Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Wait a second: could a two-bedroom unit ( #406 ) at the condo building 550 Vanderbilt actually rent for just $3,390, barely 5% more than a two-bedroom at "100% affordable" 535 Carlton , which maxes at $3,223? See screenshot from StreetEasy below. After all, $3,390 would be less rent than currently requested for some one-bedroom units at 550 Vanderbilt. Sure, there's a glut in and around Downtown Brooklyn, but that seems a stretch. Actually, unit #406 was originally sold as a one-bedroom, with 788 square feet. According to the listing, this "is a huge flex 2 unit" and "Owner will put up a pressurize wall" to create a new bedroom.

Well, I've previously criticized the developers of Pacific Park Brooklyn for appropriating nearby blocks as part of their purported (and very oddly shaped) 22-acre "neighborhood." In February, they  pronounced  the new Four & Twenty Blackbirds store across Dean Street “in the heart of #PacificParkBK!" But you have to hand it to the office space provider Industrious: they got the message. They're not in Prospect Heights any more. The web site for their location on Dean Street, opposite the southeast block of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park and very near Four and Twenty Blackbirds, proclaims, "Work in Pacific Park, where brownstone Brooklyn meets downtown." Thing is, that view of 550 Vanderbilt in the background (or 535 Carlton in the other direction) by no means captures what users of that nifty deck will be finding over time: construction of two buildings directly across the street, and three larger buildings over the railyard behind them. Anot...

Not unlike the way the Prospect Heights Historic District was used to promote  550 Vanderbilt, or the building was described as an "oasis above the never-ending excitement of Brooklyn," let's look now at another tweet claiming " #550Vanderbilt fits right in with the existing charm of Brooklyn, while making a statement all by itself." Oh, really? As one person  responded , "It's a 20 story building surrounded by 3 story buildings. Maybe in China this is considered fits right in." The view in the above photo is southeast from Atlantic Avenue. Of course, all the other buildings planned for the project aren't visible, either as existing structures or mock-ups. The real context Consider the image below, from the opposite angle, looking north and west from the southeast, produced in September 2015 by the architects of the B12 (615 Dean) condo tower. That yet-unbuilt tower would be 287 feet , clearly much larger than 550 Vanderbilt (the...

The next Atlantic Yards/Pacific Quality of Life Meeting will be held: Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 6:00 PM Shirley Chisholm State Office Building 55 Hanson Place 1st Floor Conference Room Brooklyn, NY 11201 If you have any questions, concerns, or suggested agenda items contact the Empire State Development Atlantic Yards Team (aka, presumably, the Pacific Park Team) at atlanticyards@esd.ny.gov. The most recent of the bi-monthly meetings, in March, ran short and was relatively subdued. There were few questions about project operations and impacts, and very little for the project developers and arena operators to present. The agenda, at right, is completely vague, since "Updates" could mean anything. Pending questions For this meeting, we're still awaiting answers to larger and smaller pending questions, which include: what's the project schedule , given unspecified delays? what about the effort to sell (parts of) three building sites (B12, B13, B3)? ...

In a community notice, the Barclays Center has shared a version of its May 2017 event calendar, which consists of just three publicly ticketed events, all concerts. The Barbra Streisand concert should draw an older crowd and more vehicles. May is typically a slow month for the arena, at least when there are no playoff games, though this is as slow as May 2015 and not as slow as last year, the first year when there were two major league sports teams. But if they can't fill more dates, maybe they really don't want to lose the 44 events guaranteed by the hockey Islanders. Several graduations The list above doesn't fully capture the activity at the arena, though, because typically there are multiple privately ticketed graduations, which include: May 11, 9 am: Long Island University May 16, 10 am: NYU Tandon School of Engineering June 5, 9:30 am: Baruch College June 8, 9 am: Medgar Evers College (with Hillary Clinton speaking)  June 8, 4 pm: LaGuardia Community Col...

