Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

The New York Times Will Stop Endorsing Candidates in New York Races , the New York Times reported Aug. 13, in its Business section, without any accompanying announcement from the Opinion page.  That means no more endorsements for mayor, governor, and (as they'd done) selected state and city races. That means a boost to incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who saw a rivalry galvanized in 2021 by the Times's endorsement of the lesser-known Kathryn Garcia. From the article: Kathleen Kingsbury, The Times’s Opinion editor, said in a statement that The Times remained a journalistic institution “rooted in New York City.” She did not give a reason for the shift but said that “Opinion will continue to offer perspective on the races, candidates and issues at stake.” My best guess is that the Times calculated that it wasn't worth the time and effort to do due diligence for local races when its readership has become so broad. Heck, the Times used to endorse City Council candidates in races that...

OK, when a New York Times profile of former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, posted online 9/6/23, bizarrely credited the former city official with the Atlantic Yards plan but also said the recession forced its abandonment, I tweeted the following "Apartment towers... rise" far more slowly than originally planned, and delay means that baseline for #affordablehousing calculations rises steadily. In his book, Doctoroff admitted he thought #AtlanticYards was a "crazy risk," but he played good soldier https://t.co/m1DNHH5pDc — Norman Oder (@AYReport) September 6, 2023 Following up When I saw the article in print three days later,  His Mind Helped Rebuild New York. His Body Is Failing Him.  with the mistake intact, I wrote a letter to the newspaper, seeking a correction: By no stretch of imagination should Doctoroff be credited with "larger plan for 17 high-rises." Rather, the plan was developed by developer Forest City Ratner/Bruce Ratner, and shepherded/ap...

My recent post on Tish James's run for Governor sent me back to this 6/27/14 ABC/7 report (via Yahoo) headlined  Deal to expedite affordable housing near NYC arena , which deserves a closer look, not just for some errors and misreadings, but also for criticism from the then Public Advocate and a prescient warning by an Atlantic Yards opponent. This came on the day of a ( misleading ) New York Times scoop on a deal to ensure that the project's 2,250 affordable housing units would be built by May 2025--ten years before the then-current deadline (which had been extended to 2035) but still well past previous predictions. And that was the day that Empire State Development, the state authority overseeing/shepherding Atlantic Yards, approved and announced an agreement with developer Forest City Ratner to start two "100% affordable" towers within the next year, among other things. This averted a threatened lawsuit, on fair housing grounds (that delays would particularly impa...

So the New York Times today has a deep dive on Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams's relationship with donors, How Eric Adams, Mayoral Candidate, Mixed Money and Political Ambition , which sounds a lot like a deep dive the Times did on his predecessor, Marty Markowitz. 10/24/11, From Brooklyn Office, Mixing Clout and Charity . It's unfortunate that such investigations--which rely not only on significant reporting chops but access to documents that are not simply online--come so late in their administrations. (As noted below, The City and Politico previously published their own investigations.) After all, this comes after numerous institutional endorsements of Adams, which can of course be transactional, as well as a full-throated New York Post endorsement of him, and a second-place nod from the New York Daily News . While the latter did cite his "entanglements" with those doing business, both should have had to reckon more with his record. And it's confounding ...

I recently listened to the 3/22/17  Leading Voices in Real Estate podcast  interview with MaryAnne Gilmartin, then CEO of Forest City Ratner, to be renamed Forest City New York later that year.  Most of the interview, by Matt Slepin, covered professional and biographical matters covered in other interviews/podcasts--real estate as "Rubik's Cube," comfort with uncertainty, "I always say 'I slay the dragon every day'"--but a couple of things stood out. About the arena After host Slepin asked placemaking, that gave Gilmartin entree to talk about "Pacific Park Brooklyn, which is a neighborhood that we've been creating for well over a decade... there's such responsibility on the part of the developer to build in one of the finest neighborhoods in the country at the confluence of some of the most historic and deeply diverse neighborhoods in Brooklyn." She said that meant not just creating a "great place," but also "weaving thi...

What Will New York Real Estate Look Like Next Year? , states a New York Times article, suggesting that the next primary election will help shape things. There's a new recognition that more equity is necessary, but the power brokers want to push back on anti-development sentiment: “This is not the time to double down on the narrative that business is bad, that development is bad,” said [former Deputy Mayor Alicia] Glen, who recently started a development firm, M Squared, which builds mixed-income housing in cities across the country. “We can’t play to the cheap seats of being against everything and everybody.” And one result is a new push to put affordable housing in affluent neighborhoods like SoHo, with a rezoning on tap. Trusting the real-estate establishment One problem, from my perspective is the issue of trust. The Times reported: A large expansion of Brooklyn’s Industry City complex, which developers said would create 20,000 new jobs,  was quashed last month  by opponent...

