences in land value. It is probably true that neither the MSG value assigned by the city, nor the AY arena value estimated by IBO, reflect the actual cost somebody would pay to buy the land and build a new arena. We based our value on an assumption that whatever the Finance Department is doing when valuing MSG, they would do for AY."

What the MOU said

According to the 2/05 Memorandum of Understanding between the developer, city, and state:
The Public Parties and FCRC intend that the LDC will issue tax-exempt bonds to finance all or a portion of constructing the Arena and the on-site Arena garage. The LDC bonds shall be... payable solely from PILOT....

ESDC will lease... the site on which the Arena building... is to be constructed... to a not-for-profit local development corporation ("LDC")... The lease shall be for a term of 99 years and the rent will be $1.00.

ESDC will lease to FCRC, for $1.00 by 99-year ground lease... the Development Sites, and the Arena Site, excluding the Arena Building Site. The lease shall require FCRC to pay a PILOT equal to full real property taxes on the Development Sites and the Arena Development site and improvements, subject to applicable as-of-right tax exemptions.


The Arena Building Site and the Arena and on-site Arena garage will be exempt from real estate taxes and sales taxes on materials used to construct the improvements thereon. ESDC, LDC, and FCRC will enter a PILOT Agreement with a term of 99 years pursuant to which (i) FCRC will pay a semi-annual PILOT not to exceed the full real estate taxes which the City would access were the Arena Building Site and the Arena not exempt from such taxes and (ii) the LDC shall have the right to pledge such PILOT payments to service the LDC tax-exempt bonds as described below... For any annual period during which the LDC's tax exempt bonds are outstanding, if PILOT exceeds the total debt service payments for such annual period, such excess shall be applied as follows: (i) 10% of the annual debt service payments... to pay the cost of maintenance and repair.. of the Arena and (ii) the remaining PILOT shall be paid to the ESDC.

From the IBO Fiscal Brief

The IBO's Fiscal Brief raises several questions that remain unresolved:
Low-Cost Financing and Property Tax Savings for the Arena. To provide low-cost financing for construction of the arena and its parking garage, tax-exempt private activity bonds will be issued by a not-for-profit local development corporation (LDC)... The bonds will be an obligation of the LDC—neither the city nor the state can be held legally responsible for repayment. Instead they will be backed by semi-annual payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs) from Forest City Ratner Companies to the LDC. The MOU states that the PILOTs may not exceed the property taxes that would be paid if the property was not tax exempt, although the agreement offers no indication as to what if any discount from regular property tax would be used.
(Emphases added)

In the event that the PILOT payments exceed the debt service, 10 percent will go toward maintenance and capital reserves for the arena and the rest will go to ESDC; the city will receive none of the excess. If the PILOT is too small to cover debt service on the full $555.3 million cost of construction, taxable bonds will be sold to cover the difference and FCRC will pay the debt service on these taxable bonds.

Savings for the developer

The IBO stated:
Forest City Ratner Companies will save money from this financing arrangement in two ways: First, financing using the tax-exempt bonds will be cheaper than private financing because bondholders are willing to accept lower interest rates when interest earnings are not taxable. Using the current spread of 1.5 percentage points between interest rates for tax exempt economic development bonds and corporate bonds and assuming that the entire $555.3 million cost of constructing the arena is debt financed over 30 years, this subsidy has a present value of $91 million (in 2005 dollars) over the financing period. If only a portion of the $555.3 million is financed with tax exempt bonds, then the subsidy would be smaller.

Note that only a fraction of this tax break, which has surely grown as the arena cost has grown to $637.2 million, shows up on the chart above because the costs are borne mostly by federal rather than city and state taxpayers.

The IBO continued:
This cost would be borne primarily by federal taxpayers, with relatively little impact on New York City or State. City and state personal income tax revenues would be affected only to the extent that LDC bondholders are residents of the city or state.

Although the city will not make an outlay in this financing arrangement, the city will give up resources. Under federal law, there is a limited allocation of tax exempt private activity bonding authority available to each state for residential and other economic development projects. Although in recent years, New York State has not exhausted its allocation, future competition for private activity bonding authority will depend on the construction timetables for alternative projects.

PILOTs not taxes

The Fiscal Brief states:
There is a second source of savings for Forest City Ratner Companies from this financing arrangement. Although FCRC will make what the Memorandum of Understanding refers to as PILOT payments to the LDC, these payments are not the equivalent of city property tax payments. Instead they will cover the construction costs for the arena in the first 30 years—and some arena maintenance if the PILOTs exceed debt service. In a more conventional development model, a developer would need to make both construction financing payments and property tax payments for any property tax liability remaining after applying available abatements and exemptions. In the Atlantic Yards case, while the PILOTs are used to pay financing costs in the first 30 years, FCRC will save the cost of property taxes that would normally be due after as-of-right tax benefits expire.

If we assume that the arena would have a market value of approximately $100 per square foot, then the savings have a present value of $14 million in 2005 dollars.

As noted, that has now been recalculated to $19.2 million.

In the remaining 69 years, when there is no debt service, 10 percent of the PILOT payment will cover arena maintenance costs stemming from operation of the arena for the private benefit of FCRC, with the balance going to ESDC. The city would get no portion of the PILOT from the arena building.

IBO’s estimate of new property tax revenue lost to the arena PILOT does not include a loss of property taxes for the MTA land that would be part of the arena building foot print. The city currently receives no tax payment from the MTA for the rail yard because the MTA, like other state entities, is exempt from local property tax. Under the MTA’s Request for Proposals, any developer acquiring the development rights to the site would probably enter into a long-term lease, leaving the MTA in place as the owner. Therefore, the property would likely remain off the city’s tax roll, resulting in no impact on the city budget. Indeed, the MTA has an incentive to make a deal that maintains the tax exemption in order to maximize the price it receives for the development rights.

AY "on rail yards"? Error recurs in the Times

From an article in today's New York Times, headlined Scaffold Falls, Killing Worker in Brooklyn:
It is in a section of Brooklyn that is being swept up in new development, with the huge Atlantic Yards entertainment, residential and commercial complex planned on rail yards a few blocks to the west.
(Emphasis added)

I thought we'd resolved that the 22-acre project would be built only in part over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's 8.5-acre Vanderbilt Yard. After all, when the Times had a beat reporter assigned to Atlantic Yards, he wrote that the project "would rise over a railyard and adjacent land...."

However, the Times has been inconsistent about publishing corrections after multiple mischaracterizations of the site. And when the record's not corrected, reporters unfamiliar with the issue look at the clip file and make careless errors.

Ravitch: MTA obfuscates full cost of West Side Rail Yards project

A panel discussion last night on "The Fate of the Far West Side" again pointed out the poverty of public discourse regarding Atlantic Yards as the project was under consideration. At the panel, held at the Museum of the City of New York, Richard Ravitch, former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, expressed significant skepticism about planning for both the 59-block Hudson Yards area as well as plans for the MTA's 26-acre West Side Rail Yards.

"I believe in planning," Ravitch said. "But this is planning gone amok. This is planning unfettered by any consciousness of the availability of public resources."

It is in the public interest, he said, to harness "private greed." However, he criticized the MTA for its "shortsighted" desire for revenue--Crain's reported yesterday that the bids for the rail yards may be $1 billion--suggesting that the full value of the property won't be realized until the Moynihan Station project is completed.

Moreover, he charged that the MTA has refused to make available "all the conditions" that the five bidders have included in their bids. Those conditions, he warned, "include significant obligations" on the government to spend more money on the projects, leaving the public in the dark as to the ultimate cost of the project.

He and others stressed that public land was an important public resources. (More from the Rail Yards Blog and the Real Deal.)

The AY angle

Imagine if someone like Ravitch had blown the whistle on the "extraordinary infrastructure" loophole in the Atlantic Yards Memorandum of Understanding, which opens the door for increased public spending. Imagine if anyone with civic responsibility beyond some Brooklynites criticized the Bloomberg administration for more than doubling its announced pledge of $100 million to support Atlantic Yards.

Ravitch and panel moderator Lynne B. Sagalyn, Professor of Real Estate Development and Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, both expressed dismay that the press had little appetite to deal with complex financial issues attached to planning. (Sagalyn's book Times Square Roulette makes that point, as well.)

The value of growth

Ravitch suggested that the extension of the #7 subway line "is a good idea in a world of unlimited resources." However, he said, we don't live in that world.

The most important infrastructure project to accommodate the city's growth, he said, is the construction of the Second Avenue Subway, which "will open up vast areas of the East Bronx" to development.

Timing and oversight

Juliette Michaelson, Senior Planner, Regional Plan Association, suggested that the rail yards will take "two or three decades to be built out."

Given that the project would involve about 12 million square feet of development, as opposed to 8 million square feet for Atlantic Yards, a rough extrapolation suggests that AY would take not the announced decade but 14 to 20 years to build--which is what even those associated with the project acknowledge in unguarded moments.

Michaelson noted that it's not clear if a public authority, as with Battery Park City, would oversee the rail yards development. (BrooklynSpeaks has called for such an oversight entity for Atlantic Yards, but the Empire State Development Corporation has remained wary.)

Sagalyn said she recommended a "special purpose entity" to oversee the 59-block area and coordinate plans, involving existing subsidiaries of the ESDC, such as that set up for Moynihan Station.

She cited the ESDC's history of creating such subsidiaries. "If it isn't happening that way," she said, "it suggests there's a void in leadership."

Pullout without penalty? Maybe, but not without pain

The New York Post reports today, in an article headlined BUILDER CAN NIX NETS PLAN:
Bruce Ratner can pull out of his $4 billion Atlantic Yards project for Brooklyn without penalty, The Post has learned.

That's because the developer never signed binding contracts for the controversial state-approved project or drew on hundreds of millions in government subsidies, officials confirmed yesterday.

Not that that's likely; Forest City Ratner officials say it won't come to pass. But if so, there'd be questions about who's responsible for the closing and reconstruction of the Carlton Avenue Bridge and the start on a new railyard, costs that the government would have to pick up.

(The Empire State Development Corporation has been reimbursed for many of its costs in the environmental review process. As I reported earlier this month, ombudsman Forrest Taylor said that funding agreements and subsidies had yet to be formalized.)

Not without pain

But the developer wouldn't exactly go away without pain. First, the Nets consistently lose money, and the loss of the Barclays Center naming rights deal would be huge.

And Forest City Ratner would be sitting on a patchwork of property for which it paid generously for under current zoning, but would be a bargain given the expected zoning override that allows for much bigger buildings. But the demise of the project would mean the demise of the bargain and a certain amount of pain.

There's surely much more to the potential scenario; if the project does come closer to stalling, we should expect public officials to be more forthcoming.

Room for us all? Reading (and re-reading) Brooklyn Was Mine

When I first read the new anthology of essays Brooklyn Was Mine, I thought it was an accomplished and affectionate, albeit incomplete, mosaic of Brooklyn, as befits a collection whose authors live mostly in the Brownstone belt (though don't necessarily write about it). While not all the contributors are well-known, they include writers--Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Colin Harrison--who have put Brooklyn on the map as a home, if not always a subject, for authors.

Is the title phrase a selfish lament? No, it’s a citation from the expansive bard Walt Whitman: “Brooklyn of ample hills was mine.” The past tense suggests a borough in flux, memorialized before parts disappear.

Still, the portrait is inevitably partial. While there are mentions of Brooklyn's rough edges, I didn't get much sense of “two Brooklyns,” rich and poor, that the Daily News highlighted last week, nor of the persistent crime in northern and eastern Brooklyn that New York magazine recently cited. Black Brooklyn and many other Brooklyns get little attention.

OK, the collection can’t be comprehensive; after all, Thomas Wolfe definitively claimed that the borough was so vast that “only the dead know Brooklyn.”

(Photo of Susan Choi and Jennifer Egan by Adrian Kinloch at January 9 reading at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble. Both were well-received.)

The AY angle

When I learned that the editors and the 19 contributors were donating the proceeds to Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn’s (DDDB) fight against Atlantic Yards, I re-read the book through a new lens, more conscious of the gaps. "Brooklyn has given birth to some of America's greatest literary voices," co-editors Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker said in a statement issued when the book was released. "Today, a new generation of authors has grown up or resettled here, a testament to Brooklyn's unique quality of life. These writers simply want to protect a community that has provided them with so much.”

Well, the book celebrates what Phillip Lopate in his introduction terms “the fragile, quotidian miracle of neighborhood life.” Lopate catalogs some recurring "key notions" in the collection: "history, immigration, home and exile, neighborhood, public space, pastoral, loss." Brooklyn’s manifold diversity (geographic, socioeconomic, ethnic, and temporal) is celebrated, if not always anatomized.

But what does it say about “protecting” a community and the seismic shifts that may be coming? The answer: not so much. With the goal of reaching a national audience with personal essays, Brooklyn Was Mine periodically acknowledges the tides of gentrification, but offers only hints of some development flashpoints and says almost nothing about Atlantic Yards.

Nothing about the DDDB cause is explicit in the book (though it's strongly hinted in Lethem's piece). The publisher's explanation was that such a mention wasn’t necessary, given that the cause is being promoted only locally. That’s plausible, but there was a missed opportunity, not a lecture (as a Brooklyn Eagle reviewer feared), but more engagement, say, an acknowledgment that AY has been pitched, however unrealistically, as a solution to housing woes faced by poorer, minority Brooklynites. After all, when contributor Alexandra Styron writes about moving to Brooklyn for "affordable housing," the benchmark is Manhattan.

In other words, Brooklyn Was Mine collects a worthy array of personal essays about Brooklyn, but it's not--and maybe that's a lot to ask of a volunteer effort--so good at illuminating the issues around the cause it's supporting.

Incomplete reckoning

Lopate’s introduction, which shares some text from his essay in the Block by Block accompaniment to the Jane Jacobs exhibit, offers an partial reckoning: The genius of Brooklyn has always been its homey atmosphere; it does not set out to awe or intimidate, like skyscraper Manhattan—which is perhaps why one hears so much local alarm at the luxury apartment towers that have started to sprout up, every two blocks, in those parts of the borough lying closest to Manhattan. Much of the chagrin is expressed by people who have moved here from elsewhere; I, a native Brooklynite, never romanticized the place as immune from modernity, nor do I see why such an important piece of the metropolis should be protected from high-rise construction when the rest of the planet is not. But my feelings are mixed: for if the sleeping giant Brooklyn were to awake and truly bestir itself and turn into a go-getter, I would deeply regret the loss of sky. Perhaps it is some deep-seated, native-son confidence that Brooklyn will never quite get it together, which allows me to anticipate its bruited transformation with relatively sanguinity.

Lopate does cite the conversion of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank to condos. Still, as I wrote regarding Block by Block, had Lopate have spent more time reading blogs like Brownstoner and Curbed, he might not have underestimated the real-estate industry. And, of course, Lopate, by joining the advisory board of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, has by implication opposed the borough’s single largest high-rise construction project.

Already, there’s been some sniping about the book on Gothamist; one anonymous critic charged “They just moved there and now feel threatened that their little shangri-la is being destroyed!” My frustration with the book wasn't latecomer posturing, just that it didn't explain why Brooklyn is divided enough for projects like Atlantic Yards to gain support.

Of course, those sniping invite counter-criticism; as another Gothamist commentator riposted, “Bruce Ratner thinks his vision is the only valid vision for Brooklyn.” Indeed, decisions made by Brooklynites like the contributors to this book helped make it safe for Forest City Ratner to muscle its way toward (in the words of Chuck Ratner of Forest City Enterprises) “a great piece of real estate.”

Behind the book

The book, the editors told me, was born of a recognition that anthologies have become popular, their own thoughts about Brooklyn’s places and textures, the phenomenon that Brooklyn has become home to many writers, and Knutsen’s involvement in DDDB. (He lives in Fort Greene; Steiker lives in Brooklyn Heights.)

“We wanted the pieces to be personal,” Knutsen said regarding instructions to the writers. “We wanted them to find a story, or look at a neighborhood, or remember an incident, that delivers something personal about the writer’s relationship to Brooklyn."

So Atlantic Yards, obviously, wasn’t the focus. Steiker said, “I think that we wanted [readers] to get a sense of Brooklyn as a place, a compilation of the many, a feel for its people, its streets, its neighborhoods.” She added that the editors wanted the book to stand on its own as a literary collection; indeed, as she noted, an essay by Darcey Steinke stands as a portrait of Prospect Park and environs while it also describes “starting a new chapter in your life.”

There is, indeed, "a compilation of the many." John Burnham Schwartz accompanies his dad back briefly to Brownsville, immeasurably changed since the latter’s youth. Elizabeth Gaffney recalls how manhole covers provoked youthful curiosity about Brooklyn's sewer system, and hopes her child finds similar inspirations. Emily Barton interviews one of the borough’s last seltzer delivery men. Harrison traverses Brooklyn with his son for youth baseball games, offering a tantalizing observation that invites further exposition: "a lot gets worked out among players, parents, coaches, and umps. Father-son stuff. Racial stuff. Class and education differences. Talent differences. The problem of tribes."

Real estate storms

Some pieces capture Brooklyn in flux. Susan Choi tracks decline and hard-won revival in Clinton Hill through a close look at a park and her neighbors. Vijay Seshadri, a Carroll Gardens resident since 1987, cites “the great real estate storms of the past decade,” how the “Puerto Rican and Dominican social clubs” social clubs on Smith Street have “been mostly replaced by restaurants. “Almost without my noticing it,” he observes, “the neighborhood has changed, leaving me with the commonplace but nonetheless sharp recognition that I only began cherishing it when I understood it was disappearing."

Philip Dray, who with his musician wife was the first wave of artist-types coming to Williamsburg, writes warmly of his (newly wealthy on paper) Ukrainian landlady and expresses unease about his place in the neighborhood. Ethiopian-American Dinaw Mengestu, author of a great gentrification novel set in Washington, DC, describes himself as “an eager and poor writer” setting down in polyglot Kensington. And Lethem, the Brooklyn uber-author of his generation, who recreated the bad old 1970s Brooklyn in The Fortress of Solitude, finds madcap prose to try to come to grips with the “Ruckus Flatbush” that he sees in and around Downtown Brooklyn, including AY.

But there’s not enough about Brooklyn’s transformation, that after the waves of writers and others settled in Brooklyn, prices have continued to rise. (Maybe I’m just betraying my status as an anxious Park Slope renter.) The train has left the station—maybe not for Atlantic Yards, but for Downtown Brooklyn and for the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront.

So the essays, while deft enough for a “love letter to Brooklyn” (as the book was introduced at a reading in Park Slope), don't aim to answer that. Some look to history, like Darin Strauss's piece on his great-grandfather’s Brooklyn baseball history or Egan’s charming “Reading Lucy,” which evokes a spirited woman who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II and regularly sent letters to her husband overseas.

Schwartz’s essay about returning to Brownsville notes that the neighborhood has recovered somewhat, but surely Greg Donaldson, who wrote a book called The Ville (and is apparently writing a sequel), could have filled in more details. Robert Sullivan’s piece on the “vortex” created by wind in Downtown Brooklyn is intriguing, but even he admits, “Try as I may, I still can’t predict the wind in downtown Brooklyn... or how it will feel when downtown Brooklyn is redeveloped, or ‘utilized.’”

Katie Roiphe recalls a date spent on the Cyclone, which gives her a sense of Coney Island’s “seediness and greatness,” but an even stronger piece would have acknowledged Coney's current limbo, the locus of a grand battle between the city and developer Joe Sitt. Even Lawrence Osborne’s out-of-left-field essay in which he compares Red Hook to Bangkok (!) suffers for the absence of the looming Ikea.

Room for us all

The housing issue coalesces in Styron’s Reading My Father, a distinguished enough essay to be published in the New Yorker. She describes how she never read her father William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, set partly in Brooklyn until she moved to Brooklyn and felt some synchronicity.

Her piece begins by citing the first line of the novel: “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.” In 2005, after 17 years in Manhattan, Styron “had crossed the East River in search of affordable housing.” But affordable, as Assembly Housing Chairman Vito Lopez might say, is a “relative thing."

Not that Styron lived in luxury. She writes of experiencing vermin and mice in some affordable but not-so-commodious buildings. Eventually, however, she and her husband bought a house in Park Slope. Readers in flyover country might not realize what an achievement that is, how Park Slope’s charms have become so dear, how the neighborhood has become “a parody" and "affordable housing" a wedge issue for development controversies like Atlantic Yards and the New Domino. That context should be somewhere in the collection.

