Skip to main content

Featured Post

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park infographics: what's built/what's coming/what's missing, who's responsible, + project FAQ/timeline (pinned post)

Prospect Heights blight, 2009?

From the New York Post, in a puffy article headlined In the Heights:
Talk to almost anyone affiliated with Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, and their unofficial line on Vanderbilt Avenue is that it’s what Cobble Hill’s Smith Street was 10 years ago. By that, they mean it’s primed to become the local go-to stretch for everything from a cup of coffee and a seat outside to a locally sourced gourmet dinner. And residential developers are also a big part of this thoroughfare’s land grab.

Well, we know that state agencies have enormous discretion to declare property "substandard and insanitary," so the Empire State Development Corporation's blight designation may pass legal muster. But that hardly means the neighborhood is "shot to hell," in the parlance of urban planners like Lynne Sagalyn.

The AY effect

The Post reports:
...“[Atlantic Yards is] not even on my radar,” says finance guy/Brooklyn blogger Kenny Eng, who bought a 1,450-square-foot three-bedroom in the Washington for $545,000 three years ago. “The part [of the Atlantic Yards site] that’s closer to me, on Vanderbilt, will probably be a parking lot for the construction workers, so I’m not too thrilled about that.”

After a moment, he adds: “That whole project is 10 to 15 years off, even more. Who knows? I could be gone by then.”


Actually, there might be a parking lot for construction workers very soon. But towers on the eastern end of the project site near Vanderbilt might indeed be a decade off, or longer.

Comments