From the Commercial Observer ; emphasis added The Commercial Observer's Power 100 two years ago ranked MaryAnne Gilmartin and Bruce Ratner separately, at #79 and #73, and last year ranked the two leaders of Forest City Ratner together at #66. This year, ranked #67 are Gilmartin, described as President and CEO of Forest City New York, and David LaRue, President and CEO of Forest City Realty Trust, the parent company based in Cleveland. That indicates a double Ratner diminishment of sorts. First, Ratner, the New York firm's Executive Chairman, no longer makes the list. Well, he's been winding down somewhat, and has taken harsh criticism from activist investors. A new name for the New York subsidiary But what's up with "Forest City New York"? Well, the transition has begun without a grand announcement--and it's not yet achieved on the parent company's web site --but Forest City Ratner Companies is being renamed Forest City New York, I...

A roadblock in the development of the 27-story B15 (aka 664 Pacific) site, which is slated for market-rate rentals and a school across from the Barclays Center, has been removed, but plans for that tower remain unclear. Developer Greenland Forest City Partners was in a legal  dispute  with the owner of the adjacent 497 Dean property regarding the safety of planned excavation activities for 664 Pacific, as well as a license fee for access.  The case, as shown in the documents below, is now discontinued, which implies an out-of-court resolution.  What's next?  A spokesman for GFCP declined comment, so we don't know when and whether construction will start. (The market for rentals may also be a factor in deciding to build.) Perhaps the issue will come up at the upcoming Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Quality of Life meeting, next Tuesday, May 2, at 6 pm at 55 Hanson Place . As I wrote, given that the projected time for pre-construction and construct...

On 4/24/17, Forest City Realty Trust " announced the appointment of Z. Jamie Behar, CFA, and the nomination of Craig Macnab, two highly qualified and accomplished real estate executives with significant board experience, to serve on its Board of Directors." Behar, joining the board immediately, will fill the vacancy created when Bruce Ratner, executive chairman of Forest City's New York subsidiary, left the board at the end of 2016. As I suggested , the lack of encomia toward Ratner suggested the company was not super-pleased with the performance under Ratner. Macnab, an independent director, would succeed Stan Ross, who won't stand for re-election at Forest City's upcoming, if unscheduled, annual meeting. Activist investor still pushing That makes eight of 13 board members independent-- enough for the main activist investor, Scopia Capital, but not so for a smaller, feistier activist investor,   Land and Buildings Investment Management , which yesterday i...

Last September I wrote, That Resorts World Casino NYC Plaza: public amenity or promotional location?  Well, here's some more evidence .

According to the latest Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Construction Update (bottom), covering the two weeks beginning April 24 and circulated yesterday at 2:19 pm (a bit late) by Empire State Development after preparation by Greenland Forest City Partners (GFCP), the most notable work will occur around the arena block. At B3 (aka 38 Sixth), the removal of hoist run (exterior elevator) will begin, as will the installation of panels where the hoist run was. Also, removal of overhead protection may occur in certain locations. At B2 (aka 461 Dean), exterior site work to complete the sidewalk was to begin yesterday, with some work taking place overnight, as discussed in a previously distributed community notice . Outside B11 (aka 550 Vanderbilt), part of Dean Street will be repaved where the fence was removed. Saturday and after-hours work As in previous weeks, Saturday work could occur at B3, B11 (550 Vanderbilt), B12 (615 Dean), and B14. Then again, pretty much nothing has been ha...