Mengestu concludes hopefully, calling the remnants of a Jewish community down the road from the Pakistani/Bangledeshi zone “proof, if one was ever needed, that Brooklyn is always reinventing itself, that there is room here for us all.” (The collection is bookended with immigrant writers; in the opening, Lara Vapnyar writes acidly about Brighton Beach as “a parody of Russia at its best.”)

In Brooklyn, “room here for us all” is the question of the moment. It’s one Atlantic Yards, to backers like ACORN's Bertha Lewis, may help solve, though at the expense--to its critics--of Brooklyn’s scale and infrastructure, not to mention manipulation of process to gain subsidies and eminent domain.

How to square the legitimate desire to preserve what’s good about Brooklyn while accommodating the tides of growth and the imperatives of sharing the wealth? If AY is not the right solution, well, what's the bigger picture? A few hints would've been welcome.

Genre issues

Ultimately, some of my reader’s frustration reflects the limitations of personal essays rather than reportage--or fiction. Collections of fiction like Brooklyn Noir and Hard-Boiled Brooklyn get much more diversity in neighborhood and authors, and provide a lot more grit: racism, sexism, landlord harassment, tenant harassment, double-crossing, murder.

It’s not surprising that there’s no author from or writing about, say, Hasidic Williamsburg or Chinese Sunset Park, but there’s only one black author, Mengestu. (An essay by novelist Michael Thomas, who's black, apparently fell through, as it was announced on the galley.) “There are lots of ethnic groups unfortunately that weren’t represented, not out of any design,” Knutsen said. “We asked a lot more writers than who ended up saying yes. The book is diverse, even if it doesn’t hit every corner.”

“We were also asking them to do something for free,” added Steiker. “It doesn’t always work with people’s lives and schedules and realities.”

I don’t know who was asked, so it’s not fair to second-guess the editors, but a number of potential contributors came to mind. If four of the contributors--Lethem, Egan, Sullivan, and Lopate--are members of DDDB's Advisory Board, it would've been nice to see a contribution from black cultural critic (and DDDB board member ) Nelson George or the novelist Gabriel Cohen, who charts Brooklyn’s combustible complexities.

Lethem’s “line in the sand”

The collection's must-read for Brooklynites is Lethem’s hybrid “Ruckus Flatbush,” which requires a translator for those new to the Brooklyn map. In the first part of the piece, he writes manically about places called Butt Flash (Flatbush), Full Time (Fulton), Albeit Squalor Mall (Albee Square Mall), The Aggravated Antic, (Atlantic Antic), Pathetic Street (Pacific Street).

In the second part, an author's note pregnantly titled "Was Brooklyn Mine?", Lethem explains more conventionally how he avoided Brooklyn as a topic for so long: For similar reasons, Brooklyn’s battles... never seemed my own: I mean, of course, Brooklyn’s battles to be reclaimed but not gentrified, to be exalted but not kitschified, and to remain in the hands of the people to whom Brooklyn rightly belonged and not to those ‘others’--those, you know, carpetbaggers and despoilers. Always easy to spot those when you see them, right?

He stayed away: Then, recently, with my own neighborhood facing a quite enormous and shockingly bad revision at the hand of politicians and developers, I found I wanted to draw a line in the sand...

So, in response to an invitation to write for the book, "Ruckus Flatbush” is a kiss-off or poison pill: A memo to those who think they can control or define a place like this. Brooklyn: You Break It, You Buy It. Meanwhile, under the looming shadow of such operations, living people and ghosts merely carry on, side by side. Sometimes you can’t tell one from the other around here.

The germ of something more

Lethem's anguished piece is the germ of something troubling, hinting that “the improbable ideal of a place where the whole world can live together in more or less harmony,” profferred by Lopate, may not exist or, if it does, is vanishing.

The Brooklyn Paper suggested that “the sum of the collection does end up equaling more than its parts.” I'm not so sure. Yes, as the Eagle review pointed out, the book captures some new angles on the borough's multitudinous life. However, the development changing Brooklyn demands greater attention.

FCR official: lawsuit casts doubt on arena financing

Is the legal battle over Atlantic Yards having “a chilling affect” on Forest City Ratner’s ability to get financing? That's what a lawyer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said more than a week ago, according to lawyers for the 26 petitioners challenging the Atlantic Yards environmental review, though he denied it to the Brooklyn Paper.

Well, that kerfluffle is moot now that an FCR official has said essentially the same thing in legal papers, arguing for an expedited appeal of Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden's decision. (The New York Post has the story first today; the article's headlined COURT TROUBLE: RATNER ADMITS ARENA-FUNDING WOES.)

In an affidavit filed Thursday, Andrew Silberfein, FCR's Executive Vice President and Director of Finance, stated: As the Court surely is aware, the credit markets are in turmoil at this time. Many lenders and bond insurers are facing financial difficulties, and are becoming much more cautious. It is not clear what the financial climate will be in several months, when the arena bond financing is made available to the public.
Although the decision that was issued by Justice Madden in this case on January 11, 2008 should be helpful in providing comfort to potential investors that there is no significant risk that the courts will annul the approvals for the Atlantic Yards project, there is a serious question as to whether, given the current state of the debt market, the underwriters will be able to proceed with the financing for the arena while the appeal is pending before this Court.
(Emphasis added)

FCR wants the appellate arguments to be heard by May rather than held over until September; the developer would like to open the arena in 2010, even though the three-year bridge reconstruction clock, which started when the Carlton Avenue Bridge closed January 23, suggests that the earliest would be 2011.

Beyond the lawsuit

Of course, the general climate for financing isn't exactly that solid, even without a lawsuit. The stock of parent Forest City Enterprises rose steadily over the past two years, only to plunge last summer. In December, Goldman Sachs downgraded FCE stock from buy to neutral, three months after RBC Capital Markets analyst Rich Moore nudged the stock down from "outperform" to the middle ranking of "sector perform."

Other litigation

Silberfein acknowledged that other state litigation regarding Atlantic Yards "is a possibility" and acknowledged that "other litigation remains pending"--a reference to the appeal of the federal eminent domain lawsuit. He suggested, however, that this case is particularly significant: Nevertheless, an affirmance of Justice Madden's decision by this Court — which is, as I understand it, the only appellate court to which the petitioners have the absolute right to take an appeal — would help to allow the financing and long-delayed construction of the project to proceed.

As long as the state case remains pending, he predicted significant difficulties and cost increases in concluding the bond financing that is essential to the arena's completion.

Delay?

ESDC attorney Philip Karmel wrote that petitioners' attorney Jeffrey Baker had provisionally agreed to a schedule in which petitioners' briefs would have been submitted by February 19, but later disavowed it, stating that co-counsel had conflicts that required delay. Karmel opined that the delay represented "a strategy to string out this appeal" rather than a legitimate need for more time.

Final check?

In court documents, Baker acknowledged that the appellants recognize that agencies are afforded deference by the courts regarding decision-making on projects like these. However, he said that court review is the only protection for those aggrieved.

Moreover, he pointed to the 2006 case in which a trial court judge disqualified an ESDC lawyer, David Paget, for having previously advised Forest City Ratner on Atlantic Yards matters. That decision was reversed by an appellate court.

Baker wrote: With respect to petitioners claim that the close relationship between FCRC and ESDC and ESDC’s reliance upon an attorney employed by FCRC, this Court noted that the project was still undergoing governmental review and that petitioners would have the opportunity to comment during that process and seek judicial review if necessary...

This case demonstrates that the relationship between ESDC and FCRC was far too cozy and that rather than take an objective look at the various issues involved in the project, ESDC facilitated a sham process intended to grant FCRC the approvals for which it was not otherwise entitled. Appellants are counting on this Court to provide the meaningful judicial review that has otherwise been denied.

Irreparable injury?

In asking for a temporary restraining ordered (denied) and a stay (moot) on the closing of the Carlton Avenue Bridge, Baker wrote:
If the Court does not grant the within emergency stay, the Petitioners and residents of Brooklyn will be irreparably harmed. The closure of the Carlton Avenue Bridge, if it moves forward, would result in a permanent change in the environment of Brooklyn including significant impacts on traffic and significant delays for Fire Department emergency responders. Further, the closure and eventual demolishing of this bridge would irreparable harm, as Petitioners’ success on the merits of this Appeal would leave Petitioners and residents without a necessary bridge and without adequate funding to reconstruct the bridge.

The Empire State Development Corporation responded that, in light of the public benefits, the balance of equities weight heavily against granting such a preliminary injunction, since it change the status quo by disturbing existing construction contracts and interrupting the work taking place at the project site.

The closing of Fort Greene's 4W, the demise of Bogolan, and the AY effect

The story of the closing of 4W Circle of Arts and Enterprise at 704 Fulton Street, a unique incubator for artists and craftspersons from the African Diaspora is an "end of an era" in Fort Greene, and I told a good piece of the story in an article a few weeks back the Brooklyn Downtown Star. (Today from 4-9 pm 4W is holding "The Circle is Unbroken Celebration, Celebrate 17 years of Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Pride, Ujimma (Collective Work and Responsibility) and the continuation of People Power.")

It's too simplistic, as I reported, to consider the closing simply a casualty of gentrification, and as Selma Jackson, a co-founder of 4W and its sole proprietor now, explained in an email yesterday via the Fort Greene Association. It wasn't that 4W's rent was rising precipitously, it was that the artists and craftspersons were less willing to pay a fee for space and services at 4W, preferring to work on consignment.

Jackson also cited a desire to spend more time with her grandchildren and to expand the work she's doing internationally, currently coaching women business owners in Rwanda. She aims to write a book about 4W and will have " special events periodically."

Changing times

Still, the closing of 4W does show how quickly (and, to some, painfully) Fort Greene has changed, and raises questions about ways to encourage retail stability and the effects of large projects like Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Center mall and Atlantic Yards.

Before the merchants arrived, Fulton Street had drug dealers and prostitutes at night; by the second half of the 1990s, revived Fulton Street was Bogolan, Brooklyn, a testament to the Afrocentric nature of many of the businesses in the Bogolan Merchants Association. Now there's a Fulton Area Business Association sponsored, in part, by condo developers.

In an anguished response to the news of 4W's closing, which first came in a New York Daily News article blaming rising rents, Laurie Cumbo, director of MoCADA, Museum of the Contemporary African Diaspora), stated:
The closing of 4W circle marks a fatal wound to the community and the cultural diversity that made Fort Greene what it is today. Unless we recognize how important it is to make a conscious decision to support "our" businesses, the domino effect that has been planned for us will progress with rapid fire.

Keeping community

While Jackson did not echo Cumbo's rhetoric, she echoed some of the sentiments. In her farewell letter, Jackson wrote:
In closing, I want you to think of the importance of special places in our community and what our role and responsibility is in ensuring that they remain. We must actively support our services, we must actively ensure that change does not affect the places that we hold near and dear to our hearts, and we need to be concerned about community wealth building: passing on our history and ownership of community spaces.

Indeed, 4W in 2006 was designated by City Lore and the Municipal Art Society as a Place that Matters, an inventory of historically and culturally significant spaces.

Lesson: own your own

So how to manage change, and to protect "community spaces" that are businesses? One lesson from Fort Greene, as former Bogolan executive director (and now Daily News columnist) Errol Louis pointed out last December, is that, to steer their destiny, merchants must own their own buildings or have a long lease.

Jackson, a former bank manager, knows that well; she tried more than once to buy her building, but that never worked out, even though in 1999-2000, Bogolan attracted funds from a local bank to assist merchants in buying their buildings.She even considered moving to slower-to-change Myrtle Avenue, but fellow merchants on Fulton Street were dismayed at the prospect.

Indeed, the urbanist Jane Jacobs, in a 2001 speech in Washington, DC, suggested that increased rents in improving neighborhoods can diminish retail diversity and bring a "monoculture" of "whatever happens to be most profitable on that street at that time." She suggested that, just as the government subsidizes home ownership through tax deductions, so much businesses get a boost, since "ownership is the surest protection against being priced out of a place of work."

The sense that small business were disappearing in New York at large was the topic of the first panel last October tied to the Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York exhibition, Is New York Losing its Soul? Among the topics that have surfaced since are commercial rent control, encouraging nonprofits as landlords, and legislation limiting chain stores.

Bogolan & AY

In a 7/5/05 Daily News column headlined CRUSADER DREW NABE BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS, Louis saluted the recent signing of the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement and reflected on the recent passing of Bogolan founder Bilal Muhammad, "[o]ne of Brooklyn's unsung civic heroes," who did as much as anyone to help turn "Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights from troubled areas into three of the city's hottest neighborhoods."

Louis concluded:
The tiny grants we landed - $5,000 here, $25,000 there - helped make the neighborhood the kind of place where a developer like Ratner can now line up $2 billion in investments and persuade banks and national retail stores to set up shop. And a great many of the black restaurants, cafes, bakeries and fashion shops managed to stay put.

A lot of people have theories about the best way to attack inner-city deterioration. Here's my suggestion: persuade bankers, real estate developers and city planners to spend time and money finding and funding community leaders like Muhammad, who so often remain unseen and unrecognized. They hold the key to turning ailing inner-city areas into prosperous, family-friendly neighborhoods.

It's not clear to me how that translates into supporting megaprojects as the next step in the solution.

How many stayed?

Another question is how many of those black businesses have managed to stay put. The picture was already mixed by the time Louis wrote the column; see the 3/31/03 article by a NYU journalism student describing the demise of Bogolan. Several merchants that were members of Bogolan remain, such as the clothing designer Moshood and Cake Man Raven, while others have left, such as Nigerian Fabrics and Fashion and (last year) the Senegalese restaurant Keur N'Deye.

An 8/4/04 article in the Amsterdam News headlined Rebellion in the heart of Brooklyn described "the triple forces of Brooklyn Academy of Music, MetroTech and the Atlantic Center Mall," noting that BAM audience were not drawn into the adjacent neighborhoods. Bilal Muhammad's t-shirt shop tried, for a time, to establish an outpost in the mall, but "the environment was not conducive to the sale of custom-made items."

The Bogolan Merchants Association had already dissolved, and several members had moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant or closed, according to the article. By now, 2008, two of the three "key establishments" cited--the Brooklyn Moon Cafe, 4W Circle, and Keur N'Deye--have closed.

Mall effects

In a 4/24/00 New York City Real Estate Forum at Baruch College, Louis, then at Bogolan, spoke warily, and with echoes of Jane Jacobs, regarding the Atlantic Center mall:
Atlantic Center, that's a very different kind of development and a very different commercial vision for Fort Greene and it doesn't necessarily have to be in conflict, but at times it might be... The mall itself is fundamentally different from the area that we're talking about... And what's going on in Atlantic Center, it's everything that Fort Greene is not. It is not diversity of uses, it's just business. If you're not going to shop, you have no business over there. It shuts down at night with the exception of the 24-hour Pathmark and it's dark and it's sort of dangerous and it's not very pleasant after hours. Now, one block over you get an entirely different commercial vision which is sort of mixed-use residential upstairs, commercial downstairs, it's where people live, it's where people care about. It's a pedestrian sort of place, you don't bring a car down Fulton Street because while there is parking, it's kind of hard to find because there are no meters there yet. And so we're sort of seeing -- we start to nudge a little bit. Sometimes we bump heads a little bit. At one point there was a proposal floated the MetroTech bid to expand across Flatbush Avenue and into our area. And we began to talk with them and it didn't seem like what they had in mind was what we had in mind...., it's in City Limits currently, so I'm not saying anything out of school, but when someone says this is going to be the BAM cultural district and our group says this is and has been an African arts cultural district for 50 years, there can be a whose culture and on what terms do we cooperate or how do we straighten all of this stuff out.

Louis's reference to City Limits was a May 2000 article, headlined DOES IT GIVE A BAM?, that addressed the expansion efforts of the BAM Local Development Corporation. Louis was quoted in the article as saying that “Anything that brings more cultural dollars and tourism and arts and entertainment has got to be a good thing.”

However, some Bogolan members said BAM LDC was too insular; the article stated that Bogolan members were to get two seats on the LDC board. (By the way, Bruce Ratner from 1992-2001 was chairman of BAM.) Now BAM LDC has been subsumed into the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

Jackson on AY

It's impossible to assess how all the merchants of Bogolan feel about Atlantic Yards, but not all share Louis's optimism. Jackson (right) commented critically on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement:
For all the talk about what it will add to the community, including jobs, as a business owner I have seen very little benefit from the Atlantic Center development phase I or II. What it has done is decreased street parking for my customers, increased sanitation ticketing for small businesses—as one sanitation officer said to me “well the neighborhood has changed and we need to keep it clean”. Where was that philosophy when I opened in 1991? Why did it take until 2000 to be concerned about a “cleaner neighborhood? And finally it has given the landlords reason to increase the commercial rents based on the future potential of the neighborhoods, forcing small businesses out of the area now.

The magical vanishing of Pacific Street blight

It seemed intractable, didn't it, the blight bordering the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard. As the Empire State Development Corporation declared in its Atlantic Yards Blight Study:
In contrast, as illustrated by Photographs H and I, the blocks south of Atlantic Avenue host a combination of vacant, underutilized, and physically deteriorating structures and vacant lots, and are lined with cracked and crumbling sidewalks that are overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash...
(Emphasis added)

The ESDC punted on what agency was responsible for upkeep. But in the past couple of days, a clean-up has begun on the blocks. (Who's responsible? I'm not sure--I queried the ESDC and haven't yet heard back. I know it wasn't the same crew that blitzed Pacific Street one Sunday last September.)

Similar views

Photographer Tracy Collins yesterday captured the clean-up on Pacific between 5th & 6th avenues (first photo; similar perspective to Photograph C) and between 6th and Carlton avenues (second photo; it's across from the Newswalk condos and has been better taken care of then the blocks to the east and west).

Photograph H at top captures the scene one block further east, between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues. (Update 5 pm: Today Collins shot Pacific between Carlton and Vanderbilt, as shown at bottom; there's less obvious "blight removal" because of construction on the street.)

Would JJ like AY? An exhaustive "no"

Would Jane Jacobs approve of Atlantic Yards? I've written before about how the planners behind the project certainly were not unmindful of the Jacobsian qualities for a healthy city, but the project really wouldn't qualify. And I also wrote about the AY angle regarding the Jane Jacobs exhibit.

Now urban planner and lawyer Michael D.D. White ups the ante, with an essay and chart in the Brooklyn Paper concluding that AY would be very, very not Jacobsian.

In Williamsburg, Vito Lopez wants "real" affordability

Brooklyn Democratic Chair Vito Lopez, who represents Williamsburg and Bushwick in his Assembly district, is a strong proponent of affordable housing, so strong he's threatening to use eminent domain to ensure that the recently-closed Pfizer site would lead to truly affordable housing.

In a statement to the Observer, he said that the "company’s definition of affordability in no way matches the annual income of working class New Yorkers, nor the low and moderate incomes of Williamsburg residents."

Regarding Atlantic Yards, however, Lopez supported the "carve-out," ensuring a special break for Forest City Ratner and affordability that also departs from the incomes of working-class and average Brooklyn residents.

The Carlton Avenue Bridge closes (for two years)

Tracy Collins took some photos today (and here's his photostream) of the bridge closing needed to accommodate a rebuilt railyard and a platform for construction. There's apparently potential for some traffic jams. (More on that from Amy Greer.) That's Atlantic Terminal 4B in the background, across Atlantic Avenue, one sign of high-rise construction in contrast to more mid-rise and low-rise buildings on the south side of the project footprint.As I wrote, this starts a three-year reconstruction clock, given that the Carlton Avenue Bridge is supposed to take two years to rebuild, and the Sixth Avenue Bridge an additional year. That suggests that (assuming pending challenges fail) the arena couldn't open until January 2011, unless work speeded up and/or the developer and city agreed to open the arena with an adjacent traffic artery blocked.

Atlantic Yards will (eventually) spawn some Jacobsian "investigative theater"

Atlantic Yards has spawned several blogs, at least one documentary film, a book of photography (and other photographic work), and numerous songs. So why not some theater?

In December, the Rockefeller Foundation announced that 16 cultural organizations were the first award recipients of the Foundation's $2.6 million New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, supporting “trailblazing initiatives that strengthen the City's cultural fabric."

One of those grants, $150,000, was awarded to an innovative theater troupe called The Civilians, for “Development and Brooklyn Neighborhoods, a two-year theater lab exploring the Atlantic Yards Project.” The Civilians, in its self-description, “develops original projects based in the creative investigation of actual experience."

