Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

The Next Mayor’s Next City , wrote New York magazine's Justin Davidson 10/15/20, with the subheading "Bill de Blasio’s successor can make life easier, nicer, and fairer — or just keep us going the way we were before." And it will also involve many new City Council members and Borough Presidents. He writes: What kind of city materializes in the 2020s will depend in part on how those leaders balance the drive toward global-capital status with the need to care for those who are left out of that prosperity. For nearly seven years, we’ve had a mayor who campaigned on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, and the outer-boroughs but presided over an ever-shinier city of manic wealth and grinding inequities. For all his rhetorical anti-capitalism, Bill de Blasio yoked his affordable-housing aspirations to real-estate-industry trickle-down... And his commitment to safer, greener, more flexible streets has been flickering at best. The history of those disappointments, and the disl...

De Blasio recedes from development agenda as pandemic response consumes City Hall , Politico's Sally Goldenberg reported yesterday, highlighting a project in Long Island City for the former Amazon campus dubbed (a bit disingenuously, to me) YourLIC : Negotiations with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s team were inching along, and the developers had hoped to begin a public review process after the summer. But tensions flared when City Hall demanded they cover all infrastructure costs, including off-site investments developers contended were not their responsibility. After administration officials informed the group on a Zoom call in June that they would have to pay $75 million to relocate a municipal building on the site, talks fell apart, according to several sources involved in the negotiations. On Thursday the administration officially announced its opposition to the proposal . Deputy Mayor Vicki Been had a different take: As for the recent Long Island City dispute, she said the develo...

They clearly hadn't checked out battles (with proxies) like the ones over the West Side Stadium and #AtlanticYards https://t.co/ATbxDg4aFD — Norman Oder (@AYReport) February 3, 2020 Then again, there's Your LIC. As The City reported 11/13/19, A YEAR AFTER AMAZON PICKED LIC, SUSPICIONS CLOUD FUTURE : Last week, a trio of real estate firms — TF Cornerstone, Simon Baron Development, and L&L Mag — announced “Your LIC,” an engagement effort featuring four public meetings and an online conversation to solicit community feedback about the waterfront’s future.

Site 5, the parcel catercorner to the arena--bounded by Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth avenues and Pacific Street--that's currently home to P.C. Richard and Modell's, has had multiple potential futures. It was proposed in 2016 as a two-tower project with Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park stretching perhaps 785 feet, with additional bulk to be transferred from the unbuilt "Miss Brooklyn" (aka B1) tower at what's now the arena plaza, but that doesn't seal its fate. (For now, the plan has been  delayed  by litigation.) Consider: a shorter single building, with more lot coverage and thus similar bulk, was proposed for Site 5 as part of New York State's bid to win the Amazon HQ2 competition. (Later, Amazon split the decision and last year picked Long Island City as one of two sites, but ultimately backed off in the wake of pushback.) As the screenshot at left shows, the Amazon office building at Site 5 was proposed at 28 floors, likely under 350-400 feet, ...

From a CNBC article yesterday, New Jersey and Brooklyn offer glimpses of what might have been for Amazon in Queens : Small business owners were left bemoaning the Queens economic boom that got away. Perhaps the biggest losers were average New Yorkers, who polled 56 percent in favor of the deal. Um, the poll question was extremely general , and many of the jobs would've gone to newcomers, so it's kind of tough to tease out the "biggest losers." I had offered warnings about Amazon , given the Atlantic Yards experience revising the deal, so it's interesting to see CNBC trying to make more positive analogies: No doubt, many stakeholders share the burden in the deal's death — which stirred memories of another epic development battle in Brooklyn years earlier. Beginning in 2003, developer Forest City Ratner ran into interference from countless interests when attempting to break ground on a huge plot known as Atlantic Yards, now named Pacific Park Brooklyn. I...

Sure, there was some chatter yesterday about Atlantic Yards in the wake of Amazon's surprising decision --I and others would have bet on renegotiations--to pull out of plans to build a campus in Long Island City. I'm surprised too... but Amazon hadn't bought a money-losing basketball team it had to move to Brooklyn or a deal it had to revise post-recession (or purportedly blighted land to be acquired via eminent domain) — Norman Oder (@AYReport) February 14, 2019 That was former Forest City Ratner executive Ashley Cotton, who's still working on Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park government relations (I think) as an executive at L&L MAG. Amazon had invested relatively little in Long Island City. Not only did it not have a team it had to move, it hadn't started buying land, sometimes at inflated prices and with money borrowed at high interest rates. So it had much less pressure to close the deal. Thing is: had Amazon gone ahead with its campus, it likely could have-...

