The inevitable Atlantic Yards renegotiation(s): stay tuned for more. Will there be news on Thursday?

About a year ago, on July 18, 2023, I wrote Another Atlantic Yards renegotiation is inevitable. Forest City started use of tactic. Greenland has picked it up. Plus: common Chinese business practice.

Little did I know that, as I reported this week, a renegotiation was then ongoing. It would've supersized the project to make it more valuable.

But the likelihood was clear: the project's history of renegotiation, and the looming May 2025 deadline to deliver 876 more units of affordable housing, with penalties of $2,000/month for each unbuilt unit, supposed to be levied by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority that oversees/shepherds the project.

Plus: the tendency for Chinese companies to reopen contracts.

Now that a meeting of the advisory Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AY CDC) has been scheduled for Aug. 8, some new plans for the project--perhaps involving Related Companies--may be be revealed.

Ongoing but unmentioned

A renegotiation had been happening all along. They just didn't tell us.

In April 2023, at an AY CDC meeting, Director Gib Veconi asked about the affordable housing deadline: "What’s ESD’s position about collecting those remedies?” ESD representatives, he noted, had previously claimed that the remedies were non-negotiable.

“The project documents haven’t changed, so the requirements on the project are still the same,” the ESD's Tobi Jaiyesimi stated carefully. “We recognize where we are with the developer’s ongoing discussion with the MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] as it relates to the platform… but at this time there have been no changes to the project documents, so those obligations are still standing.”

She was referring to the stalled plan to build a platform, in two stages, over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard, used to store and service Long Island Rail Road trains. Each block would support three towers and, once complete, would supply the remaining project open space. 

The documents had changed, at least regarding Site 5 (as I wrote), but it's true that the documents regarding the housing deadline hadn't changed.

What Jaiyesimi didn't say was that Greenland was seeking an extension as part of its plan to supersize the project to make it more financially feasible.