Not an AY documentary

Its grant application stressed, "The project is NOT a talking heads documentary about the various positions on Atlantic Yards. Instead, it will draw on the unique skills of theater artists to reveal the fabric of everyday life in these neighborhoods, and to discern how a community interacts with larger forces."

Given the Rockefeller Foundation's funding of Jane Jacobs's writings and its current funding of related activities--the Jacobs Medals and the Jane Jacobs & the Future of New York exhibition--it's not surprising that the foundation would support an innovative theater troupe that takes some inspiration from Jacobs.

Civilians background

Since its founding in 2001 by Artistic Director Steven Cosson, The Civilians have created several original and diverse shows. Soon, the troupe will debut This Beautiful City, a play with music, created from interviews, that explores the Evangelical movement, centered in Colorado Springs, its unofficial capital.

Off-Broadway through January 6 was Gone Missing, a documentary musical “about things that go missing -- keys, personal identification, a Gucci pump...or one's mind.”

I spoke with Cosson in late December, before the news of the dismissal of the state lawsuit challenging AY, to learn more about the Civilians' project. An edited version of the exchange is below.

Why Atlantic Yards

AYR: Why Atlantic Yards?

SC: I am a former resident of Fort Greene, it was the first place I lived when I moved to New York in 1999, I had an apartment on Lafayette Avenue and Vanderbilt, and I moved a couple of years ago to Bed-Stuy. I’ve certainly known about Atlantic Yards since it started, something I followed. In the past year, I thought that our theater company could potentially find a way to engage in what’s going on. Part of that was having tried to make a show about a city [Colorado Springs], and becoming more intersected in how cities function, from how things work in a neighborhood or even within a small block, and how they work on the macro level.

Atlantic Yards, and in different ways what's going on the rest of Brooklyn, is bringing up important questions about how democracy works in our country and our cities, and what sort of say people have in how a neighborhood changes.

It’s not necessarily going to be the story of how decisions were made. That’s probably told by straight journalism. We can find a way to start at the grassroots level, asking how does an urban neighborhood work, in many ways taking inspiration from Jane Jacobs, and try to get a picture of these various neighborhoods that will be affected by Atlantic Yards, what’s at stake if an urban ecology like this has sort of a radical change imposed from above.

Diversity of views

AYR: To what extent will you get the pro-Atlantic Yards view in or just the larger view that there has to be planning on behalf of the larger city? Someone like Hilary Ballon, who curated the Robert Moses exhibitions--she’s frequently made the point that projects have to serve a larger public.

SC: Our strategy is to try to sit and listen to every possible stakeholder. I think, even on the grassroots level, we certainly will get a large diversity of opinion. We do intend to try to work our way up to the top. I’m hoping I’ll be sitting in the offices of Forest City Ratner [one day].

[American Theatre reported: Cosson coaches the Civilians to ask non-judgmental questions—"How did you get to Colorado Springs?"—and then to try not to show a personal reaction.]

AYR: Well, they pretty much don’t talk to me. They do talk to some in the press, but they don’t say much.

SC: Who knows. But the most important thing is that we’re going on in with a plan but not a determined outcome. We intend to let the material drive the process. We intend to work in a variety of different formats. We might end up curating a couple of evenings of music performance. Some work might take place in a school or a community center. Some Internet radio programs might come out of this. Let that be a catalyst for conversation. Those sorts of events [won't necessarily] feed directly into the show, but certainly will inform our thinking.

The work they do

AYR: American Theatre magazine described your work as “interview-based documentary cabaret.”

SC: How I describe our work is a lot more broad. We create original theater from investigations into real life. Some work has been more musical theater; [Gone Missing] is more of a cabaret theater piece. We have other projects that are more like straight plays. This project could end up being anything.

Everything comes out of some engagement with real life; it could be a contemporary subject, or a historical subject. There’s intensive research at the beginning. For contemporary stuff, we try to do very much a grassroots, face-to-face research process.

We’re premiering a new show... We spent a lot of time in the city of Colorado Springs. We interviewed several hundred people, attended church services, community meetings, and attended the freethinkers’ potluck. With each project, we try to find the best way to learn the story from the ground up.

AYR: This sounds a little like Anna Deavere Smith, who did Fires in the Mirror about Crown Heights, or Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project.

SC: There’s been a real surge in documentary theater in the past ten years. Certainly we take inspiration from all sorts of places. But probably our greatest influence is an English theater company called Joint Stock. They were active in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Caryl Churchill wrote plays for them, David Hare. My graduate school professor had been a member of Joint Stock.

AYR: You don’t call it straight documentary theater.

SC: I call what we do investigative theater. I think of a documentary theater as the theatrical expression of something that is more expository, in which the goal is to tell a particular factual story. [With] the Joint Stock company, research fed into a creative process. With our Colorado show, even though we were there when the Ted Haggard thing happened, and it’s part of the show, our work is an effort to get into some of the deeper questions of what’s going on in this phenomenon, rather than telling the story of Ted Haggard.

AYR: Do your pieces have one author or multiple authors?

SC: It’s all different. We’ve had shows authored by a single playwright. In some cases, we’ll have a research phase and hand it over to a playwright. In other cases, they’re all authored by a writer or writing team, but in some cases, the writers are using mostly verbatim material from the interviews.

AYR: How many shows do you do?

SC: We premiere one show a year, but we’ll have various projects in production over the course of a given season. This year, there will be three shows.

AY starts in the fall

AYR: What’s your timetable for the Atlantic Yards work?

SC: We’re starting early work this summer, but really working more in earnest in the fall and winter.

AYR: How many people do interviews?

SC: Maybe a core group of 15 people. I’m hoping to involve a number of students; we’re hoping to have theater and ethnography and urban planning students. All told, there might be a 100 different people having different types of conversations. With our Colorado project, we ended up working with a Colorado college and also having as diverse a group of interviewers as possible. College-age kids will be able to have a different type of conversation with younger people. [Maybe] we can find nonprofessional interested people who might want to participate, and have conversations with their neighborhood.

AYR: What’s the timetable for producing something?

SC: Because we are interested in having constant dialogue, we’d like to have to something on stage in a month or so [after the start], but as far as a culminating show, it’ll probably take a couple of years. As opposed to a documentary film or a journalistic work, it can’t necessarily engage with the same timetable as to what’s happening politically. But my hope is whatever’s happening will inform what’s happening politically, and will have broad enough interest that it will inform what’s happening on the national level.

AYR: Have you looked at video of public meetings?

SC: I’ve read transcripts of the public meetings. Lately I’ve been reading what’s online.

AYR: Some of the real drama was last year. Have you seen the documentary Brooklyn Matters?

SC: Yeah. Again, it’s such an early stage, it’s hard to say exactly what we choose to put in the show, but it may not be the dramatic conflict that was happening when Atlantic Yards got decided. In a way, it’s trying to take, say the way Jane Jacobs describes her neighborhood in her writings, to see if there’s a way to do that in theater.

The Jacobs influence

AYR: Have you read Jacobs recently?

SC: In putting together the plans for this project, I re-read [Death and Life of Great American Cities]. One question that just puzzles me about what’s happening in New York City... As a layperson, the impression I had was that the sort of authoritarian master planning model had its limitations. And the lessons of Jane Jacobs were really valuable to how a city decides how it changes. And what’s happening on the ground is a totally different story.

Looking for the difficulty

AYR: I think you’ll have no trouble finding things interesting, controversial, and difficult.

SC: That’s what we look for. We look for the difficulty.

AYR: Anything you want to add?

SC: It’s certainly good for us that the word will be getting out. Just from the Rockefeller announcement, a few people have been getting in touch with me. But our big Colorado show opens March 8. [Photo]

I've got to finish with the Christians first. After that we have a show in New York called Paris Commune, a historical show [inspired by an actual concert that took place in the overthrown imperial palace during the 1871 revolution], and that opens in early April.

So once I’m done with Colorado and France, I’m going to move forward into Brooklyn.

Before Gehry joined Ratner: "one architect" model was wrong way to go

In February 2002, some months (presumably) before developer Bruce Ratner asked him to work alone on the Atlantic Yards project (and towers over the Atlantic Center mall), architect Frank Gehry suggested that a "one architect" model to build "sections of the city" was precisely the wrong way to go.

The video from the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference has just been posted. Gehry's musings on the issue began at about 12:28, under the "City building" segment.

Not like Rockefeller Center

Gehry said:
The issue of city building in democracy is interesting, because it creates chaos, right? Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other--I mean, it's not that... if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the "one-architect, like the Rockefeller Center model," which is kind of from another era.

Whatever the flaws of Rockefeller Center, it added streets, not subtracted them, as with Atlantic Yards. Gehry in 2005 said of AY, "Normally I would’ve brought in five other architects, but one of the requirements of this client is that I do it."

The question is why he agreed; perhaps the opportunity to build his first arena, and a "neighborhood practically from scratch" trumped Gehry's qualms about the "one architect" model.

The Regional Plan Association, using a somewhat different gloss on the term Gehry used, argued last May that Atlantic Yards shows we must get much better at "city building."

The back story on collaboration

The prelude to Gehry's 2002 remarks on city building regarded plans for a new building at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Gehry explained:
[Art Center President] Richard [Koshalek] wants to add a library and more student stuff. It's a lot of acreage. I convinced him to let me bring another architect, from Portugal, Alvaro Siza.

Interviewer Richard Saul Wurman: Why'd you want that?

Gehry responded:
Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is considered Portugal's main guy, in architecture... His early work has a resemblance to my early work... [He] evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language. I always felt he should come to Southern California and do a building... I like the idea of collaboration with people like that, because it pushes you. I've done it with Claes Oldenburg, and with Richard Serra... It's a richer experience... It's like jazz; you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something.... For me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city.

It sounded promising, and you could imagine Gehry saying the same thing about a mega-project in Brooklyn if he had brought in other architects.

The collaboration with Siza, however, came to an end after three years, Architectural Record reported, because of the long-distance relationship proved too difficult. Gehry's designing the building himself, but construction won't start for at least 18 months, according to the Pasadena Star-News.

City Council bills would cost owners who warehouse property

In November, I wrote about how Boston, unlike New York, has changed tax policies to give owners of vacant or abandoned properties not in tax arrears a reason to sell or build, and how Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer was pushing for new policies in New York.

Now, as the Daily News reported last Wednesday, such empty buildings north of 110th St. would lose a tax break under state law.

Beyond that, according to the Daily News, a City Council bill sponsored by Council Member David Yassky would require "every owner of a vacant lot or residential building to file a notarized registration of his plans and pay an annual fee of up to $5,000 while the property is vacant."

Yassky spokesman Sam Rockwell told me that the Yassky's proposal also would mandated an annual survey of vacant land and lots: "The latter will help the City help landowners avoid fines--with the knowledge gained from the survey, the City can foster affordable housing development and the like in underutilized areas."

Populist City Council Member Tony Avella, according to City Limits, is taking an even harder line, planning a bill that would treat vacant housing as a nuisance and make owners who intentionally keep their land or buildings vacant subject to fines. (Presumably, the criteria will be more clear when the bill's introduced.)

The AY angle

What might such changes have meant for the Atlantic Yards footprint? They would've provided some more revenue to the city, and might have pushed the owners warehousing property to sell or build. And such laws would've provided an alternative to declaring stagnant properties blighted, as the state has determined.

In other words, eminent domain isn't the only tool to revitalize an area that has empty buildings or lots.

On MLK Day, the question of jobs, housing, and infrastructure

Two years ago I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech:
"I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

Well, where do we go from here (to quote the title of a King speech)? On Saturday, in a column headlined Good Jobs Are Where the Money Is, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, taking off from the observation that the gap between rich and poor is ever-growing, observed:
Forget all the CNBC chatter about Fed policy and bargain stocks. For ordinary Americans, jobs are the be-all and end-all. And an America awash in new jobs will require a political environment that respects and rewards work and aggressively pursues creative policies designed to radically expand employment.

I’d start with a broad program to rebuild the American infrastructure. This would have the dual benefit of putting large numbers of people to work and answering a crying need. The infrastructure is in sorry shape. New Orleans comes to mind, and the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

The country that gave us the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe ought to be able, 60 years later, to reconstitute its own sagging infrastructure.

The AY angle

Herbert's point, extrapolated to Brooklyn, is that targeted government investment can turn the tide. The need for jobs and housing is far, far greater than the holy grail of the Atlantic Yards project.

Does Forest City Ratner, which is touting the minority hiring and contracts that are part of the privately-negotiated Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement, really care about minority empowerment and affordable housing, or is it just a cost of doing business, one more than offset by the privately-negotiated zoning bonus?

After all, if the developer wanted to affect policy on affordable housing, it would've used the mailing list it collected at a 2006 affordable housing information session to advocate for other policies beyond AY.

Infrastructure issues

Maybe columnist Herbert knew something was coming. On Saturday, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the creation of Building America’s Future, a non-partisan coalition for federal infrastructure investment, with initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Rendell said, "America’s infrastructure crisis is far broader than bridges and roads. The infrastructure crisis includes the basic necessities communities and businesses need to survive: schools, waterlines, wastewater treatment systems, dams, flood mitigation, hospitals, energy, aviation, rail lines, and ports. This is an issue that crosses party lines and we need significant federal investments now."

Again from the AY angle, renewed investment in infrastructure could lead to more jobs (and thus greater capacity to pay for housing), increased affordable development tied to transit, and also a generally better quality of life all around.

Jane Jacobs coverage collected

12/20/07: The AY omission in the Jane Jacobs exhibit, some contentions, and the lesson of skepticism

12/19/07: The Jane Jacobs exhibit: a worthy reaffirmation but just the start of a longer discussion

12/05/07: Panel on "oversuccess" raises questions about community review, CBAs, gentrification, and AY

12/5/07: Imagine Flatbush, Jane Jacobs, and NIMBYism

12/03/07: Will "absurd" process make Atlantic Yards this generation’s Penn Station?

12/2/07: A neo-Jacobsian take on urbanism: "morphogenesis"

11/29/07: Panel: a stronger public sector might mitigate "oversuccess," but developer reality is scarce

11/7/07: "When the Big Get Bigger": the unresolved challenge of balancing town and gown

11/1/07: A look at the context and legacy of Jane Jacobs--and a swipe at AY

10/26/07: At the Brooklyn Bear's Garden, a Jacobs reminder

10/19/07: Civic activism post-Jane Jacobs: stamina, (AY) "insurgencies," and "retaking our souls"

10/11/07: Designing Public Consensus--it takes a lot more meetings

10/10/07: The "activist press" and the "Atlantic Yards Narrative"

10/9/07: The missing Jane Jacobs chapter in The Power Broker

10/7/07: New York's soul lost? 'New York Calling' fills in some gaps

10/5/07: Jane Jacobs on Kelo; her attorney on post-Kelo legislation

10/4/07: Is New York losing its soul? Sort of, panelists say (and one targets AY)

10/2/07: Vitullo-Martin takes a second look at Jane Jacobs

9/28/07: Jane Jacobs was wrong about a stadium, but Toronto ain't Brooklyn

9/27/07: Would Jane Jacobs approve of AY? One Time Out-ster thinks so

9/26/07: We are all Jacobsian now--but what about process?

9/25/07: UNITY 2007: a new, Jacobsian plan for the Vanderbilt Yard

9/19/07: Jane's Walks coming in two weeks, including one on AY

9/14/07: "Listening to the City" and Atlantic Yards

9/11/07: Atlantic Yards through a Jacobsian lens

9/7/07: Coming: the Jane Jacobs exhibit and discussions; AY gets some notice

8/19/07: Superblocks, a massacre in Newark, and Jane Jacobs

8/2/07: Vito Lopez invokes Jane Jacobs, says New Domino should be scaled down

7/28/07: On complex land-use choices and "land monopoly"

5/25/07: Critic Goldberger: post-Moses era represents failure to plan

5/9/07: Reconsiderations of Jane Jacobs lead inevitably to Atlantic Yards musings

5/7/07: What the Village Voice was to the Washington Square battle, the blogs are to Atlantic Yards

4/26/07: At Glazer talk on modernism, AY is poster child for too much density

4/14/07: Robert Moses, transportation, and the question of Atlantic Yards

3/6/07: Jane Jacobs, Atlantic Yards, and "the age of marketing"

2/15/07: Spin city #1: Burden calls AY “a gaping hole in the heart of Brooklyn”

2/11/07: Moses revisionism, Jane Jacobs, the BQE, and the Promenade

2/1/07: "Time to build again," as Moses controversy gets airing

1/15/07: Times profile of planning chair Burden maintains AY myth, suffers curious cut

1/6/07: Brooklyn Matters: race, class, and the Atlantic Yards debate, on film

10/12/06: Planning Chair Burden claims Jacobsian mantle, discards it for AY

9/3/06: The more things change... (Jacobs on public hearings)

7/2/06: Critic Goldberger calls AY a corruption of Jacobsian "mixed-use"

6/2/06: Rereading Ouroussoff on AY and Gehry: reinventing Brooklyn or flawed process?

5/18/06: Raising hell? Allan Temko and the "foxes" critiquing architecture today

5/8/06: DDDB's new advisory board, Jane Jacobs, & "angry blogs"

4/30/06: A veiled defense of Atlantic Yards? The Times's Ouroussoff on "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs"

4/30/06: What would Jane Jacobs say? Disingenuousness & Atlantic Yards

4/27/06: Atlantic Yards out of place in "New Downtowns" discussion

3/7/06: Historic preservation, the legacy of Robert Moses, and the enduring lessons of urbanism

Jane Jacobs medals, Year 2 nominations

The Rockefeller Foundation will be accepting nominations for the 2008 Jane Jacobs Medal on its web site through February 1. As the announcement states, "The 2008 Rockefeller Foundation Jane Jacobs Medals will recognize two living individuals whose creative vision for the urban environment has significantly contributed to the vibrancy and variety of New York City."

As I wrote when covering the inaugural dinner honoring Barry Benepe and Omar Freilla, it seems that "we are all Jacobsian now," given the widespread attendance of city leaders. However, we're not, and even Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff now acknowledges misgivings about the Atlantic Yards process.

Regarding Atlantic Yards, as I wrote regarding the Jane Jacobs & the Future of New York exhibit, I think the most enduring Jacobsian legacy is, as Paul Goldberger suggested in another context, a "model for skepticism."

The "Free Lunch" for sports team owners and the starving of parks

In an interview yesterday on Democracy Now, New York Times writer David Cay Johnston described the country's subsidies for sports teams--though he didn't mention the Nets/Atlantic Yards--that he criticizes in his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill).

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck—you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.

The new owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team in Washington, D.C., paid $450 million for the team. But, in fact, they got the team for free, because the subsidy they’re getting for the new stadium is worth $611 million. We actually paid these people to buy the team.

Note that Bruce Ratner and partners paid $300 million to buy the New Jersey Nets and the direct subsidies for Atlantic Yards--not all for the arena--total $305 million, and the indirect subsidies and tax breaks total much, much more.

Starving public parks

JOHNSTON: Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that’s astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.

If you go to England and you want to start a soccer team, they have to let you join the soccer league. There are thirteen commercial soccer teams in the London area. New York City, the biggest city in the country, there are two baseball teams, because there’s no free entry into the market. In Los Angeles, there’s no football team. And the owners use this power to prevent others from owning teams, to prevent municipal governments from owning teams, to prevent nonprofits from owning teams, to extract money from the taxpayers to build them new stadiums.

At the same time that we’re doing this, we are starving our public parks for money. And I show in Free Lunch how the rise of urban gangs and now suburban gangs is connected to this. We used to have all sorts of programs in this country after World War II for young men and young women on Saturdays and during the summer and school holidays, where even if you didn’t have any money—didn’t matter that your parents didn’t have any money, because—and I know this because I did it as a child—you could go to any one of a half-dozen different places, and there were organized activities to keep you out of trouble. After all, idle hands are the devil’s workshop is not exactly a radical new idea. Well, we’ve cut and cut and cut those programs to fund two different subsidies: one to sports teams’ owners, one that goes to Tyco, General Electric, Honeywell and some other big companies. And, lo and behold, we’ve had a big rise in urban violence because of the vacuum being filled by young people who no longer have these organized activities.

Then again, a privately-owned sports arena within Atlantic Yards, named for Barclays Capital, would provide opportunity for (paid) amusement and thus qualify as "recreational," according to Justice Joan Madden's January 11 decision.

