Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Click on graphic to enlarge. This is post-dated to stay at the top of the blog. It will be updated as announced configurations change and buildings launch. The August 2014 tentative configurations proposed by developer Greenland Forest City Partners will change, and the project is already well behind that tentative timetable.

Ah, the (spoon-fed real-estate) press just can'tget enough of the garden at 550 Vanderbilt. See Hippie Amenities With a High-End Twist, from tomorrow's New York Times Real Estate section, posted yesterday:
Just as Birkenstocks and bee pollen have come back in style, so have crunchy lifestyle concepts, from yoga and meditation to composting and home fermentation. And with veganism, Waldorf schools, doulas and healing crystals shifting from far out to very much in fashion, a growing number of New York luxury buildings have embraced the hallmarks of 1970s hippiedom with a high-end twist. Look for amenities like rooftop gardens, kitchen composters, art and meditation studios, bike shares, infrared saunas, even an adult treehouse.
“Especially in Brooklyn, the concrete jungle is not the atmosphere people are aiming for,” said Ashley Cotton, an executive vice president of Forest City New York, whose recently opened condo in Prospect Heights, 550 Vanderbilt, developed in partnership w…

It's not uncommon for the schedule of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park-related meetings to change, and once a previous one has been postponed, the rest get pushed back. And that's exactly what happened.

A message from Empire State Development: the next Quality of Life Meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 19 instead of the previously scheduled September 6 date. This is an opportunity to raise questions about project operations and progress. Sometimes new information emerges.
Atlantic Yards / Pacific Park Quality of Life Meeting
Tuesday, September 19, 2017 @ 6 pm
Shirley Chisholm State Office Building
55 Hanson Place
1st Floor Conference Room
Brooklyn, NY 11217

No RSVP is required, but people can send project-related questions, concerns, or suggested agenda items for the Quality of Life meeting to atlanticyards@esd.ny.gov.

When the lottery for units at the "100% affordable" 535 Carlton opened a year ago, a lot of people were encouraging applications.

So I guess it shouldn't have been surprising that Empire State Development, the state authority overseeing/shepherding Atlantic Yards, alerted people to an upcoming information session.

But I was surprised to see the state reproduce the web page from developer Greenland Forest City Partners, including such nonsense as "Pacific Park is Brooklyn’s newest neighborhood." So I copied it.

Welcome to 535 Carlton, Brooklyn’s Latest Affordable Rentals - ESD Message by AYReport on Scribd

A few recent books I've been reading--including Neil deMause's The Brooklyn Wars: The Stories Behind the Remaking of New York's Most Celebrated Borough and Kay Hymowitz's The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back--say interesting (and contradictory) things about Brooklyn, and deserve a longer assessment, along with a third book, Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.

Moskowitz's overall arguments are worth engaging, but for now I'd like to address one specific paragraph regarding Atlantic Yards. (deMause's book more extensively addresses Atlantic Yards, if inevitably tilted to the early part of the controversy, while Hymowitz's book goes elsewhere.)

Moskowitz's brief focus on Atlantic Yards is another example of how (inevitably?) complex things get boiled down awkwardly or incorrectly for future consumption. I've seen this in other books, as well. It's unfortunate…

In an interview headlined Toward Being a Better Gentrifier, CityLab's Brentin Mock interviewed the (out of NYC) academics (two white, one black) who wrote the new book Gentrifier about their experiences. And the interview complicates some easy bromides.

"The problem isn't gentrification: It's that my neighbors are getting locked up, or they are being over-policed, or there aren't any schools, or there’s lead poisoning in the neighborhood, or there aren’t any long-term rentals anymore," says Jason Patch. Those are things to organize about. (Or, I'd suggest, any social action that leads to solidarity and more civic and communal resources.)

"Evictions can happen due to disinvestment in a neighborhood, and [they can also] happen because of over-investment," says John Joe Schlichtman. " Eviction happens because of disconnection from the rest of the city and a neighborhood’s reconnection to the rest of the city. Militarized policing can happen du…

In an April interview, New York magazine critic (and author) Justin Davidson, asked about New York City's future, responded:
The immediate question is how it can cope with an affordability crisis. I wish I knew the answer, but I emphatically don't. I think that the solutions to the question are largely out of local control. I think we're talking about large-scale economic mechanisms and national, international policy. And, perhaps, regional policy, a focus of the Regional Plan Association and other planners. The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: New York, released recently by the George Washington University School of Business's Center for Real Estate & Urban Analysis in partnership with Smart Growth America, recently pointed out that "just 2.4% of the total regional land mass in New York is considered 'walkable urban.'" The full report is embedded at bottom.

And that scarce land is far more valuable than the suburbs. According to the announcement:
Despite the…

According to the latest Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Construction Update (bottom), covering the two weeks beginning August 14, median restoration work on Atlantic Avenue between Fort Greene Place and Sixth Avenue will likely begin during this week.

That's one block, bordering the Barclays Center and also the perimeter of the Atlantic Center mall (but not the Atlantic Terminal mall).

The MPT (maintenance and protection of traffic) will be shifted, according to approved plans (presumably by the Department of Transportation), starting on or about Tuesday 8/15/17 ,to accommodate the median restoration work. However, the traffic flow will still contain three westbound and two eastbound lanes. The time frame to complete the work was not stated.

Also, relocation of the Vanderbilt Yard site access ramp on Pacific Street will begin during this reporting period. Contractor and LIRR access to the site will be via the LIRR Entrance on Atlantic Avenue.

The update was circulated Friday at 10:18 …

We all hear about "Brooklyn the brand," or casual references to "Brooklyn" in popular culture. Remember, marketing for 550 Vanderbilt claims "Everything you love about Brooklyn."

But that "Brooklyn" is only a piece of the larger borough.

A new effort to reframe how we think about the borough--all the boroughs--comes from the urban-focused artificial intelligence studio Topos, in this Medium post (and described in FastCoDesign):
With the exception of Queens/Brooklyn, all boroughs are separated from one another by water. The implications and limitations of this physical partitioning of land have changed considerably since the initial formation of the boroughs. New York City is now connected by over 2000 bridges and tunnels, the vast majority of which were built after 1898.
...Furthermore, we were interested in going beyond more familiar demographic viewpoints to capture the personality of a place, and what it feels like to actually be there. In a s…