NetsDaily, drawing on Sports Business Journal, yesterday reported YES ratings drop a precipitous 28 percent to worst in NBA :  "Brooklyn Nets games on YES Network posted a 0.33 rating, the lowest for any NBA team since the 2010-11 season when the Nets on YES averaged a 0.31." Apparently the Nets' ratings went up initially, thanks to the addition of Jeremy Lin, then plunged after his injury. NetsDaily suggests: Next season, YES will likely have a resurgence, with its two-season long dispute with Comcast resolved. That cost them 900,000 households. The Nets and YES will also have a new contract starting next season, with a substantial boost in rights payments. Attendance and gate count up NetsDaily noted that reported attendance rose to  15,429 , an uptick from 15,125 in 2015-16. That represents 28 of 30 NBA teams ahead of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Denver Nuggets, as reported by ESPN. NetsDaily also reported some statistics that aren't publicly posted...

Bloomberg reported 4/21/17, Billionaire Prokhorov to Sell 49% in Brooklyn Nets, RIA Reports : Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov wants to sell 49 percent of the Brooklyn Nets, the professional basketball team in New York that he fully owns, according to RIA Novosti. A buyer for the stake hasn’t been found yet, Prokhovov said, according to the news service. His spokesman didn’t comment immediately when contacted by Bloomberg News. Prokhorov said in November that he’d hired Allen & Co. to find a local minority investor for the Nets “to further strengthen the team’s New York presence in order to expand upon our business and community relationships.” He didn’t say at that time how much of the club he planned to sell. The news, apparently, is not that Prokhorov wants to sell, given the six-month effort, but that he wants to sell just less than one half. The more interesting question is how that local investor would "strengthen the team's New York presence" if th...

From a thoughtful profile in the April issue of Harper's magazine, headlined Defender of the Community: Bill de Blasio gambles on doing the right thing , from Alan Feuer: Casting himself as a kind of urban Robin Hood, the mayor gave his listeners a choice. He could, of course, sit back and do nothing as the market did to them what it had already done to hyper-gentrified neighborhoods like Williamsburg, in Brooklyn: bury them in glass condominiums and artisanal pizzerias. Or he could use his right hand to welcome builders to the area while employing his left to pick their pockets of apartments people could afford. “I have a huge critique of the free-enterprise system, but it’s not going anywhere,” he said. “There’s plenty of places in the city where someone can build a building in any way they want. That’s the reality of a capitalist system. My vision is that the government intervenes to the maximum extent possible to create balance.” But what if that balance is out of whack, as...

There's something a little ironic about the tweet at right from Pacific Park Brooklyn, touting the new condo building 550 Vanderbilt. The photo captures not just the brownish brick and large windows of the lower floors of the tower, but also the brown street sign Vanderbilt Av. A brown street sign indicates a historic district, and the small horizontal band delineates the Prospect Heights Historic Distric t, which was designated in 2009 after several years of activism. As  the map  below shows, Vanderbilt Avenue and Pacific Street, just across from 550 Vanderbilt, is the extreme upper right "finger" of the historic district, thus bookending the southeast block of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project. And that reminds us that the historic district designation came a few short years after the Atlantic Yards site, including many properties on that southeast block, was found to be blighted, to enable eminent domain. It's not typical for blight--"substan...

On Thursday, April 20, I appeared on the WBAI morning show, hosted by Michael Haskins, talking about my article for City Limits,  The Real Math of An Affordable Housing Lottery: Huge Disconnect Between Need and Allotment . My main message: whenever you read an article about an affordable housing lottery, and someone says there's a tremendous need for affordable housing, recognize there's a much higher chance for a middle-income household to win than a low-income household to win.

With the Barclays Center still awkward for hockey, Newsday reported yesterday, Islanders plan to submit bid for arena at Belmont Park, NHL’s Gary Bettman says : The Islanders plan to submit a bid to the state to build a new hockey arena at Belmont Park, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said Friday, marking the first public confirmation of the team’s stadium strategy. Saying that the Islanders “are reviewing their options,” Bettman also mentioned the land next to Citi Field in Willets Point as a potential landing spot for the Islanders and added that the renovated Nassau Coliseum is “not a long-term option.” “Yes, there is an RFP [request for proposal] for Belmont and I know they are going to participate in that,” Bettman said of the Islanders. “I believe that everyone thinks there is a terrific opportunity there, if not at Willets Point, to create a more hockey friendly environment for the Islanders, which is something [Islanders co-owner] Scott [Malkin] is committed to do.” Neither te...