TRO denied regarding environmental lawsuit; will appeal be expedited?

In an unsurprising decision, a state appellate judge yesterday denied a temporary restraining order (TRO) to block the closure of the Carlton Avenue Bridge sought by the petitioners in the lawsuit challenging the Atlantic Yards environmental review. As part of the appeal of Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden's January 11 decision, the petitioners have asked for a TRO and preliminary injunction to block this "permanent change in the environment of Brooklyn including significant impacts on traffic and significant delays for Fire Department emergency responders."

Should work begin, and petitioners ultimately succeed with their appeal, it's possible that there won't be a working bridge nor adequate funding to reconstruct it, argued petitioners' attorney Jeffrey Baker. Forest City Ratner has argued in the past that any delay increases the cost of the project and delays the expected benefits.

Associate Justice Angela M. Mazzarelli of the Appellate Division, First Department, denied the request, pending a hearing on a motion for an injunction to block the project from moving forward without a final decision on the lawsuit, according to Candace Carponter, legal chair of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. The burden was high, since the petitioners must argue irreparable injury and the likelihood of prevailing on the merits.

"The only way to preserve our rights is to file these motions," she said.

But isn't the issue in some ways moot, given that the TRO was denied, and work on the bridge is supposed to begin January 23? It seems so, but Carponter said maybe not, given that the work has already been delayed a week.

Appeal schedule

Carponter said that the defendants, including the Empire State Development Corporation and Forest City Ratner, will by next Friday file a motion for an expedited appeal, asking that the appellate court arguments be heard in the next few months rather than in September, which Carponter said would be the usual schedule.

The final volley of papers regarding the expedited appeal and the request for a stay is due February 5.

Exhibit opening: (De)Construction of the Neighborhood

Photographer Tracy Collins has been steadily tracing the incremental changes in and around the Atlantic Yards footprint, marking the transition between urban landscape and "urban room."

An exhibit of his work, drawn from (and presumably beyond) his book, (De)Construction of the Neighborhood, will open at 7 pm on Thursday, January 24 at Tamboril Latin Restaurant Bar Lounge, 527 Myrtle Avenue between Grand and Steuben, a block north of the Pratt Institute.

The ESDC's blight dodge: living "among" but not "in" unsanitary conditions

The text from state Supreme Court Joan Madden's decision January 11 (right), as posted by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), pointed me to a curious locution used by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC): "most of the residents in the area continue to live among conditions that are unsanitary and unsafe."
(Emphasis added)

That deserves a closer look, since I and many others apparently ignored the linguistic switch from "in" to "among."

The primary definition of "among," according to the dictionary, means In the midst of; surrounded by. But the blight conditions cited by the ESDC in the passage quoted do not surround any residences.

Indeed, DDDB, in its response to the ESDC's Blight Study commented:
And there is no evidence anywhere in the entire Blight Study that residents of the study area live among unsanitary and unsafe conditions. That assertion is laughable, had the compilers of this Blight Study bothered to talk with residents of the footprint site they would have found not one who would say they live in unsanitary and unsafe conditions.
(Emphases added)

I asked attorney George Locker, who represents rent-stabilized tenants in two buildings in the Atlantic Yards footprint, about the conditions of those apartments. "The general condition is satisfactory," he responded. "There's certainly nothing unsanitary. The most important thing is they live in structurally sound buildings." Their biggest complaint? "The environment is inhospitable," he said, citing construction noise. "That's really affecting them." (The tenants are involved in two lawsuits challenging aspects of the project.)

What the ESDC said

Let's look at Section B of the Blight Study. The ESDC wrote:
Comparing conditions in Photographs F and G with conditions depicted in Photographs H and I further illustrates the progress in removing blight from ATURA north of Atlantic Avenue compared to continued unsanitary conditions and underutilization of the properties south of Atlantic Avenue immediately adjacent to ATURA. Photographs F and G depict streets and buildings that are typical to the revitalized areas of ATURA north of Atlantic Avenue.

Photograph F shows some of the recently completed multi-family housing administered by the New York City Housing Partnership (left) and the eastern façade of the Atlantic Center mall (right). The bridge that crosses the rail yard between Blocks 1119 and 1120 is visible in the picture’s background. Photograph G shows more recently constructed multi-family housing at the corner of Fulton Street and Carlton Avenue, one block north of Atlantic Avenue.

Note that, in Photograph F, the eastern façade of the Atlantic Center mall, an anti-urban blank wall, is hardly the sign of a thriving neighborhood. Planner (and DDDB advisory board member) Ron Shiffman has described the mall as the "only pre-existing blighting influence" in the area around the footprint. And as I observed, it's built to less than 60% of the allowable development rights, an indication of blight, according to the ESDC's standard as applied to the AY footprint.

(Click on the map at bottom to see the block numbers.)

Below Atlantic Avenue

The Blight Study continued:
In contrast, as illustrated by Photographs H and I, the blocks south of Atlantic Avenue host a combination of vacant, underutilized, and physically deteriorating structures and vacant lots, and are lined with cracked and crumbling sidewalks that are overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash. Photograph H shows the fenced rail yard and deteriorated sidewalk to the right (Block 1121, lot 1) and an old warehouse building (Block 1129, lot 25) to the left.

Note that the Blight Study does not deal with who might be responsible for the deteriorated sidewalk and the weeds. (More on that below.) Certainly these are not the conditions in (or even among) which residents live, since there's no housing on the north side of Pacific Street.

As for the "old warehouse building," that's the Ward Bakery, which developer Shaya Boymelgreen (who developed the nearby Newswalk) was said to have considered for a hotel, but instead made a quick killing by selling it to Forest City Ratner for more than double what he paid.

The Blight Study continued:
Further west along that same block, Photograph I shows the fenced rail yard to the right and a primarily vacant warehouse building (Block 1129, lot 13) to the left. In the background of the picture, beyond lot 13, is a market rate condominium building (Newswalk), which is not part of the proposed project site. Other market rate condominium buildings in the immediate vicinity include: 618 Dean Street on the south side of Dean Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues (not part of the project site) and 636 Pacific Street and 24 6th Avenue (part of the proposed project site).

That primarily vacant warehouse building, however, is in excellent shape, and owner Henry Weinstein has said he wanted to convert it into housing.

Market-rate condos

The Blight Study continued:
The proximity of these market-rate condo buildings to the blighted properties profiled in this study indicates that, although some isolated redevelopment has occurred on blocks just south of the ATURA boundary, most of the residents in this area continue to live among conditions that are unsanitary and unsafe.
(Emphasis added)

The value of perspective

The Blight Study continued:
Photograph J, taken from the north side of Atlantic Avenue looking south over the rail yard on Block 1119, again demonstrates the contrast between redevelopment of ATURA north of Atlantic Avenue and continuing blighted conditions to the south of Atlantic Avenue, particularly along Pacific Street adjacent to the rail yard. Photograph J illustrates the relative underutilization of the Block 1119 and the physically deteriorating buildings that lie just south of the ATURA boundary. The contrast between the blocks shown in the photograph and the blocks north of Atlantic Avenue (at the photographer’s back), which include a revitalized mixed-use neighborhood within the ATURA boundary, is remarkable.

What's remarkable is the perspective of Photograph J. The "relative underutilization of [sic] the Block 1119" is bogus, since that block is a working railyard. Were it to be used differently, a new railyard would have to be constructed and a rezoning (or override of zoning) be accomplished.

As for Block 1127 below it, only the three or four buildings in the left side of the picture are actually on that block, while the buildings in the right side of the picture are active retail buildings along Flatbush Avenue.

The photo at right shows another perspective on Flatbush Avenue, as well as the clearing of adjacent Block 1118 by Forest City Ratner. Note that it's an "AAA prime" "development site." (You can see the "Furniture House" sign in both this and the above photo.)

Punting on blight

The real question is who was responsible for the "unsanitary and unsafe conditions" among which people live.

As I wrote in November 2006, several people commented to the ESDC, saying the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) should be blamed for failing to take care of the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard.

In response, the ESDC punted, ignoring the question of responsibility:
Chapter 1, “Project Description,” and Chapter 3, “Land Use, Zoning, and Public Policy,” describe in detail the present condition of the project site, including the Vanderbilt Yard.

And what if the railyards, despite the designation as part of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, aren't actually blighted, as I wrote, but an active use--and, it should be added, a very valuable site for development.

Indeed, it is not "unsanitary" or "unsafe" conditions that lead to indicia of blight in the map above, but rather underutilization, as with this gas station. (Or are these cracks in the sidewalk unsafe?)

Flashbacks from the quiz: Gargano, Stuckey, Marty

The best part of the Atlantic Yards Quiz last night was the segment with audio samples, thus bringing us:
--Empire State Development Corporation Chairman Charles Gargano, halting and evasive on the Brian Lehrer Show regarding "friendly condemnations"
--Forest City Ratner executive Jim Stuckey, also on the Brian Lehrer Show, declaring, in defense of the company's pursuit of profit, "It is, after all, America"
--and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, in an interview with the Brooklyn Paper, asserting that Atlantic Yards opponents "feel that Atlantic Yards is more important than the issue of Osama Bin Laden and terrorism."

At Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook, quizmaster Scott Turner replayed the 15-item audio round and offered well-timed running commentary. There could have been another 15 more memorable samples.

Results

Oh, though I was favored to win, I came in second by a point to a strong five-person team associated with NoLandGrab: Lumi Rolley, Eric McClure, Amy Greer, Steve Soblick, and Geoff Zink. (Credit the hive mind and the free drinks served at the event I attended before the quiz.) The Brooklyn Paper team came in tied for third.

The "other" AY lawsuits might take a year to resolve

While two legal cases (federal and state) organized by Atlantic Yards opponent Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn have gotten the most attention recently, two lawsuits filed by 13 tenants (12 in rent-stabilized housing) in the AY footprint may take another year to resolve, even though both have been dismissed by state appellate courts.

On 11/9/07, the Appellate Division, Second Department, upheld the Empire State Development Corporation's relocation plan for the tenants, who would be displaced by project construction. Yesterday we learned that, on January 9, the court denied permission to appeal to the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court.

However, attorney George Locker said that he will pursue an alternate path and file the same motion before the Court of Appeals, which chooses cases on a discretionary basis. "I expect that the state's highest court will see the public importance of the issues presented and that it will elect to address them," he said.

If the Court of Appeals does take the case, that would take a year, he estimated.

Meanwhile, Forest City Ratner issued a press release saluting the decision, calling the plaintiffs "project opponents" (they're not supporters, but they're not associated with the official opposition) and declaring, “This is the second time in less than a week that the courts have decided in favor of the Atlantic Yards project." Most press coverage followed Forest City Ratner's take.

Condemnation

If the Court of Appeals chooses not to hear the case, the next step would be for ESDC to move in Brooklyn Supreme Court for a vesting proceeding, to take title from Forest City Ratner and transfer it to ESDC, extinguishing the rent-stabilized leases.

"When they commence it, we will oppose it," Locker said, and will bring up an argument that was previously dismissed as inappropriately filed: that the demolition of a building with rent-stabilized tenants must go through much slower procedures of the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which oversees rent-regulated buildings.

"I think it'll take a year before that's resolved," Locker said. "There will be motions, hearings, briefings, and there will be an appeal. And that doesn't count that fact that people have to be relocated, according to the law."

Then again, Locker acknowledged that the case is not as political as the litigation driven by groups opposing the project. "My group has always been prepared to resolve this," he said. "We're just not prepared to be bulldozed."

Demolition coming

Meanwhile, the ESDC has stated that abatement is complete at 626 Pacific Street and demolition will be under way this week or next. That low-slung building is adjacent to 624 Pacific Street, where, in June 2006, tenants were rudely awakened by the improper use of a backhoe, rather than hand tools, for demolition of an adjacent within this two week period.

(In the photo above, 624 Pacific is the four-story building and 626 Pacific is adjacent at left. Copyright David Gochfeld.)

Locker, who represents those tenants, said he has put the ESDC on notice that new demolitions must be conducted safely. He said ESDC attorneys said the agency was on notice, and that the environmental monitor named last May was alerted to the issue.

"I consider it a form of harassment," Locker said of the planned demolition. "If you can't begin your project without both buildings down, does it really make sense to go through all the effort to take down 626, when it's right next to 624 and people live there. Why push it--to save a couple of hours in the future? It can only be interpreted as a sign of force."

(Photo of 626 Pacific from February 2007.)

The Atlantic Yards quiz, tonight

The announcement:
Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz and Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn host: QUIZ DON'T DESTROY
A special night of knowledge about the Atlantic Yards project
Thursday, January 17, 8:00 p.m., free
Rocky Sullivan's of Red Hook
34 Van Dyke Street (at Dwight Street).

For four years, the spectre of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards skyscrapers and arena have dominated Brooklyn. On January 17th, those who've paid attention can be handsomely rewarded. Come to Rocky Sullivan's of Red Hook for a special edition of Quizmaster Scott M.X. Turner's weekly Pub Quiz.

Bring a team -- family, friends, co-workers, your community group. Compete against teams from local and city wide newspapers.

Prizes galore!

Here's what Matthew Schuerman, then of the New York Observer, predicted: "Word is, Norman Oder could play with one arm tied behind his back--and still win!"

After being named the favorite by the Observer, how could I not compete?

Appellate judge's recusal may be good news for AY eminent domain plaintiffs

Though they didn't say so explicitly, plaintiffs in the Atlantic Yards eminent domain case had to be pleased to learn that U.S. District Judge Edward Korman, the most skeptical member of a three-judge panel who last October 9 heard the appeal after the case had been dismissed, recused himself from the case.

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), which organized the lawsuit and whose spokesman, Daniel Goldstein, is lead plaintiff, issued a press release yesterday stating that Korman had recused himself. Though no formal reason was stated, Korman did in court offhandedly mention that he'd received an Atlantic Yards mailer “some years ago” and responded in the affirmative.

(It’s not clear what mailing he got, but I wrote that it could have been this May 2004 flier, and DDDB assumes as much in its press release, noting that it's believed that respondents got a tote bag and a voucher for two Nets tickets. Click to enlarge.)

Two judges divided?

DDDB's press release stated, "Pursuant to the rules of the Court, the two remaining members of the three-judge panel may request a replacement judge at their discretion, but must request a replacement judge if they do not agree on how to decide the appeal."

Does that mean that the remaining judges, Robert A. Katzmann and Debra Ann Livingston, are divided? We don't know.

Plaintiffs' attorney Matthew Brinckerhoff told me, "After the recusal, the two remaining judges could have decided the appeal on their own without a replacement provided they both agreed on the disposition and were not otherwise inclined to ask for a replacement judge."

That leaves open the option that they sought a replacement judge for reasons of legitimacy rather than disagreement. Indeed, Brinckerhoff in the press release said the addition was "indicative of the integrity of this court and a sign of the seriousness with which the court is addressing these issues."

New oral argument?

Korman has been replaced on the panel by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs. The plaintiffs last week asked for a new oral argument before the reconstituted panel, given that Jacobs wasn't present at the previous hearing. (Presumably, he does have access to the transcript.)

Brinckerhoff said he couldn't estimate the likelihood of a new argument. "Because replacements are rare, and a new argument is discretionary and it logistically requires the three judges to assemble for a special session, it's basically impossible to handicap, but I suspect it will be primarily Chief Judge Jacobs' call as the new member (and the Chief)," he said.
(Update: a new argument was denied.)

Korman's skepticism

"I have no reason to doubt that Judge Korman would have decided our appeal fairly and impartially, notwithstanding any issues created by his response to Ratner's propaganda campaign," Brinckerhoff said in the press release, echoing comments he made after the court hearing in October.

Still, it was clear that Korman seemed skeptical of the plaintiffs' case, and he's a Brooklynite who remembers the Dodgers. Then again, skepticism from the bench, as exemplified by state Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden's demeanor in court last May on the lawsuit challenging the environmental review, does not necessarily translate into a result, as Madden's decision last Friday showed.

But it's a good bet that, sometime after Korman's rather offhand and last-minute statement from the bench in court last October, the issue of what exactly he'd done--and how it appeared--became a lot clearer to the judge and his colleagues.

From $6 million to $120+ million: Newswalk and the evidence against stagnation

How much has Brooklyn changed? On January 4, I pointed out a dramatic shift since the production of the documentary A Walk Around Brooklyn in 2000. The Empire State Development Corporation seems to think that the zone bordering the Metropolitan Transportation's Vanderbilt Yard would be stagnant absent the Atlantic Yards project, and state Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden didn't disagree.

The story of the luxury Newswalk building in Prospect Heights offers some useful context; in an interview taped 03/28/06 for Michael Stoler's CUNY-TV show BuildingNY, Shaya Boymelgreen, then partner in Leviev Boymelgreen, discussed how he paid $6 million for the former Daily News printing plant less than a decade earlier.

The dialogue begins at approximately 17:13.

Getting a deal

MS: And now, 1997, the market is changing, the world is changing, and Shaya Boymelgreen leaves the Avenue B and the Williamsburg, and decides to buy the Daily News building on Pacific Street in Brooklyn. How did you decide to buy a 500,000 square foot building and convert it to residential condominiums?

SB: I think, at that time, we have a niche to buy not in the center of the city, not in the center of the prime places, because [of] lack of money, and I saw an opportunity in this building--this building went for six million dollars, half a million square foot, for six million dollars.

MS: It went for basically eleven dollars a foot.

SB: Something like that. And I said, there's no way, we can make, from this piece of glass, we can make a gem, we can make a diamond out of it.

The location

MS: You were right near Flatbush Avenue, you were right in the heart of Downtown Brooklyn, in an area that today is Atlantic Yards, that Bruce Ratner is planning to build this stadium and everything else. And you--it took chutzpah and a combination of confidence--

The area is neither Downtown Brooklyn nor Atlantic Yards, but the footprint is carved around the Newswalk building, which occupies a good chunk of the block between Pacific and Dean streets and Sixth and Carlton avenues.The foresight of a deal

SB: Y'know, the people that bought from the Daily News bought it for three million dollars. When I met them, they didn't know if to sell it or not to sell it. And I saw what I can do from this building. It was just a fortune, no windows, just one big manufacturing building, with all this big machinery... And I came to them and I said... they said that they're not sure if they want to sell it or not... I said, y'know what, I'll give you six million dollars.

MS: So they paid three million?

SB: They paid three. I knew they have somebody talking to them about five million dollars. And if I'll offer five and half, they'll go to six... it's going to go into an auction... I say, I'll give you six million dollars and I'll buy the property. I saw the face--very surprised. They said they need a minute with themself. They walked out, they came back, they said: are you ready to give us half a million dollars tomorrow morning? I said yes. In the morning I was there with half a million dollars, and we wrote a contract.

Long process

MS: How long did it take you to redevelop the News building?

SB: A year and a half just to demo and to take out all the printing machines. It was huge, huge, thirty machines--each machine was a building by itself... At the same time I was changing the zoning. The zoning change took two and a half years...

Note that the ESDC had said that, "While the City, if it desired, could rezone the project site, it has not."

MS: So when did the first tenant move in?

SB: I believe in 1999 a tenant was moving in.

Some history

I wrote in March 2006 about the history of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA). The Daily News built a printing plant on Dean Street in 1927. In 1983, as the Times reported in an 11/27/83 article headlined “The Intricacies of Initiating Development Projects,” city officials helped the newspaper add parking space and a new 15,000-square-foot warehouse, despite complaints from neighbors.

The plant closed, however, at the end of 1996, as the newspaper moved its printing operations to a more modern facility in New Jersey. The building was a haven for squatters for several years. Boymelgreen bought the building and converted it into the luxury Newswalk condominium complex, which opened in 2002 (as opposed to 1999, according to clips I saw).

And why wasn't it included in the Atlantic Yards site plan? As the Village Voice noted in a 4/5/04 article, “But if Ratner could design around Newswalk, he could have spared other properties as well.” (The building has about 170 units, according to the Voice article.)

Likely the cost of buying out all the owners was deemed too high, and the rest of the block had more structures in good condition than the rest of the footprint, so it would be hard to argue blight. Then again, the new construction on the same block also challenges the notion that Atlantic Yards is needed to arrest neighborhood decline.

The cost today

Here's a Newswalk unit that was on sale for $635,000 in September.

