Down the memory hole: Atlantic Yards "has become an anchor of downtown Brooklyn"?

From the 2019 book Zoning: A Guide for 21st-Century Planning, edited by Elliott Sclar, Bernadette Baird-Zars, Valerie Stahl, and Lauren Ames Fischer. The summary:

Zoning is at once a key technical competency of urban planning practice and a highly politicized regulatory tool. How this contradiction between the technical and political is resolved has wide-reaching implications for urban equity and sustainability, two key concerns of urban planning. Moving beyond critiques of zoning as a regulatory hindrance to local affordability or merely the rulebook that guides urban land use, this textbook takes an institutional approach to zoning, positioning its practice within the larger political, social, and economic conflicts that shape local access for diverse groups across urban space.

...Where and why has zoning, an act of physical land use regulation, replaced social planning? These questions, grounded in examples and cases, will prompt readers to think critically about the potential and limitations of zoning. By reforging the important links between zoning practice and the concerns of the urban planning profession, this text provides a new framework for considering zoning in the 21st century and beyond.

About Atlantic Yards

Overall the two pages devoted to Atlantic Yards and Barclays are skeptical, noting that Empire State Development Corporation (now simply Empire State Development) can override local zoning.

But there's an odd statement:

Atlantic Yards, now Pacific Park, has become an anchor of downtown Brooklyn. The development reveals that while state intervention is sometimes necessary to site essential infrastructure projects, it can also subvert local communities' ability to define, defend, and protect their personal values through local land ordinances.

(Emphasis added)

While the Barclays Center, at the edge of (and, arguably, extending) Downtown Brooklyn, might be said to have become an anchor, the very unfinished Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park could hardly be called an anchor, whether of Downtown Brooklyn or Prospect Heights, the edge of which encompasses nearly all the project site (except for Site 5).

Not until development is completed over the Vanderbilt Yard can any anchoring impact be assessed.

Also, there's an unresolved tension regarding the role and impact of local communities's decisionmaking. Surely, they deserve a voice, especially regarding projects that have such a large impact.

The impact of that voice probably should differ depending on the public or private nature of development. (After all, locals may be wary of affordable housing or public housing,)

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park was pitched as a public-private development. I've argued, and would continue to argue, that it's more of a private-public one.

That suggests a large voice for locals, especially regarding the most private aspects of the project, and perhaps less for the more public ones. My thought analogously derives from a paper by Lynne Sagalyn and Martin Gold, giving greater credence to eminent domain actions that are more public than private, and vice versa.