The Brooklyn Way? The "traditional way in which large projects are done" is the dubious legacy of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park and the Barclays Center

We're hearing a lot about The Brooklyn Way, the decade-later update of #HelloBrooklyn, the Brooklyn Nets' attempt to glom onto borough cred if nothing else.

Well, it reminded me of another phrase from 2012: "the traditional way in which large projects are done."

So let's go back to the 10/01/12 Charlie Rose interview with Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center developer Bruce Ratner. The summary:

Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of the Brooklyn Nets, Irina Prokhorova, director of the Prokhorov Fund, Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of BAM, and Bruce Ratner discuss the development, design, and cultural impact of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

A civic developer?

As the host fawned over Forest City's marquee projects and asked about “Atlantic City Yards,” a beaming Ratner contrasted himself to rivals, claiming they eschewed "civic" development but instead "look at more, I think, the economics."

At 22:05 of the full video (excerpted below) Rose tossed Ratner a softball: "What's the biggest misconception about you that you would like for people to know is simply not--"

"That's a very good question," Ratner said. "I think that this idea that the intent was really to do something great for Brooklyn, it really was. It was not, you know, economic, it was not all this,  it was really trying to do something great for Brooklyn."

 

As I wrote at the time, that, of course, is why Ratner renegotiated deals so often and why he wanted to build a "airplane hangar" arena design before public outcry forced him to change his plans. And why arena concessions cost so much. 

Today, of course, concession prices are far higher and the first season's $15 Nets tickets were gone because, as Ratner's deputy Brett Yormark said, "we are a business."

"I love Brooklyn," Ratner continued, to Rose. "I've been working in Brooklyn for 25 years, chairman of BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] for ten years. I like every aspect of Brooklyn. So that was the idea. On the other hand it's been described that I had these other motives and so and so. That's really, I think the biggest--"

Rose interrupted: "You had to do all kinds of things to get there."

Ratner tried to get a word in: "And also--"

Rose kept talking: "A lot of roadblocks that you had to know, and you had to manipulate politicians--"

Ratner continued: "That's the other thing. We did it in the traditional way in which large projects are done."

Some ambiguity, but...

I previously wrote that Ratner had essentially endorsed Rose's capsule analysis. After re-watching the exchange, it seems more ambiguous, since Ratner's sentences were primed before Rose's ultimate utterance, and Ratner was just bulling his way through.

That said, he made no attempt to correct Rose's observation later, perhaps because he knew it was true. The key politician to manipulate has been the governor, since the governor controls Empire State Development (ESD, formerly Empire State Development Corporation), the state authority that oversees/shepherds Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park. 

And the governors have always come through, with ESD today, for example, failing to require the developer, now Greenland Forest City Partners, to explain how it will meet the May 2025 deadline for the project's remaining 876 (or 877) units of affordable housing, which is impossible. 

Earlier in the interview, Rose had prattled, "You were called lots of names. Because people didn't know what your intent was. And they worried that what you were promising you weren't going to deliver."

Well, it wasn't because they didn't know his intent. But they did question that Ratner wouldn't deliver, since he wasn't trustworthy; as the Times had recently said in 2012, the developer had a "reputation for promising anything to get a deal, only to renegotiate relentlessly for more favorable terms."

And history has borne out reason for lack of trust.

Remember how Ratner said the project would be finished by 2018? Or that modular construction worked out "technically perfectly"? Or that "of course, we're going to build the housing... we've already bought all the land." They hadn't. 

And they sold nearly all of the project going forward, in two phases, to Greenland USA, the arm of Shanghai-based Greenland Holdings Corp. (aka Greenland Holding Group), which is even less transparent than Forest City, which at least had to report to investors quarterly and face questions from investment analysts.

It's #TheBrooklynWay.