Some units, I'm sure, are much more expensive, but, to be conservative, let's estimate $700,000 as the average value of the 170 units. That adds up to a valuation of...nearly $120 million. Nice work, given that, as Judge Madden ruled that "blight conditions documented in the Blight Study... provided a rational basis for the ESDC's conclusion that continued new development on the project site was unlikely."

The dubious crime statistics and the missing cloud over the AY court case

State Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden's dismissal Friday of the case challenging the Atlantic Yards environmental review seemed like a slam dunk for the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) and other defendants.

However, as I wrote, regarding the dubious claims of increased crime in the project footprint, Madden simply punted, stating that "since the incidence of crime is just one of the factors in determining blight... petitioners' arguments as to the accuracy of the crime statistics need not be addressed."

But what if she had tried to assess that factor in the state's claims of blight? That might have led, if not to a full unraveling of the defense case, at least the start of a cloud--potentially, a large cloud--over its legitimacy, notably the Blight Study.

(It was attached to the General Project Plan, however, the ESDC, which responded in detail to challenges to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, before approval of the project, did not respond in detail to the Blight Study.)

Any intellectually honest analysis would've concluded that the crime claims were dubious, if not bogus, as I explained in July 2006. Community Board 2 commented: The crime statistics in the DEIS are misrepresented and cannot be used honestly as evidence of blight.

Lawsuit claim and response

The lawsuit stated (p. 51, # 269):
The Blight Study's section on crime is factually erroneous, relying on data from only a small portion of the Project site already within the ATURA and failing to provide any factual support for the claim that crime in the Project site as a whole is greater than crime in the surrounding area.

The ESDC's one-word response (p. 118): Denied.

In comments to the Public Authorities Control Board in December 2006, after the ESDC board approved the EIS and the General Project Plan, the ESDC sidestepped a response to the claims about crime.

The judge's options

As we know, Madden decided not to even analyze the debate about crime. Given that she had eight months to write the decision, and that laypeople can find the flaws in the crime claims, it would not have been that difficult for the judge to declare doubts about that element of blight.

Thus, Madden could have given some credence to the petitioners' claims that the incidence of blight was overstated, while still affirming that the footprint was blighted.

Or maybe it would have led Madden to rethink her statement that the "blight conditions documented in the Blight Study... provided a rational basis for the ESDC's conclusion that continued new development on the project site was unlikely."

Stagnant Prospect Heights?

Remember, the petitioners contended--based on newspaper articles (here's the latest from the New York Times real estate section) and citations of recent and new development--that the project footprint and environs was undergoing redevelopment. The ESDC called that claim speculative.

It didn't get cleared up in court. “OK, let’s compare our analysis to the market analysis they did,” commented petitioners' attorney Jeffrey Baker sardonically in court last May. “Sorry, I can’t. They never did.”

Remember, Department of City Planning official Winston von Engel said in March 2006 that the city had not tried to market the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard. And a year later, Chuck Ratner of parent Forest City Enterprises offered his own off-the-cuff market analysis, calling the project footprint "a great piece of real estate."

Rereading the AY court decision: could "Shoot the Freak" also be a "civic project"?

Let's take another look at one of the central challenges to the Atlantic Yards environmental review dismissed Friday by state Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden, the issue of whether Atlantic Yards would, in fact be a "civic project," 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.”

The petitioners--26 neighborhood and community groups--argued that a for-profit sports arena wasn't a civic project. The defendants--the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), developer Forest City Ratner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the Public Authorities Control Board-- said the arena will "provide a venue for other entertainment and cultural events."

Madden concluded that going to a basketball game is "recreational" under the Urban Development Corporation Act (UDCA). But that conclusion strains logic, since almost anything could be "recreational" under her analysis.

Community events not the issue

The "civic project" discussion begins on p. 26 of her decision. First, she dismissed the notion that opening the arena for some ten community events a year qualifies it as a "civic project." She wrote:
In determining the "civic project" issue, the court will focus on the question as presented by petitioners, i.e., whether an arena primarily intended for use by a professional basketball team and operated by a private, profit-making entity, qualifies as a "civic project" within the meaning of the UDCA. As to the civic benefits alleged by the ESDC and quoted above, the commitment as to those uses for ten events a year is de minimus when compared with the primary use of the arena by the Nets, and thus, does not impact on the determination of this issue.

How to interpret statutes

Madden then began a roundabout trip to the dictionary:
In any case of statutory interpretation, the starting point must be the language itself which is the clearest indicator of legislative intent, and if the language is unambiguous, the court must give effect to its plain meaning... When, as here, the term does not have a controlling statutory definition, courts "construe words of ordinary import with their usual and commonly understood meaning, and in that connection have regarded dictionary definitions as 'useful guideposts' in determining the meaning of a word or phrase." [citation omitted]

Well, the language may be the starting point, but it is not necessarily controlling. There are numerous techniques and theories of statutory interpretation; consider the use of legislative history, among multiple examples in the book Legislation and Statutory Interpretation.

Did the state legislators who in 1968, on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral, passed the Urban Development Corporation Act "to rebuild slums," as the New York Times put it, intend to support such an arena?

Doubtful, though then again, they probably didn't intend to have the extraordinary powers of eminent domain and zoning overrides to be delegated to a business development authority, which the Urban Development Corporation became, when it later took began to operate as the ESDC. And no one's challenged that switch.

Defining recreational

Madden continued:
The court must determine the meaning of the word "recreational" as used in the UDCA's definition of "civic project," which includes a project "designed and intended for providing facilities for... recreational... purposes."... Although the UDCA does not define "recreational," it cannot be reasonably disputed that this is a word of "ordinary import" which must be construed in accordance with its usual and commonly understood meaning. [citation omitted] Turning to the dictionary for guidance, the word "recreational" is the adjectival form of "recreation," which the American Heritage College Dictionary defines as "refreshment of one's body or mind through activity that amuses or stimulates; play. [citation omitted] Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language defines "recreation" as "1. refreshment in body or mind, as after work, by some form of play, amusement, or relaxation 2. any form of play, amusement, or relaxation used for this purpose, as games, sports, hobbies, etc."

Applying this definition, the sports arena portion of the Project, which is primarily intended to serve as the home of the Nets basketball franchise, is a facility designed and intended for recreational purposes, as when sports fans attend a professional basketball game, like any other sporting event, they are engaged in a form of amusement, and the fact they enjoy the amusement as spectators does not alter their recreational character. [citation omitted] Thus, as a venue for professional sports events, the arena qualifies as a facility designed and intended for "recreational purposes," and as such constitutes a "civic project" as defined under the UDCA.
(Emphasis added)

Passive recreation and amusement today

While it might be reasonable to think that "recreational" meant opportunities for active recreation, let's take Madden at her word and consider what other forms of amusement today might qualify as "recreational" and thus be eligible, at least theoretically, to serve as "civic projects."

How about Freddy's Bar & Backroom, slated to be demolished for Atlantic Yards? Or, perhaps Privilege New York, home of the lap dance? Or, finally, a venue where spectatorship, participation, and mob psychology meld, a downscale Brooklyn classic beloved even by patrician Department of City Planning Chair Amanda Burden: Coney Island's Shoot the Freak.

(Photo from Bridge and Tunnel Club.)

After eight months, state judge dismisses challenge to AY environmental review

Yesterday, Atlantic Yards opponents suffered a significant setback as a lawsuit challenging the environmental review for the project was dismissed by a state judge. Such lawsuits regarding projects in New York State are always longshots, given the discretion courts give to the reviewing agency, but Atlantic Yards opponents were hopeful after Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden seemed skeptical in court last May of some defenses offered in the case known as Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn vs. Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).

Madden's delay in ruling--she initially estimated she'd take four to six weeks, then predicted September--also gave some reason for optimism, though the best conclusion was simply that she was dealing with a voluminous record. (The administrative record provided by the ESDC was 22,754 pages in 38 volumes, according to her decision.)

Yesterday, however, little more than one business day before the closing and reconstruction of the Carlton Avenue Bridge--clearly a "fact on the ground" difficult to reverse and one involving significant city resources--Madden dismissed all the claims filed by DDDB and 25 co-petitioners, some of them broad-based organizations, others block associations.

Developer Forest City Ratner issued a statement quoting Bruce Ratner: “After an exhaustive three-year review process, we are continuing to move full speed ahead on the project, and today’s decision is a significant step forward.” The defendants, along with the ESDC and FCR included the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB).

ESDC issued a statement: “For the fourth time, a court has affirmed the state’s actions in the Atlantic Yards project. We are very pleased with Justice Madden’s decision and look forward to construction of the arena, housing and other facets of this important, transformative development project.” Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz also was pleased.

Appeal coming?

DDDB tried to put the best face on the decision, with spokesman Daniel Goldstein stating, "We are disappointed by the court’s ruling. Pending review of the decision we plan to appeal. But let’s be clear: Atlantic Yards cannot move forward while the thirteen plaintiffs—homeowners, business owners and tenants—are in federal court in a separate case challenging New York State’s unconstitutional use of eminent domain. We expect to prevail in that lawsuit, as well as on the appeal of today’s decision."

However, if it's rare to succeed on state lawsuits challenging environmental review, the same is true on appeal, despite potential flaws in the judge's decision, some mentioned below. The appeal of the federal eminent domain case was heard in October, with the three-judge panel often skeptical of the plaintiffs.

[Here's brief coverage from the Post and the Daily News, and somewhat more from the Times.]

Slight nods, and some punts

While in the decision, Madden at times acknowledged that, had the defendants complied with some of the plaintiffs' concerns, it might have been better public policy, she stressed that the role of the courts in reviewing such decisions was limited.

And in one instance, regarding the dubious claims of increased crime in the project footprint, she simply punted, stating that "since the incidence of crime is just one of the factors in determining blight... petitioners' arguments as to the accuracy of the crime statistics need not be addressed." In another instance, she didn't address the petitioners' argument that the ESDC didn't respond to extensive comments on the Blight Study.

Also, she exhibited some odd logic in concluding that because the site is blighted, this project is necessary to remove such conditions, given that a rezoning could also do the trick.

However, her decision was mostly unbending. "Judicial review of administrative proceedings, including an agency's compliance with SEQRA [State Environmental Quality Review Act, enacted in 1975] and the UDCA [Urban Development Corporation Act, which in 1968 established what is now called the ESDC], is limited to whether the determination was made in accordance with lawful procedure and whether, substantively, the determination 'was affected by an error of law or was arbitrary and capricious or an abuse of discretion,'" she wrote. "The court is not permitted to second-guess the agency."

While the petitioners argued that the MTA had not complied sufficiently with SEQRA and the PACB had not complied at all, Madden found that the MTA had compiled a record and that the PACB, which was limited to assessing the financial feasibility of the project, was not required to do more.

Public comment period

The petitioners argued that the ESDC should have left the comment period open beyond September 29, 2006 (extended from September 22) because the law requires that comments be received for 30 days after a public hearing--and that the two "community forums" (my reports on the first and second forum) held after the raucous 8/23/06 hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement were essentially public hearings.

While the ESDC followed the same procedure regarding public comment--indeed, the hearing examiner enforced a three-minute time limit that was not enforced at the public hearing--the agency claimed that, because there was no formal presentation of information at the beginning of the session, there was a difference. (The formal presentation was largely ignored at the public hearing, as it happened.)

Madden called the petitioners' arguments "not persuasive," given that, had the ESDC not scheduled the optional community forums, the 30-day limit wouldn't have been challenged. (Then again, had the ESDC not scheduled the forums, the public hearing, at which many were turned away and some local officials--among them Shirley McRae of Community Board 2--said was managed unfairly, would've stood as the single opportunity for public comment on the DEIS.)

"[E]ven if no precedent exists for holding a community forum, nothing in the statute precludes the ESDC from giving the public additional time or opportunities to comment on a project, either in writing or in person," wrote Madden. "Here, the ESDC has essentially expanded the role of the written comment."

So the ESDC action was lawful, Madden concluded, then offered a small concession: "Notwithstanding this conclusion, the court fully appreciates petitioners' position that in view of [the] magnitude of the Atlantic Yards Project and the controversy it has engendered, additional public hearings and an extended public comment period would have increased public scrutiny and participation in the process."

Community Advisory Committee

A Community Advisory Committee (CAC), which Atlantic Yards Ombudsman Forrest Taylor indicated on Tuesday would be made more representative, is required of ESDC projects, but the petitioners argued that the CAC did not play a meaningful role, since three of the six members (from the city, ESDC, and Brooklyn Borough President's Office) were project supporters. (The other three came from Community Boards 2, 6, & 8.) Moreover, the committee didn't meet until 6/29/06 and could not have much impact, they said. And the three members from the CBs asked for more time.

The judge, however, pointed out that the statute "imposes no prescriptions as to the composition of the committee, or the time or stage in the planning process when the committee should be established."

Again, she offered a slight nod to concerns: "Thus, while it may have been preferable to have established the Community Advisory Committee at earlier stage in the process," the law was controlling.

A "Civic Project"?

One of the major points of contention at the hearing last May was whether Atlantic Yards would, in fact be a "civic project," 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.”

The petitioners argued that a for-profit sports arena wasn't a civic project. The defendants said the arena will "provide a venue for other entertainment and cultural events."

The question, though, was whether going to a basketball game is a "recreational" event. Madden said yes, offering the following rationale:
--in statutory interpretation, the starting point is the language itself
--when there's no statutory definition, go to the dictionary
--Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language defines "recreation" as "refreshment in body or mind, as after work by some form of play, amusement or relaxation"
--her conclusion: "when sports fans attend a professional basketball game... they are engaged in a form of amusement."

That may be so, but when, say, schools offer "recreation," it is generally participatory rather than an exercise of fandom.

Maximizing private participation

"Moreover, the lease to and operation of the arena by a profit-making entity is consistent with the UDCA's overall purpose to maximize private participation," she wrote.

That begs for further discussion. As I wrote, the original notion of "maximize private participation," in the wake of urban riots, was to get the private sector to finally invest in the low- and middle-income subsidized housing.

Moreover, the maximization of private participation in this instance arguably gives the developer the arena for free. Yes, tax-free bonds will be issued to build the arena, but FCR will pay off those bonds via Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) to the local development corporation set up to nominally own the arena. (See page 6 of the Memorandum of Understanding between developer, city, and state.) The PILOT will not exceed the real estate taxes were the site not publicly-owned and tax-exempt. (See “R-TIFC-PILOT”.)

Questions of blight

At issue was the designation of blight on the south side of Pacific Street and the north side of Dean Street, the blocks outside the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA), designated as blighted some 40 years ago, light years ago in Brooklyn's real estate market.

"The Court of Appeals instructs that the term 'blight' is to be given a "liberal rather than a literal definition,'" Madden wrote. Citing a range of federal and state cases, she noted that, once a site is determined to be blighted, "unblighted parcels may be designated as part of an overall plan to improve a blighted area." (Unmentioned was whether there's any limit to piling on such nonblighted parcels; in New Jersey, a pending law would limit such parcels to 20 percent of the site.)

And are the buildings and houses on Dean and Pacific streets blighted? The ESDC said they are, citing structural problems, vacant buildings, and underutilization. Madden, however, made no attempt to judge whether the ESDC's standard--that a building failing to fulfill 60% of allowable development rights under current zoning is by definition blighted. (Planner and DDDB advisor Ron Shiffman has pointed out that such a rule would render vast swaths of Brownstone Brooklyn blighted.)

And what about the condo conversions that have begun in the neighborhood. The ESDC calls it "isolated redevelopment" and Madden agreed, calling it "insufficient to outweigh the ample evidence of blight conditions documented in the Blight Study." She didn't address evidence of even more new construction just adjacent to the footprint.

And was it ok for the ESDC to determine blight after Forest City Ratner drew the map it wanted for its project, rather than first define a blighted area to be redeveloped? Again, Madden offered a nod to petitioners' concerns: "While it may have been preferable from an urban planning point of view, for the ESDC to have designated the entire area of the Project as a 'land use improvement project' prior to Forest City's involvement, the legislature has pointedly left such choices for the agency, not the courts." (This issue is on appeal in the federal case.)

Terrorism

Madden further dismissed various charges that the ESDC had failed to comply with SEQRA. While the argument that the ESDC should have considered the threat of terrorism "raises genuine issues of public concern," the law does not require that level of detail, she wrote.

She noted that the "SEQRA regulations cite facilities with some degree of dangerousness such as an oil supertanker port, a gas storage facility or a hazardous waste facility, and explicitly exclude 'shopping malls, residential subdivisions, or office facilities.' The instant Project is more akin to the latter category of excluded facilities." That's hard to dispute, but the addition of an arena, and the history of a planned terrorist attack at the adjacent subway station--not mentioned in the decision--add a layer of concern. (Also, as NoLandGrab notes, streets were closed around the arena in Newark because of concerns over terrorism.)

Project completion date

The petitioners argued that it was bogus to assume that the project would be completed by 2016, and that that designation artificially limited analysis of the cumulative impact of development. Only one case has addressed this, Madden wrote, and the "build year" is a "nonstatutory baseline."

Moreover, she wrote, petitioners did not find mistakes in the construction schedule: "Assuming that construction would have begun as proposed at the end of 2006, the FEIS expected it to be completed over a 10-year period..." (Maybe the plaintiffs didn't point it out, but the construction schedule assumed that construction was to begin even before the December 2006 approval of the project--impossible.)

She called statements by Forest City Enterprises executive Chuck Ratner that the project might take 15 years, and project landscape architect Laurie Olin that it might take 20 years "vague and inconclusive."

Traffic

"Petitioners objections to the ESDC's traffic findings are limited to two specific issues, namely that the FEIS did not consider the impacts on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and the FEIS disregarded public comments regarding peak traffic hours," Madden wrote. "Petitioners submit no competent proof from a traffic expert to support their objections. Rather, they rely solely on generalized comments to the DEIS, which are insufficient..."

I'm not sure why the petitioners did not include evidence from experts Brian Ketcham and Carolyn Konheim, who did submit comments on the DEIS and after the FEIS was issued.

Transit growth rate

And what of the state's claim that transit ridership was growing only by .5% a year? The petitioners, Madden wrote, rely on a comment to the DEIS about surveys that show a growth rate four to six times that, but they didn't submit the surveys.

Coney Island

"While the petitioners question the ESDC's finding that the proposed Project is more transit accessible, the record establishes that the ESDC considered the Coney Island transit options and had a rational basis for its determination that the availability of multiple subway and bus lines, as well as the LIRR, renders the Atlantic Yards site readily accessible to visitors traveling from a wide geographic area," Madden wrote.

No redevelopment without AY?

The petitioners argued that the ESDC, in evaluating the rival Extell bid for the Vanderbilt Yard and the "No-Action Alternative," relied on the "allegedly 'false assumption' that 'significant new development is considered unlikely given the blighting influence of the rail yard and the predominance of low-density manufacturing zoning on the project site," Madden wrote.

The petitioners cited new development in and around the footprint, but Madden noted that, "as previously determined herein, that fact alone is insufficient to outweigh the ample evidence of blight conditions documented in the Blight Study, which provided a rational basis for the ESDC's conclusion that continued new development on the project site was unlikely."

But that doesn't address the simple option of a change in zoning, which could easily spur new development, as it has done, for example, on the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, formerly zoned for manufacturing. Nor did she address charges that, unlike Extell, Forest City Ratner did not submit its 20-year profit-and-loss statement with its MTA bid.

Wind study

Should the state have issued a Supplemental EIS regarding the effects of wind, given that a wind study was referenced in the FEIS but not attached? Madden said no, noting that SEQRA states that "highly technical material should be summarized." (Emphasis added by judge)

Bear's Garden

Petitioners claimed that the ESDC didn't fully evaluate the impact of the project on the Brooklyn Bear's Garden at Pacific Street and Flatbush Avenue, in the wedge of land known as Site 5. Madden noted that the ESDC did assess the affects of construction impacts and shadows.

"Finally, even though the FEIS did not consider the impacts of traffic, crowds, glare, and nighttime lighting on the Bear's Garden, not every conceivable environmental impact need be addressed to satisfy the substantive requirements of SEQRA," she concluded.

An Atlantic Yards lexicon--and more contributions welcome

More than four years after the announcement of Atlantic Yards, and just in time for the Atlantic Yards quiz coming Thursday, herewith a selective and unscientific lexicon of memorable words, phrases, and quotes regarding the project.

You're welcome to nominate your own contributions to the list, either in email directly to me or by posting comments.

