Even though the City Council is much more exercised about tax breaks for Madison Square Garden than Atlantic Yards, City Council Members Letitia James and David Yassky yesterday again called attention to the city's subsidies for AY. While the Council approved Resolution 90, which asks the state to end the 20-year-old property tax exemption for MSG, James and Yassky introduced an amendment that would withhold tax breaks and subsidies for Atlantic Yards. "If the Council thinks subsidizing MSG is a bad deal for the City and State, they should take another look at the tax breaks and subsidies being offered to the proposed Atlantic Yards Development: they are even worse," James and Yassky said in a statement. It didn't make it past a council committee, but it may recur in the future. Such tax breaks and subsidies may indeed be much larger, as MSG pointed out (graphic at right), but they are not quite comparable, because they include a whole suite of breaks. In fact, th...
This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, concerns the $6B project to build the Barclays Center arena & 15-16 towers at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park Brooklyn in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland USA bought a 70% stake going forward. In 2018, once the arena & four towers were built, Greenland bought out most of Forest City's stake, then sold three leases to other companies.