"Anticipate" in the Ratner lexicon = "the placeholder date we don't believe but think we can get away with"

I think the word anticipate needs to be added to the Atlantic Yards Lexicon, since it does not, to Forest City Ratner, mean foresee, but rather "the placeholder date we don't believe but think we can get away with."

From the 4/1/06 Brooklyn Paper, headlined BRUCE: I WILL BUILD ARENA:

Despite months of delays and false starts in realizing his vision of building a Brooklyn arena for his New Jersey Nets, Bruce Ratner remains convinced that everything is going according to plan.

“These things do get delayed, [but] I have a very a good track record of getting things done,” Ratner told The Brooklyn Papers and other reporters before a Nets game at the Meadowlands last week.

“You look at the kind of development [Forest City Ratner Company] does, almost everything winds up taking longer than we anticipate. This is how it is … Normally, there wouldn’t be a matter of great consequence [but] here everybody [is] watching, asking questions … So it’s not unexpected from my point of view.”

Ratner originally predicted that the Frank Gehry-designed arena — at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues in Downtown Brooklyn — would be finished in time for the 2007 season.

Now he says it will be finished for 2009.

(Emphasis added)

Poor prediction

In a 5/4/08 Daily News op-ed, Ratner described goals and plans to get the arena and associated towers going, concluding:

We anticipate finishing all of Atlantic Yards by 2018.

Last September, WNYC reported, in Ratner Abandons 10-Year Timeline for Atlantic Yards:

Developer Bruce Ratner said Tuesday morning what many of his critics and even some of his associates have been saying for years: there is no way the entire Atlantic Yards project will be done in 10 years.

He said the 10-year timeline was always misunderstood. It was never meant to be more than a best-case scenario to be used in environmental impact statements.

“That was really only an analysis as to what the most serious impacts [would be], if all the other planned development in downtown Brooklyn happened right away,” Ratner says. “It was never supposed to be the time we were supposed to build them in.”