A-B

“Absolute absence of democratic process”—New York Magazine’s Chris Smith on the AY approval process

A.R.E.A. Bagels, formerly A.R.E.N.A. Bagels—a 5th Avenue bagel baker that changed its name after protests from patrons

“Antibuilders, antidevelopment brigade, antidevelopment crowd, antidevelopment groups, antidevelopment protesters, anti-development yuppies…liberal... serving as sentries guarding the walls of the Central Brooklyn ghetto.”—Errol Louis’s invective toward AY critics

"Are you stuck on stupid?"—William Stanford (aka “Mr. X”) on scheduling a community forum on Primary Day, at 8/23/06 DEIS hearing

“A Super Design for a Great Project”--Daily News editorial headline 5/15/06 on Frank Gehry's design

“Atlantic Yards Carve-Out”—the provision that gave FCR special bonus in the revision of the 421-a tax law

“Atlantic Yards Community”--ESDC "doublespeak" (according to Lumi Rolley) for a place that doesn't quite exist

"Blank check"--phrase used by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn to describe the option for government entities to pay "extraordinary infrastructure costs" ofr the AY project

“Blight should not be determined by a private party.”—plaintiffs’ attorney Jeffrey Baker at 5/3/07 hearing before State Supreme Court Justice Joan A. Madden

“Bloggiest”—Outside.in’s designation of Clinton Hill as the nation’s bloggiest neighborhood; I’ve challenged that, arguing that the main reason is Atlantic Yards, which would be mainly in Prospect Heights

"Blood Money"--Brooklyn Paper headline regarding the Barclays Capital naming rights deal

““Bring Basketball to Brooklyn”—the initial pitch for Atlantic Yards

“Brooklyn is a world-class city and we deserve Atlantic Yards”—Borough President Marty Markowitz, before the 8/26/06 DEIS hearing

"Brooklyn Matters”—title of Isabel Hill’s documentary on Atlantic Yards

“Brooklyn Standard”—FCR “publication” that came and went

“Brooklyn Tomorrow”—Courier-Life/New York Post June 2007 insert of advertorial puffery

“Brutally weird”—Quote from Jason Flores-Williams I applied to Errol Louis and other curious episodes in the AY adventure

“Build a whole neighborhood practically from scratch”—Frank Gehry upon the AY announcement 12/10/03

“The Burrow”—John Pinamonti’s haunting AY tune, part elegy, part fight song

“Businesses don’t have to invest in hard-to-develop areas.”—Jim Stuckey to Mike & the Mad Dog on 1/18/07, re Forest City Ratner's business plans

C-F

“Can it work for Brooklyn?”—Municipal Art Society June 2006

“Coalition of conscience”—Assemblyman Roger Green’s assessment of the public and union officials backing AY, before the 8/23/06 DEIS hearing

Community Liaison Office—the hardly-visible outpost Forest City Ratner set up in the former Spalding building

“Dark Genius of Joe DePlasco”—TimesRatnerReport (my predecessor blog) on FCR’s once-prominent flack

"The debate over Atlantic Yards is not a debate about race or class, it’s a debate about sensible development versus destructive development"--DDDB's Daniel Goldstein, on the Brian Lehrer Show

(De)Construction of the Neighborhood—subtitle of photographer Tracy Collins’ book on Atlantic Yards

“Develop Don’t Delay Brooklyn”—Errol Louis column headline, later taken up by the Daily News, a play on Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn

“Downtown Brooklyn”—the developer’s persistent mis-location of the project, belatedly corrected by the New York Times

“Drunken sports fans won’t be urinating in the backyards of the luxury condos. They’ll be peeing on the stoops of the rest of us.”—Kristyn LaPlante of Park Slope Neighbors, at the 8/23/06 DEIS hearing

“Economic segregation”-Hakeem Jeffries on the "Atlantic Yards carve-out," version one, at least

“Either we are going to have a model for how to build mixed-income housing, or we are just flapping our lips.”—ACORN’s Bertha Lewis, before the 8/23/06 DEIS hearing

“Emergency demolition”—the justification for Forest City Ratner's February 2006 demolitions of five properties; though a decision at the Empire State Development Corporation was pending for five weeks, the developer made no attempt to warn the public

(An) "entirely sane extension of Downtown Brooklyn"--the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's Henrik Krogius on Atlantic Yards

“Extreme density”—Phrase popularized by AYR regarding plans (since reduced) for more than 300 apartments per acre

“Friendly condemnations”—former Empire State Development Corporation Charles Gargano’s frequently-used term for the state’s intention to condemn properties owned by developer Forest City Ratner; the tenants disagree

G-L

(A) "Garden of Eden grows in Brooklyn”—Herbert Muschamp, New York Times architecture critic, upon the unveiling of the AY project, 12/11/03

“Gehry, Thy Name is Eminent Domain”—graffiti created by Patti and Schellie Hagan's graffiti in Prospect Heights (photo by Adrian Kinloch)

“Get real about traffic and parking”—Borough President Markowitz, before the 8/23/06 DEIS hearing; however, most of his recommendations didn't get much immediate traction

“Go back to Pleasantville”—activist Umar Jordan’s crack at Tal Barzilai, an Atlantic Yards critic who (unlike most critics, who are Brooklynites) happens to live in suburban Pleasantville, NY

“Growth is good but growth has its limits.”—City Council Member Letitia James, at the 8/23/06 DEIS hearing

“He’s gotta raise $2.5 billion”—Mayor Mike Bloomberg on the radio 1/23/04 on developer Bruce Ratner, using the initial project cost figure and bypassing significant subsidies and tax breaks

“I call on Errol for a little more intellectual rigor.”—Assemblyman Richard Brodsky to columnist Errol Louis regarding the latter’s take on subsidies

“I cannot prioritize traffic jams and shadows over housing and jobs.”—teacher M’Balia Rubie, at the DEIS hearing

“If this project passes [state review], it’s 50/50 baby”—Bertha Lewis, after 2/28/06 housing debate, on the ratio of subsidized and market-rate housing

“I’ve come out against the use of eminent domain to build a basketball arena.”—Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, treading carefully

“I was born in Brooklyn. I was raised in Brooklyn. I grew up in Brooklyn,”—Assemblyman Roger Green, at the DEIS hearing

“If his clients or if other members of the community think this was really a terrible project, they can express themselves in the next election…”--ESDC lawyer Douglas Kraus (right), in court 2/7/07

"It's The Scale, Stupid"--Jonathan Cohn of Brooklyn Views offering a bottom-line analysis

“If this doesn’t come out for Ratner, it’ll be a conspiracy against blacks”—James Caldwell, BUILD

“If you’ve never been in the Marcy projects, you’re not from Brooklyn.”—Umar Jordan, at the DEIS hearing

“Instant gentrification”—City Council Member Charles Barron regarding Atlantic Yards

“Is that Pacific, at the bottom of the project?”—ESDC board member Charles Dorkey, at the 12/8/06 meeting when the board was about to approve the project

“It is, after all, America”—then FCR executive Jim Stuckey on the Brian Lehrer Show 7/19/06, regarding the developer’s right to seek a profit

“It’s a great piece of real estate”—Forest City Enterprises executive Chuck Ratner 3/6/07 on the site that the state calls blighted

“It’s all about being here”—slogan last year at the Nets’ home, then the Continental Airlines Arena, in the Meadowlands

“It’s Orwellian, almost”—FCR’s Stuckey to the New York Times, challenging citizens’ criticisms of the developer’s lack of openness

“Jobs, Housing, and Hoops”—the initial Atlantic Yards slogan

“Legally-binding Community Benefits Agreement”—the mantra in brochures produced by the developer

“Liar flier”—term used by opponents to describe FCR’s brochures

“Liberal, do-gooder”—Frank Gehry’s term for himself and Bruce Ratner

“Like so many things in life, it was just a matter of money.”—Bruce Ratner, in 6/26/05 New York Times Magazine interview, on the winning bid for the Nets

“Live. Work. Play.”—the first Atlantic Yards flier

M-R

"Mad Overkiller"--nickname given to yours truly by sometime antagonist Errol Louis

“Making omelets without breaking eggs”—Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff 2/1/07 on the city’s post-Robert Moses capacity to build big without antagonizing communities

“Miss Brooklyn”—Frank Gehry’s name for his signature tower (occasionally called “Ms. Brooklyn”)

“My ego trip”—Frank Gehry 5/15/06 on Miss Brooklyn

“Newcomers who made out like bandits”—Errol Louis on people who sold their apartments to FCR

(A) "new urban form, however, more likely analogous to a spaceship landing in a field than a unifying element in the community”-Park Slope Civic Council, testimony on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement


"Not Just Nets"--The Brooklyn Paper's recognition that Atlantic Yards was about more than basketball, and Brooklyn development is about more than AY

Pacific Crest Research—shadowy polling firm that seems to be working for Forest City Ratner

“Privately financed” (almost exclusively)—the developer’s explanation of how the project would be financed

Privately-negotiated affordable housing bonus-AYR term for AY density

“Projects change, markets change”—FCR’s Stuckey offers a laconic (and not quite credible) explanation on the switch from office space to condos

“The project will provide…”—Curious syntax used by ESDC, the developer, and pollster Craig Charney that omits the role of actors like the developer and government

Ratlantic Yards (and other rat-related jibes)--The unfortunate consequence of a developer having an easily parodied name

"Ratzilla Attacks Brooklyn”—New York Magazine cover line

“Response to criticism”—the New York Times’s assessment of FCR’s token scaleback

(The) "right project, in the right place, at the right time for Brooklyn.”—Borough President Marty Markowitz, who not long before was calling for an arena in Coney Island

S-Y

“Same site” as proposed new Dodgers stadium—repeated error by New York Times and other media outlets regarding the planned arena location

“Screecher seats”—term used by Forest City Ratner to describe 2000 $15 seats to be available at the arena

"Serious and difficult questions”—U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy's ruling 2/23/07regarding the exercise of eminent domain under emerging Supreme Court jurisprudence

"Sexy project"--New ombudsman Forrest Taylor, on Atlantic Yards, a phrase he seems to have dropped

“The $6 billion lie”—AYR on AY economic projections

(A) "stadium for the Nets is a good idea. But 17 high rises?"—Pull quote for 11/13/05 John Manbeck op-ed in the Times, confusing stadium with arena

“They would’ve been picketing Henry Ford.”—Frank Gehry on project critics, in a phrase that launched Stuart Schrader's blog

“Tout of Bounds”—New York Post headline on requirement that apartment sellers praise FCR

“[like a goddamn] tsunami…. So, if I could stop one iota of gentrification, I’ll do it.”—ACORN’s Bertha Lewis, at 2/28/06 housing debate, on the AY housing deal

Urban Room—both the building that would lead to the arena and the open space created by demolitions

Walk/Bake/Kids Disco/Quiz Don’t Destroy—fundraisers or events sponsored by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn

“Wealthy white masters”—DDDB’s Daniel Goldstein, in an intemperate email to a New York Daily News reporter

"We cannot stop progress."—ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano, on New York Voices, October 2006

“We don’t have nannies”—Union worker John Holt dissing Atlantic Yards opponents, at the 9/18/06 community forum

“We’ve been suffering, before anybody even thought about livability”—Bertha Lewis on the tradeoffs regarding AY, at housing debate 2/28/06

“What was a pretty active area has been emptied”—Dean Street resident Peter Krashes to WNYC on the view from Dean Street

“Yes in my backyard”—columnist Errol Louis, and flier distributed (and held by, among others, Hasids from Williamsburg) before DEIS hearing

“You’re the victim”—community activist Darnell Canada, warning at 8/23/06 DEIS hearing of consequences of AY plan doesn’t pass, portrayed memorably in Brooklyn Matters

Regarding Hudson Yards plans, a Community Advisory Committee offers pointed criticism

If there was a Community Advisory Committee involved in the Atlantic Yards planning, it certainly wasn't heard from. But there is a Hudson Yards Community Advisory Committee (HYCAC), set up by the mayoral administration and City Council, and it has issued a forceful open letter to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority regarding the plans for new development at the West Side yards.

The committee offers praise for the public presentations and models provided by five development teams: This amount of public disclosure with little formal public process is an important contribution to open government and better planning.

However, much is missing, and some of the criticism, as I'll explain below, echoes criticism of the Atlantic Yards plan.

Summary of criticism

The points, as summarized by the Rail Yards Blog:
1. There is too much density for a successful environment.
2. There is no public infrastructure and no commitment to build it.
3. There is no plan for affordable housing.
4. Allowing changes in the ERY zoning and WRY design guidelines will create a better plan.
5. Make real New York City blocks.
6. Big open space may not be best.
7. The entire High Line can and must be preserved.
8. Require a genuine commitment to sustainability.
9. Strong labor provisions and opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses must be provided.
10. Put the school in a good location.
11. Modify the cultural facility zoning on the ERY, since there is no committed not-for-profit user.
12. Make good connections to Hudson River Park.
13. The financial aspects of the proposals must be made public.

Fudging superblock density

Remember how architect Jonathan Cohn, in his BrooklynViews blog, began pointing out how Atlantic Yards density was actually much higher if city streets were excluded, as they should be in calculating Floor Area Ratio (FAR)?

(In a 4/16/06 article about Atlantic Yards bloggers, the New York Times rather condescendingly treated Cohn's analysis as something "quickly added to opponents' talking points" rather than a piece of public education.)

Well, the HYCAC makes a similar argument:
The base floor area ratios (FARs) of 11 on the Eastern Rail Yard (”ERY”) and 10 on the Western Rail Yard (”WRY”) seem reasonable until you realize that they are calculated across the entire sites, including open space and streets. Excluding open space and streets (as parks and streets are excluded elsewhere in the City), the effective density of these proposals is in the neighborhood of 25 FAR. That is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented density over such a large area anywhere in the City, and far exceeds what can be considered good planning for the future of the City or the local community.

More blocks, better open space

There are some other parallels to the Atlantic Yards debate. Echoing criticism of Atlantic Yards put forward by BrooklynSpeaks and the UNITY plan, the HYCAC calls for additional streets to create "real New York City blocks," not superblocks.

Moreover, the HYCAC suggests that smaller open spaces rather than larger plots offer the best option to create inviting space for the public. Several entities, including those behind the UNITY plan, make that point regarding AY.

AY ombudsman faces critical audience, says Community Advisory Committee coming

Atlantic Yards ombudsman Forrest Taylor met a cordial but sometimes prickly audience last night at a meeting held by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), which has been significantly critical of the project and is a plaintiff challenging the Empire State Development Corporation’s (ESDC) environmental review of the project.

(Photos by Jonathan Barkey)

Taylor, appointed by the ESDC at the end of November after a 203-day wait, got high marks for his accessibility--CBN co-chair Candace Carponter said he always answered the phone. But several among the 60 or so people at St. Cyril's Belarusian Cathedral on Atlantic Avenue found him not-so-reassuring when he repeated the ESDC stance on issues of security and traffic.

City Council Member David Yassky reminded Taylor of concerns that streets might have to close, as in Newark, given that the glass-walled Atlantic Yards arena would be set back the same distance from the street. Taylor said the ESDC had been briefed by the New York Police Department, which is “100 percent comfortable with security measures.”

And Patti Hagan of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition reported that, in conversations with firefighters at Engine Company 219 on Dean Street near Sixth Avenue, which uses Carlton Avenue regularly to cross Atlantic Avenue to respond to calls, had not been briefed on the planned January 16 closing of the Carlton Avenue bridge.

Taylor said he wasn’t privy to internal Fire Department conversations, but that the ESDC had received assurances that the department could do its job despite the closed bridge. (Hagan further pointed out that the ESDC notice neglected to inform people the bridge would be closed for two years.)

Facilitator, not public advocate?

The meeting showed a contrast between two visions of the job: the ESDC wants a communicator, a fixer, who can bridge gaps between the many agencies and interested parties so essential information is exchanged. Community critics want a public advocate who might reach some independent conclusions.

“I think we thought an ombudsman would be a little more objective,” said CBN co-chair Terry Urban (at right, with Taylor) after the hour-long meeting. “We want him to ask them [agencies like the police and fire departments] to go further.”

Taylor, for his part, called the evening “illuminating. You get to hear what people are feeling. They won’t always like the answers, but at least there’s someone to reach.” Tieless at the end of the day, he was cordial but unflappable, and when speeches ended in murky questions he sometimes said he didn’t understand the point.

Another body may have to break the logjam in some instances. City Council Member Letitia James said that she’d requested that the Council’s Public Safety Committee question the police department regarding security plans. Added Yassky, “we’d like to get the police department... to be as public as possible.” (At right, Yassky, with James in background.)

As Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) put it, “The thing that’s hanging out there is, ‘How is this different from Newark?’”

Job description

Taylor began by describing his two main responsibilities: to bring issues of community concern back to the ESDC, and to “keep the project on track” by coordinating among the “alphabet-soup list of agencies” responsible for some aspect of Atlantic Yards. “Obviously a project as large as this is going to create headaches,” he said. “My job is to minimize them.”

While Taylor has been working out of ESDC’s Midtown Manhattan offices, he said he plans to soon move to 55 Hanson Place in Fort Greene, an office building which also houses the office of Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries and is a few steps away from a building with the office of Council Member James.

CBN asked members of the audience to introduce themselves and state their organizational affiliation and neighborhood location. One Dean Street resident described her location as “directly across from the project.” Goldstein (right), whose Pacific Street condo would be demolished for AY, quipped that he was “directly under the project.”

Community Advisory Committee coming

Carponter reminded Taylor of a letter CBN sent ESDC last fall asking for a progress report on oversight measures announced in May. Taylor said an interagency working group “will be working on a monthly basis.”

As for a transportation working group, he said it would be “a subcommittee of a newly-reconstituted Community Advisory Committee.” (Such a committee was established during the approval process, but hardly met. (Updated) Also, the environmental lawsuit says a required CAC was limited to representatives of the three Community Boards, the ESDC, New York City, and the Brooklyn Borough President's office and thus did not have meaningful participation.)

He said local elected officials would shortly be asked to nominate members, as would the three affected Brooklyn Community Boards: 2, 6, and 8. And how often would the committee meet? At least quarterly, he said, a frequency that provoked some derisive sounds from the audience.

Would meetings be open? That’s up to the CAC. While Taylor was asked if CBN would get a representative, he responded, “You know your elected officials just as well as I do.”

What do you say?” asked DDDB's Lucy Koteen of James.

“Yes,” the Council member responded.

Still, it seems a good distance from the new governance structure proposed by BrooklynSpeaks.

Bridge closing

Koteen said that the closing of the Carlton Avenue bridge would put a squeeze on traffic. “I would’ve appreciated it if agencies had come to discuss it with the community,” she said, giving the Fort Greene Association as an example.

“Duly noted,” said Taylor, adding, “Certainly this was looked at by the DOT [Department of Transportation].”

A resident of Dean Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues noted that residents faced gridlock 12 hours a day and asked what’s being done to mitigate it. “There are several things in this voluminous document,” Taylor responded, referring to the Final Environmental Impact Statement.

Maureen Shea (right) of Park Slope Greens observed that, “in general this project has ignored the experience of the pedestrian.” She asked what Taylor’s office would do “if the project doesn’t go forward,” an outcome she desires.

“We’re not contemplating the project not going forward,” Taylor responded sharply. “The project has been approved” and is moving forward. (Still, two major lawsuits remain unresolved.)

Money questions

Yassky, who got far weaker applause than did James, asked Taylor if a funding agreement had been finalized for the project, presumably for the direct subsidies. “There’s a city part and a state part,” Taylor said. “I think the state is done.” However, it’s one agreement, so “until both are done, neither are done.”

Goldstein asked if agreements regarding housing subsidies and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) had been finalized. Taylor said no.

Vote of support

At least one person at the meeting, former Fort Greene Association chairman Howard Pitsch, expressed support for the project, stating he was encouraged to learn, via a Courier-Life article, of Forest City Ratner’s “very good” track record hiring minority- and women-owned businesses.

Will Taylor help ensure continuance of such hiring, Pitsch asked. Taylor said the first e-mail he got was from a minority businessperson. “It was pretty easy to set them up with Forest City Ratner.”

Interesting, not “sexy”

After the meeting, I asked Taylor, who has a background in city government, state government, and as a consultant/lobbyist, how he came to take the job. “Someone reached out,” he said. “It was an interesting project, a big project, a high-profile project. It excited me.”

He has apparently learned to not describe Atlantic Yards as a “sexy project,” as he did in a Daily News interview after his appointment.

