Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

From the front page of the New York Times Styles section today (though published online two days ago), The Battle for the Soul of the Hamptons : To help make its case publicly, the group has enlisted the powerhouse political firm SKDKnickerbocker, whose officials have factored in the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama and the successful effort to redevelop the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn over community opposition there. They keep getting it wrong. It's impossible to say "redevelop the Atlantic Yards" because "Atlantic Yards" never existed in the first place: it was a branding name for a proposed, and now partly enacted, development project. (I wrote about this in May 2006 and again in January 2009.) It would be OK to say "develop the Atlantic Yards project" or "develop Atlantic Yards" but the use of "the" suggests it's a place. "Re-develop" is worse, because it implies an existing defined pla...

I write separately how the housing in the next two "100% affordable" towers skews mainly to middle-income households who'd pay more than $2,000 for a studio apartment and more than $3,000 for a two-bedroom unit--and how Mayor Bill de Blasio has fudged the issue. Do remember this: such obfuscation would be much tougher if Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Brooklyn was discussed using rhetoric that was common through 2006. For the first few years after Atlantic Yards was announced, the developer and project supporters used a more precise, if less self-serving, locution: "affordable and middle-income housing."  Only later was it all generalized as "affordable," which papers over the vast differences in expected rents. After all, "affordable" technically means only "income linked," in which households spend 30% of their income on rent. The 4,500 rental units would proceed under the 50/30/20 program, with 50% market, 20% low-income, a...

Last week, when discussing the sometimes fraught operation of the Barclays Center, which periodically has trucks lined up outside on Dean Street, arena Community Affairs Manager Terence Kelly suggested operators deserved some slack. “As a start-up,” he said at a periodic Atlantic Yards Quality of Life Committee meeting, “we're still seven months out... we’re learning the challenges that exist, and we’re improving every single day.” At another such meeting last October, Ashley Cotton, then Forest City’s External Affairs VP (and now Chief of Staff), acknowledged  that, despite progress in several areas of operations, “we're just a start-up and we're still learning." State of the Art That contrasts sharply with other rhetoric emanating from the arena, such as the Mission Statement : We present unparalleled Entertainment in Brooklyn, in a State of the Art Venue, with global appeal that lifts the spirit and creates lasting memories. Or take the announcement f...

From a GlobeSt.com article yesterday headlined MTA Looks to Unload Midtown Headquarters : Gene Rusianoff, staff attorney for transit advocacy group the Straphangers Campaign, tells GlobeSt.com that he’s concerned that the MTA find the money it needs to fund its rebuilding program. “They need the dough,” Russianoff says. “They have a five-year rebuilding program and only funding for the first two years.” Russianoff’s main concern, he says, is that the organization not cheat itself on any property it sells. “We don’t think the MTA got a very good deal for the West Side Yards or the Atlantic Yards .” (Emphasis added) Russianoff was using shorthand, but, as I wrote 3/29/11, actually, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority property, 8.5 acres, is called the Vanderbilt Yard . By contrast, Atlantic Yards is the brand for a 22-acre site that includes formerly public streets, formerly private property, and some private property that neither the state nor developer Forest City Ratner co...

A second look at that first Atlantic Yards flyer (Live. Work. Play…), sent to Brooklynites in May 2004, turns up some remarkably echoey rhetoric. "It's more than just basketball. It's a dream, it's jobs and it's housing," said Sen. Chuck Schumer. "This is something that has been the dream of so many people in this great borough for decades, that major league sports would come back to a major league town," declared Gov. George Pataki. "This is a dream come true for Brooklyn," asserted Borough President Marty Markowitz. Little did they know. Maybe the overstated headline--"What Brooklyn Leaders are saying about Atlantic Yards"--should've been a hint. Only one of the four was a Brooklyn leader, and only two of the four are Brooklyn residents. And their Atlantic Yards claims, as of now, are more fantasy than reality.

