Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

I have an op-ed in today's New York Daily News headlined The billion-dollar Belmont bad bet: A new arena will compete with Nassau's county-owned Coliseum. Here's the start:
A new, $1.18 billionarena project at Belmont Park on the western edge of Nassau County seems nearly a done deal, thanks to Gov. Cuomo, who’d love to cut a ribbon on a new home for the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders and see an adjacent retail and entertainment complex built.
But does Long Island really need a second arena barely eight miles from the recently renovated and downsized Nassau Coliseum, once the Islanders’ home?
State documents confidently claim that the new arena, with the Isles as anchor tenant, would happily coexist with the county-owned Coliseum. But there’s no backing evidence, and a closer look suggests that the older venue — officially now known as NYCB Live, Home of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum — faces a significant threat.
It’s not just that the new arena would…

There's a new health center at 38 Sixth Avenue, the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park tower at the southeast corner of the Barclays Center, but the same questions I raised 7/20/17 as the project percolated--who's paying and who's served?--remain.

I missed this press release untily Bklynr distilled it into a roundup of press releases  1/18/19:
NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Group Brooklyn opened a new Medical Group Office at 38 6th Avenue late last year, right by the Barclay Center. It provides adult and pediatric orthopedic, radiology, podiatry, neurosurgery and physical medicine and rehabilitation services. Procedures offered on site include X-rays, casting, blood drawing, fluoroscopic and other pain management modalities and nerve blocks. The medical group will also soon expand clinical services to include comprehensive urological services. Urologists will perform vasectomy, lithotripsy, urodynamic testing, cystoscopy and other procedures on site. Additionally, NYP Medical Group…

The Brooklyn Nets, after the second-best record in the league since Dec. 7, are now sixth in the NBA's Eastern Conference and thus playoffs-bound, as I noted on Twitter.

And that would certainly help the bottom line of the Barclays Center, since extra games, especially ones that sell lots of tickets, bring more revenues.

As noted in the response to me on Twitter, the New York Islanders are also playoffs-bound, ranked fifth in the National Hockey League and leading the Metropolitan Division.

So that would be good for the bottom line of BSE Global, which operates both the Barclays Center and the Nassau Coliseum, where the Islanders have been splitting their season.

Actually, it's not an even split--nearly all the end-of-season games are in Nassau: 15 of 18. However, the Barclays Center has more luxury suites--and more seats.

Attendance at the Barclays Center has been generally poor, sometimes under 10,000, while the Coliseum has often sold out, or come close to selling out, its …

Judy Rapfogel Is Back In Albany With A Big Lobbying Contract, the Forward's Josh Nathan-Kazis reported 1/14/19. It's $20,000 per month for a year.

Rapfogel, of course, was the former Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, convicted of corruption in 2016. And she's married to William Rapfogel, former executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a charity powerhouse, who was pleaded guilty in 2014 to stealing from his employer.

And they were connected to Forest City Ratner in a couple of ways: the Met Council gave executive Bruce Ratner an award, presented by Silver; Michael Rapfogel, who's now partnering with his mother at GrandRap Strategies, was hired by Forest City; the developer directed profits from a cantorial concert to the Met Council; Silver and William Rapfogel attempted to steer a Lower East Side urban renewal project to Forest City; and Forest City and the Met Council later partnered (unsuccessfully) on a bid f…

The latest Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Construction Update (bottom), covering the two weeks beginning Monday, Jan. 21, 2018, was circulated at 11:41 am Friday (lead time) by Empire State Development (ESD) after preparation by Greenland Forest City Partners.

There are few changes from the previous update, given that vertical construction is not expected to start until spring, and the ongoing work is infrastructure or demolition.

But there will be some more evening work, presumably at the east end of the Vanderbilt Yard:
East Portal SOE [support of excavation] and general excavation activities to Yard Grade elevation will include a night shift between the hours of 3:30 pm and 12:00 am, Monday through Friday during this reporting period. Necessary light/dust/noise mitigation measures will be utilized. This night activity can be expected to continue for the next 4 weeks. Also, there will now be mechanical demolition at 728 Atlantic Avenue, one of the two buildings that "bump" s…

I have an article in The Bridge, Lessons of Rezoning: When It Doesn’t Work Out as Planned, which begins:
Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City (LIC) have been utterly transformed since city policy toward those neighborhoods changed in 2004 and 2001, respectively. Numerous towers have sprouted after rezonings unlocked permission to build big on formerly low-rise industrial or commercial space. By one account, LIC is the nation’s fastest-growing neighborhood.
But those new towers almost exclusively contain apartments, rather than the expected result of mainly office space. The failure to plan for new residents means overcrowded public schools and insufficient open space, according to a recent report from the Municipal Art Society (MAS), a longstanding advocate for a more livable city. The neighborhoods are “whiter, wealthier, and more crowded than ever.”
In Downtown Brooklyn, a key piece of open space, 1.15-acre Willoughby Square Park—to be built over a parking garage—didn’t materializ…

The Nets are not just, by far, the better team in New York basketball, but also, thanks to a surprising run of wins against strong teams, a playoff contender.

How Nets went from worst trade ever to Kings of New York basketball, by Anthony Puccio, notes:
[Owner Mikhail] Prokhorov's five-year plan had suddenly turned into one of the biggest failures in NBA history and they had to dig their way out.

It's February of 2016. Lionel Hollins and Billy King had officially been axed, and it was time for Dmitry Razumov to introduce new GM Sean Marks to the media. Razumov explains how he was "proud" of the hiring and later echoes something the Nets probably should have done from the start:

"We didn't rush."

In other words, they didn't hire the big name. They hired the right guy. Since, then, strong hires (coach Kenny Atkinson), trades (D'Angelo Russell), draft choices (Caris LeVert), and more.

A bit of mythmaking

Strong piece on rebuild of Brooklyn Nets...
tho…

The next bi-monthly Atlantic Yards Quality of Life meeting is Tuesday, January 22, at the usual location, starting at 6 pm:
55 Hanson Place
1st Floor Conference Room
Brooklyn, NY 11217 The agenda (right) typically reveals nothing beyond the entities making presentations, so here are some questions that should/might come up.

Timetable questions: short term

What's the timetable for the next buildings, which would represent the first new building start since June 2015? (The ongoing construction work has otherwise been infrastructure.)

Note that B4 (18 Sixth) and B15 (664 Pacific, with school) are expected to start this year, but no specific schedule has been announced.

B12 and B13, the two remaining sites on the project's southeast block, also are expected to start this year or next.

Timetable questions: longer term

What about the full project, which has until 2035--or 2025 for the affordable units?

There's a long percolating plan for Site 5 and unspecified plans for six towers…

Shanghai-based Greenland Holdings Group, the parent of Greenland USA (the main Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park developer as of now), may not be rising quite as fast as it once projected on the Fortune Global 500, but Forbes magazine last year had some pretty good news.

Forbes in 2018 ranked Greenland #341 on the Global 2000 list of largest public companies. Fortune ranked the firm #252, up 25 spots from the previous year's #277--though that was not far above a previous rank.

But Forbes--more on this below, since I have questions--also ranked Greenland as the fastest-growing company in the world, based on revenue growth, which was surely related to the firm's rapid overseas expansion.

That ranking, through 2017, did not reflect the company's recent pullbacks from investment in California. Nor could it encompass Greenland's subsequent decision to sell development leases in Pacific Park Brooklyn, a sign of caution, which raises questions about its current ambitions. So even …