After criticism of MSG tax break, James, Yassky point to AY

Yesterday Madison Square Garden and its owner, Cablevision, was on the defensive at a City Council Finance Committee hearing where sentiment clearly has shifted—years after good-government advocates began lobbying about it—to lifting the tax exemption that now saves the Garden some $11 million a year.

In response, Cablevision called attention (right; click to enlarge) to the even larger tax breaks and other forms of support the city has handed out for construction of new sports facilities for the Yankees, Mets, and Nets.

And two City Council members—Atlantic Yards opponent Letitia James and sometime critic David Yassky—issued a statement saying the City Council should take a broader look at all subsidies, including much larger ones for Atlantic Yards.

Explaining the numbers [update]

IBO spokesman Doug Turetsky says of MSG's figures, "They have extrapolated from numbers we have presented in reports in the past and used portions of them but their totals are not the reflection of our numbers as sourcing them to us would lead one to think.

They include state and federal subsidies, which are not part of the comparison we presented yesterday. In addition, they compare the one-year cost of the MSG exemption to the lifetime subsidy costs of the other projects."

25 years later

The resolution notes that MSG was granted a property tax exemption by the state in 1982, at a time when an incentive was seen as necessary to keep the sports teams from leaving the city, a threat that clearly has passed. Moreover, it notes, “privately owned sports arenas built in recent years in other major cities, according to the IBO [Independent Budget Office], generally do pay real property taxes – as did MSG from 1968 when it opened until 1982.”

The resolution seems likely to pass City Council, given the support of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who clashed with Cablevision over its opposition to a West Side Stadium that could compete with MSG, and Council Speaker Christine Quinn. However, it must then pass the state legislature, where cagey Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, long allied with Cablevision, has kept his cards close to his vest, as the New York Times reported.

Quinn’s opposition

Quinn was apparently in full dudgeon, according to a statement published on Gotham Gazette:
$11 million dollars may not sound like a lot of money to [company president] Jim Dolan, but to most New Yorkers it’s a fortune. If he expects the City of New York to extend what is almost a million dollar a month tax break in perpetuity, he’s sadly mistaken. New Yorkers pay the highest taxes in the country, and they need to know that their tax dollars are being spent wisely.
“When Mayor Koch requested the exemption for MSG, he believed it would be for a decade, not a quarter of a century, and certainly not forever. But for more than twenty-five years, New Yorkers have compensated Madison Square Garden’s decision to stay in New York to the tune of nearly $297 million dollars. It’s time for them to start paying their fair share.
“Madison Square Garden, the Knicks and Rangers, should be treated just like all our hometown professional sports teams. The Yankees and Mets are building publicly owned ballparks on publicly owned land, the Garden is a private facility. If and when a new arena is built for the Knicks and Rangers, Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILOTS) should be considered as were structured around the agreements to build new homes for the Mets and Yankees.

She didn’t mention Atlantic Yards, perhaps because the term “publicly-owned land” is a dodge. As the Memorandum of Understanding shows, private property will be conveyed by Forest City Ratner to the state and leased back for nominal sums.

Council sponsors

Among the nine initial City Council sponors are Lew Fidler and Mike Nelson of Brooklyn, both Atlantic Yards supporters. Fidler told the New York Sun, "The Garden pressured the city into a giveaway in perpetuity, and that was wrong."

Note that the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) deal in the Atlantic Yards MOU is for 99 years.

James and Yassky

In their statement, James and Yassky, who called the MSG exemption “now entirely unnecessary,” added:
Unfortunately, Madison Square Garden is not the only potentially tax-supported, privately-owned arena on our horizon: if you think subsidizing MSG is a bad idea, know that worse is on the way in the form of Atlantic Yards, which features a new stadium for the New Jersey (soon-to-be-Brooklyn) Nets. The Atlantic Yards Project is slated to receive $500 million in City and State subsidies, including $205 million in the current City Budget, a property tax carve-out valued at up to $200 million, and $100 million from the State.
Forest City Ratner is the greatest beneficiary of public subsidies in NYC. The various tax exemptions enjoyed by this company, and others in the City, have not been reviewed or been subject to as much scrutiny as was witnessed in the Finance Committee hearing today. This legislative body should be reviewing how we grant tax exemptions to companies on a city wide basis, and not single out any one company. The policy should be consistent, broad and equitable.

I don’t know if Forest City Ratner is the greatest beneficiary of public subsidies, but they are King of the PILOTs, as Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez recently wrote.

In 2005, Bettina Damiani of the watchdog group Good Jobs New York argued for “attention to what we believe are unnecessary taxpayer giveaways – that are not only being given to Madison Square Garden... We hope all large corporate subsidies get this type of attention." She made similar arguments yesterday.

Retention vs. construction

MSG said in a statement that it was wrong to pick on them: “With a more than $50 billion City annual operating budget, it is strange that Speaker Quinn would focus on MSG's abatement which pales in comparison to the more than a billion dollars in benefits recently granted to all other pro sports teams in New York City."

Quinn told that Times said MSG was disingenuous to compare its deal with those regarding new construction. (Then again, it was for a remodeling.)

MSG within norms?

In testimony (which I was sent) at City Council , Thomas Hazinski, Managing Director of HVS Convention, Sports & Entertainment Facilities Consulting argued that “MSG’s property tax exemption is well within the norms for sports venues in the United States.”

In fact, he said, most get far more subsidies than just abatement of property taxes. “The vast majority of sports venues do not pay property taxes,” he said, though the IBO has pointed out (see below) that new arenas have been required to pay property taxes.

He also said that MSG’s “exemption is more modest than the support New York City has offered to other professional teams, citing “the estimate of public support for the new Nets arena in Brooklyn is $340 million with $14 million in property tax savings.”

A fact sheet (top) MSG distributed stated $342 million, citing the IBO as a source. While the city and state have pledged $305 million, the IBO, as noted by Turetsky's comments, does not endorse MSG’s calculations.

Either way, clearly the amount of subsidy is even greater for the other sports facilities. Hazinzki noted, “These totals do not include other key support mechanisms, including the full value of tax exempt bonds.”

Economic impact

Hazinski argued that New York “has leveraged greater economic impact from Madison Square Garden with less overall public support,” given that MSG “is the home of three professional teams and hosts hundreds of other events.” That cuts both ways, however, because it suggests that MSG already has steady income.

Moreover, Cablevision’s willingness to spend $11.5 million—more than the tax-exemption over one year—to settle a sexual harassment case involving former MSG executive Anucha Browne Sanders, also suggests that the company has deep pockets.

Hazinksi, in closing, argued that the Council defer any vote until a full evaluation of “what government support is appropriate for the development of a new arena.” Quinn has said that could be taken up separately.

IBO evaluation

The IBO yesterday criticized the tax break, as the Daily News reported. Last February, in its Budget Options for New York City document, the IBO offered much stronger pros than cons regarding removal of the exemption:
Proponents might argue that tax incentives are now unnecessary because the operation of Madison Square Garden is almost certainly profitable. Because Madison Square Garden, L.P. owns the Knicks and Rangers teams, and the MSG Network and Fox Sports New York, it receives game-related revenue from tickets, concessions, and cable broadcast advertising. In addition, Madison Square Garden hosts concerts, theatrical productions, ice shows, the circus, and much more in its arena and theater, and it collects both rent and concession revenue on these events.

Proponents also might note that privately owned sports arenas built in recent years in other major cities, such as the Fleet Center in Boston and the United Center in Chicago, generally do pay real property taxes—as did MSG from 1968 when it opened until 1982—although some have received other government subsidies such as access to tax exempt financing and public investment in related infrastructure projects. In the case of MSG, the continuing subsidy, long after the construction costs have been recouped, is at odds with the philosophy that guides economic development tax expenditure policy.

Opponents might argue that the presence of the teams continues to economically benefit the city and that foregoing $13 million is reasonable compared to the risk that the teams might leave the city. Some also might contend that reneging on the tax exemption would add to the impression that the city is not business-friendly.

These days, the risk that such teams would leave a major media market seems low. And, as James and Yassky and Damiani pointed out, the city still manages to seem business-friendly.

[Updated]: IBO testimony

From the IBO's testimony yesterday:
With an open-ended benefit, the city continues to face an annual cost even if the conditions that prompted the initial deal have changed. In 1982, the owners of the Garden argued that their costs, including taxes and energy, had grown so high that they threatened their ability to keep the basketball and hockey teams playing there. Today, it is unlikely those conditions remain. With the advent of its own cable TV network, more intensive use of the facility to generate advertising revenue, and construction of new luxury boxes and club seating areas with higher ticket prices, the Garden today is by all accounts a highly profitably enterprise.

In recent years the city—ignoring the argument that sports facilities are a bad investment—has entered into agreements with the Nets, the Mets, and the Yankees to subsidize new facilities for each of those teams. IBO has estimated that the net present value (40 years with discount of 6 percent) of these city subsidies range from $140 million for the Nets arena to $162 million for Yankee Stadium. These deals also include additional state subsidies and federal tax exempt financing. Measured on a comparable basis, the Garden’s exemption represents a city subsidy of about $218 million. While the value of the Garden’s subsidy from the city is larger, with these other deals, the city has somewhat leveled the playing field in terms of public subsidies for our major league sports teams.

(Emphasis added, given that the Nets would get $205 million in direct subsidy from the city and $100 million from the state)

Jeffries on Downtown Brooklyn development reforms, AY, and the role of critics

An article published in the Courier-Life chain this week suggests that a new effort to defend the Atlantic Yards project involves comparing it to other developments nearby in Downtown Brooklyn that lack minority hiring and contracting goals and affordable housing pledges.

Indeed, the article, headlined Jeffries criticizes Ratner foes, implied that Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, who represents Prospect Heights, explicitly criticized Atlantic Yards opponents, though in a later interview with me he expressed a more nuanced position, as well as a request to involve more Brooklynites in pressuring Downtown Brooklyn developers.

The article began:
A local lawmaker last week credited developer Forest City Ratner's record of working with Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprises (M/WBE) Program thus far on the Atlantic Yards project.
At the same time, Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries took a swipe at opponents of the project for not casting the same critical eye on the billions of dollars in Downtown Brooklyn developments.
"The Downtown Brooklyn developers should be held to the same level of accountability and scrutiny as we have seen directed at the Atlantic Yards project," said Jeffries.
"It would be helpful if some of the passion directed at the Atlantic Yards project would be used as part of the effort to help the NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents in our community benefit from the development that is taking place in Brooklyn," he added.

Questions of tone

I asked Jeffries (right) if his comments arose at a public event, or were in reaction to questions from reporter Steve Witt (who’s often written supportively of the Atlantic Yards project). Jeffries said Witt was writing a story and called him for reaction. “He certainly accurately quoted me, but I don’t know that the tone of my comments were meant as criticism but rather as an observation about the development fights in Downtown Brooklyn," he said.

“The constructive criticism of the Atlantic Yards project has raised the standard for development in Brooklyn, which is a great thing,” he said. “The issue becomes whether we can transfer that elevated level of scrutiny to other development projects around the borough, in this case all the activity that’s taken place in Downtown Brooklyn.”

Crucial difference

Atlantic Yards has a Community Benefits Agreement, with such hiring and contracting goals and affordable housing, but such pledges were achieved in the context of a privately-negotiated zoning override. Rather than example of developer generosity, it could simply seen as a cost calculated in trade for support for development rights guaranteeing a certain rate of return, part of a package that also included hundreds of millions of dollars in direct support and tax breaks, plus other benefits.

In other words, had the CBA signatories thought a smaller project was wiser, the developer wouldn't have afforded to make certain promises. “You have to give them something they can make money off,” said Tunisha Walker of ACORN at the “Priced Out” housing conference in November.

The Downtown Brooklyn rezoning gap

Jeffries noted that, when City Council approved the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning in 2004, the increase in development rights was intended to spur commercial development and office jobs. The market changed, which led to the unanticipated rush of residental luxury housing, without city officials requiring any affordable housing or hiring/contracting goals, even though some of the developments are near the Ingersoll, Farragut, and Whitman housing projects.

Jeffries, City Council Member Letitia James, and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, will " convene a public meeting and invite the development community to participate in a dialogue about what is scheduled to take place and how we can get real community participation in all of the economic activity.”

The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, the quasi-public organization that spurs downtown development, has helped organize this meeting, to be scheduled in the next 45 days, though, Jeffries acknowledged, “ultimately, it’s the developers who are going to determine whether they participate.”

What carrots and sticks do public officials have at this stage? Jeffries acknowledged that it’s too late to use the tax code or zoning to nudge developers, but bond financing may play a role. If economic conditions change, and developers decide that a mixed-income building makes more economic sense, the availability of bonding for such housing could play a role.

And why should developers participate? “We are past the point where city government can use the fact that municipal approval is required to negotiate woman and minority business participation,” Jeffries said. “But I don’t think developers necessarily look at their activity on a project by project basis. To take a transactional view is very short-sighted. If their track record leaves a lot to be desired, I think it’s going to be a lot more difficult to get their desired governmental approval [for future projects] down the road.”

Concerns on Myrtle

Of particular concern to the lawmakers, Jeffries said, is the development scheduled to take place on Myrtle Avenue immediately adjacent to the Ingersoll housing project. Residents have complained that their supermarket, pharmacy, and laundromat were demolished by developer John Catsimatidis, without any notice. “We’ve been in discussion with Joe Chan and the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, who are very open and willing to be helpful as it relates to the restoration of services,” he said.

The luxury housing planned “creates a great deal of uncertainty” for residents in the development, he said. Beyond the Myrtle development, plans for a tower at the Albee Square Mall site nearby, as well as activity taking place in the Brooklyn Academy of Music cultural district also raise concerns.

AY critics' role?

Taking off from the Courier-Life article, I asked Jeffries what Atlantic Yards critics should do? “What didn’t make it into the article is my observation that I can understand why Atlantic Yards has raised the passions of the community, because it’s going to be put down in the middle of three residential neighborhoods: Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, and Park Slope,” he said. “In constrast, the development taking place in Downtown Brooklyn, with exception of the activity on Myrtle, seems one step removed from residential neighborhoods.”

“As I said to Steve [Witt], it makes complete sense to me on one hand why it’s been easier to organize community residents against Atlantic Yards. That said, I think the consequences of the development that’s taking place in Downtown Brooklyn, in terms of the concerns that have been raised related to the Atlantic Yards impact on quality of life, are very similar.” He cited accelerated gentrification and challenges to traffic and transportation. (I pointed out that an arena adds an extra challenge.)

Process concerns

“And then there were a whole host of process concerns that were legitimately raised about Atlantic Yards," Jeffries added. "It’s hard to justify the Atlantic Yards process, as far as I’m concerned, prior to December 31, 2006. I think the [Gov. Eliot] Spitzer administration has attempted to be more accountable and transparent, but there's still room for progress."

“The same process concerns can also be raised, as it relates to Downtown Brooklyn, because it was a bait-and-switch. I don’t think it was intentional, But we have to look at the fact that what was originally contemplated was not done. So I think there should be a renewed discussion of how we can deal with the changed development landscape.”

Well, bait-and-switch may be a little strong, given that, as Jeffries acknowledged, what was contemplated was not achieved and the luxury housing was not the plan. It might be better to note that city officials, legislators, and community advocates were mostly unaware of the possibility. And if the new pressure might seem unfair to developers who are now just playing by the rules, it raises a question of how to reform "rules" that were established with little foresight.

(In a 5/18/06 article, the New York Observer noted that the groups FUREE and ACORN had sat out the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning two years earlier, though ACORN had recently released a report contrasting the affordable housing planned for Atlantic Yards with the absence of affordable housing in Downtown Brooklyn developments.)

The effort to engage the Downtown Brooklyn developers, Jeffries said, would best involve more Brooklynites. “If we can show the development community that all of Fort Greene is supportive of the notion of this development taking place in a way that improves the lives of the more socioeconomically disadvantaged residents, we’ll be in a much stronger position. I think the feeling is out there to be supportive of the residents of Ingersoll, Whitman, and Farragut.”

A gentrification novel set in DC, with a twist

The New York Times Book Review calls Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (the title's a reference to Dante's Inferno) "a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel." (It's out February 5 in paperback; that's the third cover below.)

As the artful cover image indicates, the book indeed is many things, but for me, it was a great "gentrification novel," part of that burgeoning subgroup of books (see The Fortress of Solitude, etc.) that capture urban neighborhoods under pressure.

Changes in DC

Mengestu, who came to the United States from Ethiopia as a young child, imagines a more embattled compatriot, Sepha Stephanos. who runs a withered grocery store in the hardscrabble but gentrifying neighborhood of Logan Circle, several blocks east of Dupont Circle. (The book is set in the late 1990s. When I visited Logan Circle recently, it looked far more gentrified than the book suggests; indeed, a Whole Foods opened nearby in 1999.)

In the United Kingdom, the cover appropirately suggests urban grit and the novel is titled Children of the Revolution, a reference to a song played by Sepha and fellow African expats who get together to mourn their respective countries' fates.

In the middle

Sepha is black, but he is not African-American, and he feels that most acutely in his uneasy friendship and near-romance with Judith, an academic who is the neighborhood's first white gentrifier and looked at suspiciously by many neighborhood veterans, from the respectable church ladies to the lounging layabouts. With Naomi, Judith's 11-year-old biracial daughter, Sepha is not quite a father figure, but a mentor who rises out of his melancholy.

Sepha is about to be evicted, and his neighbors feel they may be losing their neighborhood. But behind those present-day sorrows, there are deeper historical tragedies, felt by Sepha and his exiled friends. Sepha had fled Ethiopia to escape the military rule that killed his father, and the Red Terror of the time--little noticed in the United States--haunts his memories.

Sepha faces not only a landlord who wants him out, but tension from the neighbors. After threats on Judith's house, Sepha finds a brick outside his store. Judith's house is set ablaze. (This had to be before the Whole Foods arrived.)

Who to blame?

Despite the neighborhood's general misgivings about gentrification, the perpetrator is not a shadowy gang of vigilantes, but rather "one desperate, lonely man" who did odd jobs and lost his lease when his landlord jacked up the rent.

Thus the novel ultimately is not an exhaustive take on gentrification and pushback. But those are some underlying minor chords in a haunting, complex song.

And guess what: Mengestu now lives in Brooklyn. In the anthology Brooklyn Was Mine (about which I'll write more shortly), he celebrates his polyglot neighborhood of Kensington.

ESDC on the way to hiring Owner's Rep for Construction Oversight

It may seem a little late to oversee all demolition and somewhat soon to oversee building construction, but the Empire State Development Corporation last month issued an RFP for an Owners Representative for Construction Oversight.

The Owner’s Rep, according to the RFP, will act as ESDC’s "eyes and ears” on site during construction of the Project... More particularly, the Owner’s Rep will help ESDC identify, address and investigate risks associated with construction activities, including; demolition, site and civil construction, rail yard construction, and construction of an arena and 16 mixed use buildings.

Responses are due Monday, January 7. While the ESDC states that construction is "expected to continue through at least 2016"--others have estimated it could take 20 years--the agency says that it's "uncertain" if the Owner's Rep would be required for the entire construction period.

Announced in May

The initial contract would be for a minimum of two years. And while the issuance of the RFP seven months after the position was announced in May might appear to be a delay, there apparently was no push for an immediate hire. "The plan has always been to have that entity on board before construction of the arena and other buildings begin," said ESDC spokesman A.J. Carter.

Some "construction activities" such as demolition, however, have already begun. It's unclear if any construction of buildings can begin before lawsuits are cleared, but rail yard construction activities are in full swing.

Two Owner's Reps

This job, Carter confirmed, is the same as the Owner's Representative for Construction Activities, as mentioned in the May 7 press release regarding several new oversight measures.

ESDC has also hired an Owner’s Representative Mitigation Monitor to "ensure that [developer Forest City Ratner] complies with certain measures that have been incorporated into the Project to avoid adverse environmental impacts."

Carter explained, "The Owner’s Representative/Mitigation Monitor ensures that the developer complies with all the requirements of the EIS [Environmental Impact Statement]. The Owner’s Representative/Construction Oversight oversees the construction for the benefit of ESDC. Their responsibilities do not overlap."

A Walk Around Brooklyn: the year 2000 seems like a different era

The acclaimed two-hour public television documentary A Walk Around Brooklyn was released in 2000, but a recent re-viewing shows it illustrating a different era, before Brooklyn crossed the rubicon of a red-hot real estate market (and, of course, before the 2003 announcement of Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, much less the opening of the developer's Atlantic Terminal mall, which came in 2004).

