From City Limits: Ever-Shifting Pacific Park Plan Highlights Uncertainty of Big Development Schemes

I have an article in City Limits today, Ever-Shifting Pacific Park Plan Highlights Uncertainty of Big Development Schemes, which begins:

A looming affordable housing deadline in Brooklyn may be met—but only because state requirements are far looser than what Brooklynites were promised regarding the project launched in 2003 as Atlantic Yards.
A newly acquired document discloses a plan, otherwise kept under wraps, for the developer of the vexed project, called Pacific Park since 2014, to meet an ever-closer deadline: building the required 2,250 affordable housing units by May 31, 2025 .
Only 782 affordable units have been built, in three of four completed towers, and housing advocates have raised questions about the developer’s capacity to meet that deadline. After all, recently announced plans to start four more towers this year and next would deliver only about 60 percent of the required total.
The solution–to build three additional towers, including an “100 percent affordable” rental building, likely with 450-plus units—has not been described publicly by developer Greenland Forest City Partners nor Empire State Development, the state authority overseeing the project They’ve both resisted explaining how the 2,250 total would be reached, despite requests from some members of a new body aimed to increase project transparency.
The new details about Greenland Forest City’s plan were made available not in Brooklyn but half a world away in China, as part of a document discussing unbuilt project sites, treated as collateral for immigrant investors seeking green cards under the federal government’s EB-5 program.

Why is this important? Because the units, based on past performance, may be less affordable than promised, and the timing indicates that the project will not be built by 2025, as was once professed.

For the rest of the article, go to City Limits.