
At about 23:55 of the segment, a caller brought up the Atlantic Yards project. Filler concluded that Jacobs most likely would've disliked the project and Goldberger also leaned in that direction, though with more caveats. I think both would have been more confident in Jacobs's likely opposition had they understood more about the project and had considered Jacobs's likely reaction to past Forest City Ratner projects. I'll examine that below, following the transcript.
Transcript


Brian Lehrer: Paul, do you know if Jane Jacobs actually commented on that program before she died-- (Current site plan at right, from the Empire State Development Corporation's Final Scope.)
Paul Goldberger: I do not know. It would be fascinating to know about that, actually. Obviously, one would assume that she would not have been enthusiastic about it. On the other hand, she also had a fascinating way of sometimes confounding all of us by looking at things freshly. One thing that I know Jane Jacobs did not like and was rather impatient with was the kind of reflexive formulaic application of her ideas. She and I once talked about that whole trend of replacement of huge suburban covered shopping malls with these sort of new pseudo-village places, with fake streets that also pretend to be little ersatz villages. Which one might think of as a way in which some of her ideas have actually percolated into the commercial mainstream and, indeed, they were that. But she was rightly offended by the fakery of it, by the pretense, and the utter disingenuousness of it.

Brian Lehrer: Even though, Martin, itās a bunch of high-rises down there and it cuts off neighborhoods in the way that Rose says, it is mixed use in a certain sense, because--
Martin Filler: --āEven though.ā I love the way she started--
Brian Lehrer: -- itās an arena and residential development for various income levels, as well as the office towers and commercial space. Could it have been something she would be drawn to, on that basis?

But what is appalling about the scheme is the fact that I think that the city has kind of rolled over and played dead on the kind of redlining, as it were, of what gets to stay and what gets to go. And I did not see sufficient attention being paid to the low-income residents of the neighborhood and, furthermore, even if you find them another place to live, it doesnāt have that wonderful energizing sense of mixtures of people of diverse incomes living in close proximity.
What Jacobs might have thought

She might have worried that the project would create a superblock, with the closing of Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues. She might not have been as conclusory as the WNYC caller about how the project cuts off neighborhoods--project proponents point out that the sunken railyard also cuts off neighborhoods, which is why development of some sort makes sense.
But she probably would've looked closely at the new planning principle added to the Final Scope, possibly a response to alternative plans that would have continued the street grid from Fort Greene: "Creation of visual and pedestrian corridors from Fort Greene going south into and through the proposed projectās open space and connecting surrounding neighborhoods." However, visual and pedestrian corridors do not a street grid make, and the map above from the Final Scope does not seem that different from the plan in the Draft Scope, except for some changes in the east side of the project.

Would Atlantic Yards truly be a mixed-use project? Jacobs might simply have consulted the 11/6/05 New York Times, which, examining the changes in jobs and housing, called the project essentially a large residential development with an arena and a relatively small amount of office and retail space attached to it.
Pregentrified?
Critic Filler, I believe, was fuzzy in describing the area of the Atlantic Yards project as pregentrified. The neighborhoods around the project have gentrified significantly, though there is a significant component of subsidized housing, from row houses to high-rises, north of the project border within the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA).

Indeed, Filler's question of whether "sufficient attention [is] being paid to the low-income residents of the neighborhood" is a complex one. The several dozen rent-stabilized tenants currently in the footprint could ultimately move back into the project after vacating their buildings; however, their transitional rent would only be subsidized for three years, and they'd have to desist from any criticism of the project.

Affordable housing
For Atlantic Yards, the affordable housing component was negotiated by the developer and ACORN, rather than any public representatives, and the scale of the project is up to the unelected Empire State Development Corporation rather than an elected city body. So Jacobs, I think, would want more public discussion of the scale, via efforts like the mock-up (above) by OnNYTurf.
Also, Filler's comment could be examined in terms of the project's potential effect on not merely on affordable housing in the project footprint, but on displacement via rising rents in the surrounding areas.
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