It's not just the lingering view of the Twin Towers from Fulton Ferry or that fact that the former fireboat house in that scene had yet to be turned into the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. Or that opening shots from the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower (below) date from when the building contained dentists' office rather than luxury condos.

It's also that, among the relatively few talking heads, some are now deceased: comedian Alan King, who grew up in Williamsburg, and Weeksville preservationist Joan Maynard. (Others interviewed on camera include the Brooklyn Brewery's Steve Hindy and the Rosen brothers who run Junior's restaurant.)

And the landmark restaurant Gage & Tollner, in an increasingly incongruous location on the Fulton Mall, has since closed, was briefly resurrected as a T.G.I. Fridays, and soon will be reincarnated as an offshoot of the Harlem-based Amy Ruth's.

The Golden era

The film was produced with the assistance of the office of Howard Golden, Brooklyn Borough President from 1977 through 2001, and it is very much a sign of a borough striving for recognition and getting some of its due.

The concept, of course, was a bit of a fudge, because no one can actually "walk" around Brooklyn in a couple of hours, but the point was to affirm Brooklyn's burgeoning mosaic. The web site description states:
So it's no wonder that when [actor/host] David Hartman and [Brooklyn-born architectural historian] Barry Lewis set out across the East River to make the latest episode in their series of video walking tours of New York communities for Thirteen -- a follow-up to their acclaimed specials on Harlem, 42nd Street, and Broadway -- they found not one Brooklyn, but a vast patchwork of neighborhoods steeped in 400 years of history.

Under Golden's administration, from 1985 through 2001, the Borough President's Office sponsored the annual Welcome Back to Brooklyn Festival, honoring Brooklyn-born celebrities and enshrining on the Celebrity Path in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (In 1985, those inaugurated included Aaron Copland, Moss Hart, Gil Hodges, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, Mae West, and Walt Whitman. Whew.) The last Celebrity Path installment was in 2001.

The Markowitz era

Then Borough President Marty Markowitz took over and, though hardly one to eschew nostalgia, Markowitz's office has sponsored some more forward-looking celebrations, notably the Brooklyn Book Festival.

But that was launched in 2005 and as late as 2003, after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, Markowitz sounded almost abjectly thankful that a major developer would propose such an ambitious arena-plus-towers plan in Brooklyn. He said in a December 2003 radio interview, "Y’know, it wasn’t that many years ago that no one wanted to invest a dime in our borough. We should be celebrating it..."

Instead, it might have been more fruitful for Markowitz to see himself, and city administrators, as negotiators with a strong hand.

Dodgers: Brooklyn heart?

The documentary does a decent, if understandably swift, job traversing the past and present of several Brooklyn neighborhoods, and inevitably lands at the site of Ebbets Field, with accompanying nostalgic photos. A dialogue ensues.

DH: Do you realize, this team, when Mr. [Walter] O'Malley moved the team, in the late 50s to Los Angeles, the people of Brooklyn, of course, thought he was evil, the devil, he took the heart, the soul, the guts, the identity of Brooklyn, to Los Angeles.

Lewis: Y'know, I hated O'Malley too, but--when you look back in retrospect, I think he really knew what he was doing. In those days, in 1957, L.A. looked like the future, Brooklyn was the past. And isn't it ironic that, today, L.A. is more of a symbol of the past and Brooklyn is the symbol of the future.

Hints of the market

There are only a few hints, some indirect, of the hot real estate market that had begun, and was to heat up even more. Neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill are described as affordable alternatives for those who can no longer afford Brooklyn Heights, rather than destinations of their own that now even attract celebrities.

A stop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, clearly an attempt to dispel stereotypes that the entire neighborhood is poor and drab, takes us to a spectacular row house and points out the stunning architectural stock in the neighborhood's southern segment. A few years later, the real estate market there took off.

And a visit to DUMBO focuses not on the development efforts of the unnamed developer David Walentas, who owned a good number of old loft buildings and was strategizing a way forward, but the role of artists and galleries, many of them in fact nurtured by Walentas.

BL: You look around and think, well, who would want these buildings anyway. You have not just the artists, you've got manufacturers who are also leaving Manhattan. This could be their last stand in New York if they don't get these buildings. And then, in back of everybody, you have these upscale developers who are hoping to take these buildings and turn this entire waterfront into a new SoHo.

DH: So the prices are going to shoot up.

BL: Million dollar lofts, lots of coffee bars.

Uh-huh.

At Coney Island

The documentary ends appropriately at the raffish, rundown, but still-vibrant Coney Island beach, where Lewis takes a stab at predicting the future.

DH: This is now, what about the future?

BL: Well, y'know, it's New York, you never know what the future is. Hey, we we were at the Gowanus Canal. And for all we know, it's going to be a wonderful sightseeing journey through old, industrial New York.

Actually, in perhaps even more of a surprise to a time-traveler from 2000, the Gowanus neighborhood will be the home of numerous luxury developments.

Lewis predicted more accessibility:
Coney Island--well, for one thing, it's still the magnificent South Shore Long Island beach it always was. It's the front door to the Atlantic Ocean for seven and a half million New Yorkers. I can almost picture hydrofoil boats coming down from Manhattan around Gravesend Bay and landing people here on Coney Island in the future.

The melting pot

Lewis continued with a tribute to Brooklyn's setting:
Y'know, Elliot Willensky wrote a wonderful book When Brooklyn Was The World. And he said, "Where land and water meet, wonderful things happen. And y'know, it's still where land and water meet.

And it's a place where developer Joe Sitt proposed housing near the beach, the city resisted, and has instead suggested a land swap as part of a very ambitious housing and amusement development project still under serious debate.

In conclusion

The film ends with our two guides tuckered out at the beach.

DH: Hey Barry, good job, we've done Brooklyn.

BL: Isn't a great city? I mean, this is one of the great cities of the United States. It's had its trials, it's now coming back, and it's coming back into its own, and in its own way, and that's what I love around Brooklyn.

This city is a city of 50,000 acres. Y'know, in Texas, it would just be a mid-size ranch. In Brooklyn, it's the world.

And a very attractive area, it turned out, for housing as the real estate market soon crested.

Seven years later, a "Walk Around Brooklyn" would generate a very different documentary. After all, the latest promotional video for Downtown Brooklyn is narrated by an actor with a plummy British accent.

On the Nets arena, the real story is 2011, not 2010

The recent round of reporting that the Nets won't move to Brooklyn until 2010 at the earliest is just bizarre. Yes, the Bergen Record reminded us yesterday that the Nets would've had to announce their intentions at the end of December had they intended to move in 2009, as they had long maintained.

But that one story led to a widely-reprinted AP story that even the New York Times published, even though the Times less than a month ago reported essentially the same story.

The Daily News, in its online coverage yesterday, added a highly-analytical quote from Forest City Ratner spokesman Loren Riegelhaupt: ""It's a very exciting thing for Brooklyn." Here's the Star-Ledger article.

Keep adding a year

Remember, back in March, Chuck Ratner of parent Forest City Enterprises seemed to admit to a 2010-11 schedule, then backpedaled, asserting, "We remain committed to our goal of opening the arena in time for the 2009-2010 NBA basketball season.” (Of course, the original goal was 2006.)

He was blowing smoke. We should take the current 2010 pledge with a grain of salt. Arena construction takes 24 months and can't begin until the pending lawsuits are cleared. As I wrote, it's possible they could be cleared by July 31, but under other scenarios, they will persist much longer.

Even if the legal challenges end soon, it still would take a scheduled three years to reconstruct bridges on Carlton Avenue and Sixth Avenue, and it would be a very unwise move to open the arena with a major traffic bottleneck next to it.

The Carlton Avenue bridge won't close until January 16. Three years from then would be mid-January, 2011.

Critic Huxtable on West Side yards plans: New York sells itself short

From the perspective of Atlantic Yards critics, the plan to develop the West Side yards (aka Hudson Yards) is inevitably superior, because it starts with an RFP rather than an anointed developer.

And indeed, Gov. Eliot Spitzer this week told the New York Observer:
We are pleased with the bids as they came in—in terms of the magnitude financially, the scale of the proposals, the creativity, the involvement of some of our most prominent real estate companies and private-sector employers who want to site headquarters there. … It reflects and justifies our confidence that if we did an RFP [request for proposals] for that site, we could elicit great response.

But critics have already offered several cautions. In New York magazine, Justin Davidson warned that finance will trump design, and New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff called it a "grim referendum on the state of large-scale planning in New York City."

A tough critique

And yesterday, Wall Street Journal (and former New York Times) architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, in a review headlined The Hudson Yards Proposals: Plenty of Glitz, Little Vision, was harsh, writing that only two of the five design teams "appear to have thought about it beyond the standard investment model blown up to gargantuan scale." (She never wrote about Atlantic Yards.)

And she was sardonic about the opportunity for public input and public presentations, calling it a "charade." She wrote:
We continue to find the spectacle of developers' promotional and political savvy riveting, knowing that success will depend on the deal and not the design.

The Extell bid

She observed:
Only two of the five proposals being considered are worth talking about. Extell Development's submission, by the architect Steven Holl, could have the unity, character and potential beauty of a Rockefeller Center, and it is unique in this respect. The scheme flies in the face of the current cant about pluralism and diversity and proves once again that architecture is about vision and ideas. While the other proposals include a massive truss over the yards that is meant to support the new construction, Mr. Holl substitutes a suspension deck. (The trains will continue to run underneath.) This bridge-like deck carries the lesser weight (and expense) of a park, while the structures surrounding it, handsomely grouped for views of the Empire State Building and the Hudson River, can be built on solid ground. You have to admire Excell's courage in going with a single gifted architect and putting all its chips on design.

(Graphics from New York Times)

Note that the conventional critique is that large projects deserve multiple architects so they don't look like projects, and even Frank Gehry wanted to bring in others for Atlantic Yards, but was stymied by his client. Ouroussoff in 2005 thought the one-architect model for AY worked well, though he's tempered his opinions.

The Brookfield bid

Huxtable also likes the plan that was introduced publicly not by an architect but by a noted landscape architect:
The plan offered by Brookfield Properties is the work of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and the landscape firm Field Operations... The fine environmental hand of Field Operations is easy to discern. The planning process starts with the nature of the site, addressing the huge variations in elevation from street to platform to waterfront, changes in grade that create a formidable barrier to the city around it. This is not easy to read in the models or in the other proposals with their emphasis on hype and heavyweight names.

Continuing the local streets through the site establishes the connective tissue. Instead of treating landscape as leftover space between buildings, Field Operations makes it the unifying factor, softening transitions and tying everything together. Recognizing Chelsea to the south, the plan connects the 30th Street frontage to existing neighborhood fabric and scale, with the High Line, the elevated park-in-progress on the abandoned train bed that skirts the area, incorporated as part of the action.

Government failure

Huxtable criticizes the city and public agencies (MTA, ESDC) for failing to plan for the West Side in general, "from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden to the Javits Center."

Her conclusion:
The disposition of public land is expedited on the developers' terms even though the land is the most powerful negotiating tool of all -- something so valuable in New York that builders would kill for it -- and the Hudson Yards are an estimated $7 billion prize. It is accepted that whatever the plans are for these vast tracts of squandered opportunity, they will ultimately be controlled, compromised, or scuttled by the winner of the financial contest that is at the heart of the matter. New York will continue to sell itself short all the way to the bank.

Imagine what she might have said about a project without even an RFP.

The Carlton Avenue bridge will close January 16

We've been waiting for two months for the announcement that the Carlton Avenue Bridge, located between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, will close for two years of reconstruction, and yesterday I was sent a document (below, and excerpt at right) that indicated it would close January 16.

(Updated: The announcement was posted on the ESDC web site. Later, the decision was pushed back to January 23. Click to enlarge.)

The announcement states that the one-way bridge will be closed "to accommodate upgrading the Long Island Rail Road's Vanderbilt Yard under the bridge, and also to construct a new bridge as part of the Atlantic Yards project."

Meanwhile, northbound traffic will be rerouted either west along Pacific Street to Sixth Avenue, which will become two-way for the interim or east along Pacific Street to Vanderbilt Avenue. We'll see how that works, but "[t]raffic agents will be assigned to facilitate the flow of traffic."

(Photo by Tracy Collins from Sixth Avenue and Dean Streets. Pacific Street borders the brick Spalding Building in the background.)

The clock starts

The bridge was supposed to close near the end of 2006, according to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, but that plan, obviously, has been delayed.

So this starts a three-year bridge reconstruction clock, given that the Sixth Avenue bridge would take a year to reconstruct. That suggests that, if the announced timetable is kept and the city and Forest City Ratner agree not to open the arena before infrastructure work is completed--a wise move, given the potential traffic nightmare--the earliest the arena could open would be in January 2011.

The announcement

Atlantic Yards: legal endgame in 2008?

Is Atlantic Yards on the rocks or steaming steadily and calmly ahead?

The answer is neither and, though it's surely a safer bet to back the big money (the developer and the city/state) behind the project, until final court decisions emerge regarding two cases challenging the project--cases in which oral arguments drew too little press attention--Atlantic Yards still faces a big question mark.

{See below for updates on the number of plaintiffs.]

Divergent predictions

City Council Member Letitia James went out on a limb (in the words of No Land Grab's Lumi Rolley) and offered the 2008 prediction, in Gotham Gazette, that "[t]he Atlantic Yards project will go down in flames." Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn suggested that "Atlantic Yards Seems To Be Failing."

That certainly didn't impress Curbed, which Monday declared, in the category of Biggest Neighborhood Controversies of the Year:
3) Atlantic Yards. As buildings fall, the opposition battles on. We're talking about the Nets season, of course.

And Forest City Enterprises executive Bob O'Brien said in September that the developer (parent of Forest City Ratner) expected the lawsuits challenging the project to be cleared by the first half of Fiscal Year 2008, which would be July 31, 2008.

Indeed, despite challenges in the credit market and delays in the project, the developer and government agencies, proceeding with pre-construction demolition and infrastructure work, are acting as if the project, though delayed, is hardly troubled.

There is steady change in the project footprint, but for now we should remember that the facts on the ground are finite: pre-construction work is not actual construction.

The environmental lawsuit

Lawsuits that challenge the environmental review for such projects rarely succeed, and Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society explained his organization's unwillingness to join in the suit by saying that in-house lawyers thought success was unlikely.

Then again, state Supreme Court Justice Joan A. Madden at times seemed skeptical of defense arguments during the epic hearing in the case last May. And she's taken months longer than expected to rule.

Does that delay offer any hints of her decision? Not really--only that she's taking quite seriously a lengthy record, with some important contested issues.

No matter which side wins, the loser undoubtedly will appeal and, all things being equal, the defendant Empire State Development Corporation has an edge in state courts, given the history of such cases. That doesn't mean all things would be equal, however.

Assuming Madden rules within the next weeks, it's not unreasonable to expect an appeal to be resolved sometime within the year, but not necessarily by the end of July.

The eminent domain case

The federal eminent domain case was expected to have a bigger chance at stopping the project, but it was dismissed in June by U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis. A three-judge appeals court panel heard the appeal in October and was skeptical toward the plaintiffs. So the defendants clearly have an edge.

Given that this is a dispute about law rather than a fact-finding enterprise, the record is a lot smaller than that faced by Madden. So a decision should come sooner rather than later.

If it's in favor of the plaintiffs, the defendants (state, city, developer, etc.), I speculate, would not risk the delay of a Supreme Court appeal but rather proceed with discovery and let the case move ahead with the hope that they still would prevail. Either way, the case almost certainly would not be resolved by the end of July.

Plaintiffs' dilemma

If, however, the court upholds Garaufis's decision, then the plaintiffs (13 originally, but the number may vary slightly) would be under the gun, and the group likely would split. Each member is undoubtedly motivated by varying degrees of principle, orneriness, and pragmatism.

[Updated: Despite a report in September that two plaintiffs had settled, they have not officially left the case, so the total for now is 14, given that one plaintiff was added. Lawyer Jennifer Levy states: "We represent six of the tenant-plaintiffs. Two have signed agreements – but we have not yet filed a Notice of Discontinuance with the Court. Two (and perhaps three) others are negotiating."

The cost of settlement with the rental tenants undoubtedly would be lower than with the plaintiffs who are owners. Of the 14 plaintiffs, six are rental tenants.]

Before any appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the ESDC might move toward condemnation or Forest City Ratner might make settlement offers to make the case go away. Some plaintiffs, as is typical in cases where the resolution is unclear, would be tempted to settle rather than face continued uncertainty.

That would leave the plaintiffs motivated most by principle and opposition to the project to consider the appeal, which would require significant fundraising by lawsuit organizer Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.

Then again, the appeal might attract funds from some ideological opponents of eminent domain, even though the case would not aim to overturn the Kelo vs. New London decision--hated by the right-wing and a lightning rod for reform among a wider ideological spectrum--but ask the court to give that decision additional teeth.

Supreme Court roulette

Any Supreme Court appeal would be a longshot; the court accepts only about two percent of the cases sent its way. The votes of four justices are required to hear a case, and almost certainly the four right-wing members of the court would be sympathetic to the plaintiffs.

But their decision to hear the case also would hinge on 1) whether they thought they could get Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, to join them on a case that seems to violate some of the indicia for legitimate use of eminent domain (e.g., a variety of development plans from the start) he set out in his Kelo concurrence and 2) whether they think the time is right to revisit eminent domain and/or what other eminent domain cases are also being appealed.

The state option

{Updated: A reader points out that the eminent domain plaintiffs also could file objections in state court under the Eminent Domain Procedure Law. The odds are long against the plaintiffs, but that could take up to a year to resolve.

Would a dismissal of the federal case lead the ESDC to simply proceed with condemnations, as a commenter below suggests is the most likely outcome? Perhaps, but only if the plaintiffs choose not to refile the case in state court.]

Timetable questions

So, as my speculation suggests, while it's possible that the lawsuits could be cleared in seven months, several scenarios challenge that.

Given the shifting construction estimates regarding the project by Forest City Ratner, which only recently acknowledged the Atlantic Yards arena wouldn't open in 2009, it's reasonable to be skeptical about the July 2008 prediction.

After all, Forest City Enterprises' Chuck Ratner last March acknowledged:
We are terrible, and we’ve been a developer for 50 years, on these big multi-use, public private urban developments, to be able to predict when it will go from idea to reality.

That's the best bet, for now.

Where's housing (and other urban issues) in the presidential campaign?

If you live in New York, there seems to be an enormous disconnect between issues facing New Yorkers and those stressed by the national media as the presidential campaign heats up in the heartland state of Iowa. Are the major issues (index from the New York Times) really limited to health care, abortion, climate change, immigration, Iraq, and Iran?

That absence extends to the rhetoric most often used in candidates' advertising, as shown in the sample word cloud from a New York Times graphic. Fortunately, City Limits has tried to right the balance, canvassing a range of New York experts regarding housing, and sending the questions to the candidates.

"Tried" is the operative words, since no answers were forthcoming. Still, City Limits, in an article yesterday headlined HOUSING 300 MILLION WELL: WHAT DO CANDIDATES PROPOSE?, tries to tease out some of their positions, noting:
While no candidate is emphasizing his or her housing agenda, several do have one. Sen. Barack Obama wants, among other housing ideas, to fully fund the Community Development Block Grant. Former Sen. John Edwards is proposing the creation of a million new Section 8 vouchers. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson wants to lower the down payment requirement for Federal Housing Administration loans.

A housing trust fund?

The federal government could become, as it once was, the source of significant money for subsidized housing. The article states:
The National Housing Trust Fund would use a portion of the profits from government-sponsored mortgage businesses like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fund state and local housing initiatives. The goal is to build or preserve 1.5 million units of housing over the next 10 years – a target that backers say will require federal funding of $5 billion a year.

Only fringe Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich is apparently a full supporter of this measure, though other Democrats support some smaller versions of a trust fund.

Is this a good idea? It certainly should be part of the presidential debate. On the one hand, many Americans on both sides of the party divide do not support an increased federal role in such housing support.

On the other, a debate might remind everyone that the single largest housing subsidy available is the mortgage-interest deduction. And that subsidy, as Roger Lowenstein explained in the 3/5/06 New York Times Magazine essay headlined Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction?, is quite regressive.

Maybe if New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg enters the race the discussion of issues would be broadened.