From the New York Times, 4/20/17, From N.F.L. Owners to Florida Retirees, a Who’s Who of Inaugural Donors : A million dollars came from Nicholas A. Mastroianni III, whose family firm, the United States Immigration Fund, is a major force in the contentious federal EB-5 visa program . The program, which allows wealthy foreigners to seek United States residency in exchange for investments here, expires at the end of April; Mr. Trump has not yet taken a position on it. Yes, indeed, EB-5 backers want the status quo--or a slightly modified version---to remain. As I wrote in City Limits,  Emerging Kushner Deal Suggests What’s Wrong With U.S. Investor Visa Program (and with video linked on this blog ), Mastroianni's father ( updated ) made a damning admission regarding EB-5, which is supposed to create ten jobs per investor. Last November, when asked at a panel in Shanghai how EB-5 could escape allegations of fraud—after some high-profile scams and scandals—Mastroianni advised pickin...

According to a community notice circulated by Pacific Park Brooklyn, there will be overnight work Monday, April 24 through Friday, April 28. The sidewalk and road in front of 461 Dean (B2) will be replaced, with work lasting from 11 pm through 5 am.

Now this was an interesting headline from Bisnow, Hines Teeing Up 500K SF Spec Office At Atlantic Station , especially since it was followed by this: Hines is expected to go all-spec on a 500K SF office project called Atlantic Yards, connected to Atlantic Station. Hines senior managing director John Heagy said the developer will look to break ground in the second quarter of 2018 on a dual-building project that will use brick instead of the typical steel-and-glass towers seen at Atlantic Station. After all, there's a spec office tower to be built at Site 5 of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, and it's expected to be a dual building project . But it's not called Atlantic Yards anymore, and there's no Brooklyn project called Atlantic Station (though there are malls called Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center). Ah, this is Atlanta. Only just so many names to go around, I guess.

In November 2016, I reported on subleases for the "100% affordable" 535 Carlton and 38 Sixth towers that seemed to assign most of the low-income units to the lower floors of each tower. For example, at 535 Carlton, the 15 neediest households, paying $589 for a one-bedroom and $713 for a two-bedroom, were assigned to the three lowest floors (2-4). The other 75 low-income units were distributed more extensively, but concentrated in the lower half of the building.  While that wasn't the "poor door" or even the "poor floor," I called it "poor-er floor." Pushback, but no documentation A representative of the developer said that was not accurate, but wouldn't provide specifics.  When the question was raised in public that month, Forest City Ratner's Ashley Cotton said , "And we're working with HDC [New York City Housing Development Corporation], and it will be much more spread all around. The final determinat...

I'll be on WBAI/99.5 this morning at around 7:30 a.m. to talk about my housing lottery article. My City Limits article, headlined  The Real Math of An Affordable Housing Lottery: Huge Disconnect Between Need and Allotment , was spurred by two things: the common-sense suspicion that many more lower-income people apply for housing lotteries and my increasing frustration with the use of catch-all statistics by the press and others. (After all, the developers of Hunters Point South had to advertise and assemble a street team to recruit middle-income households.) So I got the data and drilled down. As I wrote, such statistics camouflage how low-income applicants face crushing odds compared to middle-income ones: Exactly 92,743 households (not quite 95,000) entered the lottery for the "100% affordable"  535 Carlton  tower, city data show. But only 2,203, according to City Limits' analysis, were eligible for 148 middle-income apartments, such as one-bedrooms renti...

