Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Appraisal Suggests Railyard Parcels Could Be Worth $1B to Developers. Site 5 Compounds Value. ( link ) Were public subsidies, and more bulk, assumed before project relaunched? Are they merited? Document for investors projected Atlantic Yards completion by 2036. Nah.

More from Public Meetings: Site 5 Tower to Focus on Flatbush; Hotel Still Under Consideration ( link ) Lingering questions about streetscape and retail. Harsh criticism of community engagement. Could Atlantic Yards CDC fund its own financial consultant?

A New, Though Murky, Focus on the $350 Million that Developers Seek for the Railyard Platform ( link ) Is this the only subsidy request? No. Was a privately-funded platform ever possible? That's murky, too.

GQ on March 24 published Exclusive: The Jay-Z Interview  and two of the exchanges with interviewer Frazier Tharpe are relevant to Atlantic Yards and the Nets. Q. You also have a discipline of almost shrugging off any kind of perception of a loss. “The Nets could go 0 for 82 and I’d look at you like, This shit gravy.” A. Yeah, because it’s all wins. If I had point-zero-zero-zero-one of the Nets, I won. It’s like: I had ownership in a basketball team. In Brooklyn. That actually relied on me heavily to get to Brooklyn, right? So yeah, I didn’t win the championship with the Nets. I still won. That is true, as we've known for a while, thanks especially to an unskeptical New York Times article Aug. 16, 2012, With Arena, Rapper Rewrites Celebrity Investors’ Playbook . My critique . And yes, Jay-Z still won. As I once wrote, in Jay-Z’s hip-hop of distraction , "you can't hustle a hustler." Yes, I wrote that before I knew the Jay-Z line , "Can’t out-hustle a hustler, you ...

State Promises 500 (25%) Initial Low-Income Units, But Critics Say It Wouldn't Make Up for Shortfall ( link ) Shift from developers' earlier plan, but still no catch-up. A $3,071 low-income one-bedroom? Developer says buildings might open in early 2030s. Project completion by 2040?

Former City Planning Chair Garodnick: Public Money in a Project Should Trigger "Absolute Transparency" ( link )  With Atlantic Yards, it's a black box. Subsidies? Tax breaks? Extra valuable bulk?

The coalition BrooklynSpeaks this morning circulated an email to its mailing list, titled What we learned from ESD’s community engagement report . While the message doesn't credit my earlier coverage, Draft Community Engagement Report Backs (!?) Developers' Aim to Downplay Low-Income Housing , there is significant overlap. BrooklynSpeaks, though, offers valuable focus. "The median annual income of most participants and respondents was more than $150K." BrooklynSpeaks notes, as I'd pointed out, that the income skew likely affects the respondents' purported support for more expensive below-market "affordable housing," though, according to a respected housing organization, "moderate and middle income levels make up only about 7% of the more than one million rent-burdened households in New York City." BrooklynSpeaks asks : shouldn't Atlantic Yards address where the need is greatest? "The open spaces cited by participants as examples ...

Sometime in the last day, with barely enough time to post public comment by today's deadline of 3 pm , Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority that oversees/shepherds Atlantic Yards, released the agenda for tomorrow's meeting of the purportedly advisory Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AY CDC). The directors will get an oral report on the Draft Community Engagement Report, regarding public input on the future of the project, that was issued a few days ago.  My critique is here:  Draft Community Engagement Report Backs (!?) Developers' Aim to Downplay Low-Income Housing . Executive session Also of note, the directors will go into executive session regarding "Negotiations with the Project Developer Regarding Memorandum of Understanding and Development of Property/Project." The presumably involves the developer's desire for $350 million in subsidies for the platform (as I reported ), its announced request for 1.6 million in additiona...