Could it be that ACORN's Bertha Lewis, who isn't really up on Atlantic Yards, only looks at the official Atlantic Yards web site (below), while Jon Benguiat of the Brooklyn Borough President's Office, like others trying to keep up, checks No Land Grab (bottom) every day? (Click on graphics to enlarge) What's missing

From today's New York Post, in an article headlined LANDMARKS BLOOMBLITZ : The proposed historic designation for Prospect Heights would cover a neighborhood bordering the megadevelopment at Atlantic Yards. Similarly, the West Chelsea district abuts the massive Hudson Yards project. No, Atlantic Yards is a project, not a place . And nearly all of the project would be in Prospect Heights. Nor would the historic district border Atlantic Yards in a bookend manner; rather, the top finger would on two sides border the AY footprint. In other words, they're part of the same neighborhood. The Hudson Yards map , while not a pure rectangle, includes whole blocks, not partial blocks, as with AY .

Remember the battle over the West Side Stadium, that 15-month donnybrook, from March 2004 through June 2005, that dominated the city’s discourse over sports facilities, leaving scant attention for the Atlantic Yards and baseball stadium controversies? The documentary A Stadium Story , screened in 2006 but not yet in wide release, offers some eerie echoes, curious contrasts, and cautionary lessons for Atlantic Yards watchers. (The film is well worth watching; for now, it’s available for $25 from the official web site , but it should be distributed soon, according to the filmmakers.) Summary of the battle The stadium , to be built on Metropolitan Transportation Authority railyards west of Penn Station--the Hudson Yards site--was to serve not only as the home of the New York Jets, to be relocated from the Meadowlands (accessible pretty much only by car), but would be the centerpiece of the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics and also, with a retractable roof, be home to trade shows...

Who loses when triple tax-exempt bonds are used to finance stadiums for the Yankees and Mets, and the planned Atlantic Yards arena? Overwhelmingly the savings come at the expense of federal taxpayers, not state or city ones, which is why city and state officials are so eager to use such a financing mechanism--the costs are just too diffuse. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, former maverick presidential candidate, and Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, yesterday released a letter asking the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department to desist from approving any more sports facility deals based on PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes), pending further clarification of their policies. In other words: don't approve any deal involving the Nets arena just yet. It's not clear to me whether Kucinich, whose letter was dated May 23, was piling on the recently-surfaced concern about such deals, or...

Forest City Ratner’s new Nets promotional logo, “Bring it to Brooklyn,” uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a backdrop. Architect Frank Gehry claims the bridge helped inspire the avant-garde architecture for his 17-building Atlantic Yards project. And Isabel Hill’s powerful new documentary about the project, “ Brooklyn Matters ,” frames its title shot using the bridge. Everyone claims the Roeblings’ bridge, harbinger of modernity when first built in 1883, a stately icon of the borough today, even as population growth, gentrification, and deindustrialization continue to change Brooklyn. Brooklyn “has a unique urban character,” the narrator intones, but “today that identity is being threatened by powerful developers who have their own ideas about reshaping Brooklyn’s future. This is a deciding moment, and the stakes are high.” Hill’s film, less than an hour long, makes a compelling prosecutorial brief against the outsized development. Community members, planners, project critics, and even New Y...

Rhetoric matters when discussing the Atlantic Yards project. After all, Forest City Ratner keeps claiming that the project would be built in Downtown Brooklyn . Critics like me have pressed the New York Times on the importance of describing the location more precisely, and the Times recently printed a correction . Another rhetorical tussle concerns the term Atlantic Yards , which entered the public lexicon as Forest City Ratner's name for the 22-acre development project, but also has become attached to the 8.5-acre railyard owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the chief undeveloped portion of the site. Thus local officials and reporters, encouraged by the developer, have used terms like "at the Atlantic Yards" or "on the Atlantic Yards," without explaining that it's a proposed development site. These seemingly minor errors serve Forest City Ratner's interest. They falsely conflate the developer's commercial branding--a project c...