In January, the online publication Bklynr wrote, in Lottery Opens Tomorrow For 300+ Affordable Units At 38 Sixth Avenue : Demand for affordable housing in other Pacific Park buildings has been profound. According to the developer, the lottery for 461 Dean Street received more than 84,000 applications for 181 below-market units; and 535 Carlton Avenue’s lottery drew roughly 95,000 applications for 298 apartments. Similarly, Curbed called some 179,000 applications for affordable units in those two towers a "tremendous response." That's par for the course. A 12/15/15 New York magazine article, Affordable Housing Could Look Like This , related, "How long were the odds? There were 925 units available in the complex, and 92,925 applicants — a population roughly the size of Albany — entered the lottery." And a front-page New York Times article, 1/30/15, Long Lines, and Odds, for New York’s Subsidized Housing Lotteries , similarly recounted long odds and quoted ...

It's a pretty impressive image , looking south from the north side of Atlantic Avenue, right? It suggests that the 202-foot tall (plus a 40 foot addition  for mechanicals) condo building 550 Vanderbilt stands alone, lording above low-rise (but exciting!) Prospect Heights/Brooklyn. More realistically... But that's a very temporary vista, and one looking west from the east side of Vanderbilt Avenue would show 535 Carlton in the background. Consider the image below, almost from the opposite angle, looking north and west from the southeast, produced in September 2015 by the architects of the B12 (615 Dean) condo tower. That yet-unbuilt tower would be  287 feet , clearly much larger than 550 Vanderbilt (the tower at lower right). As is the 313-foot tower (B10) planned just north of 550 Vanderbilt, to be built only after a deck is finished over the railyard. Also larger would be most of the towers in Pacific Park Brooklyn.

The top is done by now It was inevitable, wasn't it, that apartments at the 278-unit condo building 550 Vanderbilt would be available for rent. Surely some owners bought units as an investment. And perhaps developer Greenland Forest City Partners will rent out unsold units. So now four units are for rent, via StreetEasy , for relatively affordable prices, not much above the rents at 461 Dean, which was built for rentals only and has 50% of the units below market. That suggests the current   glut in and around Downtown Brooklyn doesn't offer as much of a premium for a fully equipped condo building. Also, perhaps, that apartments in a not-quite-finished building are harder to rent. Note that two of the units have no fee attached, which suggests the owners are willing to absorb the real estate agent's commission--again signs of a buyers' market. Estimating the math It also suggests, based on my calculations explained below, that the buyers renting out u...

So Toronto's Metro tabloid offers a short 4/10/17 article,  It rarely pays to play when sports teams call for cash: Expert : Does it ever make sense to subsidize sports? We asked economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of Circus Maximus and No Boston Olympics. He says the numbers often don’t add up.  ...Zimbalist says emotional arguments to subsidize the team can be made, but don’t substitute for a business case. “If you’re concerned at a social or cultural level, then I would say you have to think about subsidies. But don’t think about subsidies because of an economic impact.” And here's the key paragraph: Zimbalist doesn’t oppose all sports subsidies. He says stadiums as redevelopment catalysts can make sense, pointing to San Diego, Calif., and Brooklyn, N.Y. But those are the minority, and “the devil is in the details.” He warns against subsidies by another name, like waiving property taxes, interest-free loans or introducing a special tax or fee to support the team. T...

From a 2/3/17 profile in Multifamily Executive of Forest City Realty Trust CEO David LaRue, headlined LaRue Pilots Forest City Through an Aggressive Transformation : “The mall portfolio didn’t really have a clear role in a company that’s focusing on their core expertise, which is mixed-use placemaking development that often entails partnering with local government to regentrify an area,” says Sheila McGrath, senior managing director covering equity REITs and real estate operating companies at Evercore ISI, an investment banking advisory firm. I'm not sure exactly what "regentrify" means--the few cites I've seen direct back to "gentrify." A combination of "redevelop" and "gentrify"? (Technically, "regentrify" would suggest gentrifying areas that had once gentrified, then de-gentrified during economic decline.) But McGrath has it right in describing the developer's role in "partnering with local government."