As consternation rises about whether Amazon is really threatening to pull out from the tentative deal to establish a campus--half a second "headquarters"--in Long Island City, there's debate from all sides. One thing to remember is an exchange from the December hearing at City Council. “Did you need the $3 billion [in incentives] in order to come to New York?” asked Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer. “Talent was the primary driver for our decision,” said Amazon’s Holly Sullivan. “Incentives were certainly a part of that process." That's inconclusive, but it certainly suggests a lot of wiggle room. After all, tech companies are expanding in Manhattan without the same subsidy package. (With Atlantic Yards, did the New Jersey Nets need incentives to become the Brooklyn Nets? Well, it did turn out that everything was more expensive, and less remunerative than they projected, but... the team owners were desperate to move to a major media market and a brand-new...

I have a Gotham Gazette op-ed today, In Amazon Debate, Atlantic Yards Lessons Beyond Those Aired at First City Council Hearing , which begins: It was fascinating, having watched in 2004 and 2005 two New York City Council subcommittee hearings on the announced Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project, to see the Council's Committee on Ecomomic Development, with the Speaker prominent, on December 12 take a distinctly adversarial stance toward the proposed Amazon campus in Queens. Back then, not only were the Governor and Mayor gung-ho for “jobs, housing, and hoops,” many Council members, despite their questions, were essentially enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the developer and supporters got significant time from the hearings’ start, relegating opponents to later slots. And it was curious to hear both proponents and opponents of the Amazon deal rather tritely invoke lessons from Atlantic Yards (now called Pacific Park), suggesting the need for either broader public participation or the importa...

I have an article in The Bridge, Lessons of Rezoning: When It Doesn’t Work Out as Planned , which begins: Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City (LIC) have been utterly transformed since city policy toward those neighborhoods changed in 2004 and 2001, respectively. Numerous towers have sprouted after rezonings unlocked permission to build big on formerly low-rise industrial or commercial space. By one account, LIC is the nation’s fastest-growing neighborhood. But those new towers almost exclusively contain apartments, rather than the expected result of mainly office space. The failure to plan for new residents means overcrowded public schools and insufficient open space, according to a recent report from the Municipal Art Society (MAS), a longstanding advocate for a more livable city. The neighborhoods are “whiter, wealthier, and more crowded than ever.” In Downtown Brooklyn, a key piece of open space, 1.15-acre Willoughby Square Park—to be built over a parking garage—didn’t materi...

What a poll on Amazon in Queens says about the city , Crain's New York Business columnist (and former editor) Greg David wrote 12/6/18: No one should have been surprised by this week’s Quinnipiac Poll showing strong public support both citywide and in Queens for Amazon’s plan to put a second headquarters and 25,000 jobs in Long Island City. With one exception, the public has supported controversial projects like this for decades. More on the details of the Amazon poll below. About Atlantic Yards But David had a bigger lesson: I went back and dug up a 2006 Crain’s poll of the plan to build an arena for the then-New Jersey Nets and housing at a major transit hub in Brooklyn. As with Amazon, the very loud opponents of Atlantic Yards had made it appear that the public was opposed to the plan. But our poll found it was supported by 60% of residents across the city as well as in Brooklyn. According to David's source, pollster Craig Charney, "The meaning of the poll is ...

Via NYC EDC Sure, the most notable thing in my article yesterday for The Bridge: Amazon in Brooklyn: Why the Bid Didn’t Quite Measure Up , was that dramatic (and fanciful) illustration of the Amazon sign on top of the former Watchtower building, now called Panorama. And there are other interesting comparisons between the Brooklyn bid and the Long Island City offering, with better logistics and lower costs. The Atlantic Yards angle But, yes, Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park was part of it, with two sites offered as potential office towers. One was the B4 site at the arena's northeast flank, now planned as space for  810 apartments . See DT 10 in the graphic below. It says 830,000 square feet. The other was Site 5, currently home to P.C. Richard and Modell’s parcel, slated for a larger development, assuming the state permits the  shift of bulk  of the never-built tower approved for the Barclays Center plaza across the street. See DT 13 in the graphic below, with 1.14...

I have an essay in Gotham Gazette,  The Fuzzy Fine Print of Amazon’s Queens Real Estate Deal The first of several New York City Council public oversight hearings on the deal to bring an Amazon campus to Long Island City will be held Wednesday at City Hall. Titled by the Council as “Exposing the Closed-Door Process,” the questions should concern not just the big-picture issues but also some fine print regarding the company’s acquisition of city-owned real estate. Of course, the estimated $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies in the deal made among Amazon, the state, and the city deserve scrutiny, though, except for a state capital grant that could reach $505 million, those questions -- as Gotham Gazette previously reported -- mostly concern revising existing policy. ... But Council members also should look at two maddeningly complicated passages in the non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Amazon signed with Empire State Development (ESD), Gov. Andrew Cuomo's econom...

My article today, headlined  For Amazon HQ2 deal, Atlantic Yards serves as a warning , begins: The plan for a new Amazon complex in Long Island City, Queens, arrived this week with huge fanfare — at least 25,000 jobs! (over ten years). But we must remember that, despite gauzy estimates about public benefits, nothing is certain. So promises of jobs and tax revenue deserve deep scrutiny and continued oversight. For the rest of the article, click here .