It's worth reading a couple of Real Deal interviews, by Hiten Samtani, with the now-retired real estate reporter Charles Bagli, who made his bones at the "no sacred cows" New York Observer, then went to the New York Times. Bagli has not been replaced, which means the Times has lost institutional memory. Also, his coverage of Atlantic Yards, I'd note, was highly inconsistent, sometimes with scoops , too often channeling the developer's narrative , yet also belatedly tough on developer Bruce Ranter. (That didn't come up in the interviews.) There's lots of good stuff in the interviews, but I'll point to only a few excerpts. Part 1: Setting the frame From  Scoundrels of the skyline: Charles Bagli on the most colorful characters in the real estate biz , published 8/12/20: “As a former Catholic boy, I make a distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission,” he would tell the likes of Harry Helmsley, Donald Trump and Harry Macklowe, de...

From the New York Times Real Estate section today, On the Market , "a one-bedroom, one-bath, architect-renovated, 1,107-square-foot, loft-style apartment" at 535 Dean Street in the Newswalk building. Pros include large rooms and closets, a renovated kitchen, proximity to subways, and shopping. Cons: "The Atlantic Yards run behind the building, which will mean living with construction at some point. The unit does not have a washer-dryer, but there is a hookup in the foyer closet." Well, credit the Times with more candor than the typical real-estate agent. Still, the article repeats a common error : Atlantic Yards is (was) the name of a project, not a place. Just to be clear, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard, the largest component of the 22-acre site dubbed Atlantic Yards, and renamed Pacific Park Brooklyn, is across the street. And yes, there should be construction of three towers on the western block of the railyard, and thre...

How a Once-Loathed Brooklyn Arena Became a Protest Epicenter , the New York Times's Andy Newman offers today. Though it covers some of the same ground as my article for Bklyner last week, it's not a ripoff, but I wish that some of my skepticism would've gotten translated to the Times. Notably, it gives Joe Tsai, who owns the arena operating company, more slack than he deserves, given his very calibrated performance, and quotes Bruce Ratner, the arena developer, as saying “I’m very happy that it has been a place where people can congregate and hopefully going forward a place where people feel comfortable and safe." That's total b.s., given that the arena security guards easily ejected peaceful people from the plaza, like, um, my tour . "The operators of @barclayscenter have taken the protests as an opportunity to change the messaging on the screen above the plaza." Only after they faced criticism for the discordant ads. My somewhat more skeptic...

I had to twice read  The Decade Dominated by the Ultraluxury Condo , a New York Times Sunday Real Estate section cover story (1/12/20) published online today, to understand what it was really saying about Brooklyn. Could it be that, as shown in the screenshot at right, Downtown Brooklyn had only 1,574 condo units built between 2009 and 2019, fewer than not only Williamsburg but also Bedford-Stuyvesant? Not unlikely, I guess, as long as we're talking about for-sale condos. Downtown Brooklyn, as detailed in multiple reports, had far more rental units, especially if the starting point is moved back to the 2004 rezoning. For example, as cited in a February 2016 report from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams's office, In terms of raw numbers of housing units, it was estimated that 979 projected units of housing would be built over the course of a decade, but the reality is that over 11,000 housing units have been developed or are in the pipeline. According to a 2019 re...

Hey, I missed something when I wrote about  the online version of today's New York Times Real Estate section cover story, New Parks Sprout Around New York , The print version does not include the photo of the 550 Vanderbilt open space that was posted online but rather included a tiny, narrow-focused shot, below, looking east. Yes, look to the bottom left of this screenshot. Below is the image, looking west, that showed more of the 550 Vanderbilt open space, but also indicated how limited it is (and, as I wrote, misleadingly said the remainder of the open space would be behind the fence, which is rather the site for two new buildings). Here's a better look at the scope of the open space, regarding 535 Carlton, which is in the distance of the photo above. From my coverage of 535 Carlton open space And here's the schematic. 550 Vanderbilt is B11, 535 Carlton is B14.

New Parks Sprout Around New York , declares the New York Times Real Estate section, in a front-page article just posted, and, while not ignoring criticism of the Pacific Park open space, inevitably gets things wrong and fails to tease out distinctions between fractional space like the latter and public open space delivered in full, earlier in the development. Writes C.J. Hughes: New parks are coming to life across the city, many courtesy of new apartment complexes, which, in addition to the usual extras, are offering swaths of switch grass and swamp oaks, waterfalls and fountains, benches and boulder-lined paths. And although these nods to nature are created by developers and are on the grounds of condo and rental buildings, you won’t need to have a pricey apartment there to enjoy them. In a change from the residents-only courtyards of the past, these open spaces are truly open and, despite their private roots, can be used freely by the public. Get ready for the self-serving quot...

So, "New York Times Big City" columnist Ginia Bellafante, who writes weekly in the Metropolitan section, today offers At $3,700 a Month, ‘Affordable’ Apartments Go Begging , describing how the mayor's ambitious affordable housing plan has been criticized for offering too many below-market apartments to those between "51 to 165 percent of the median income for the metropolitan area, or from $43,000 to upward of $141,000 for a family of three. " (Let's pause for a moment and acknowledge the vast difference even within that scale, since those in lower half of that cohort find far more trouble on the private housing market.) Her target is a building that's been in the news. She writes: The fate of a building at 535 Carlton Avenue in Brooklyn, would suggest that they are right. The building was developed with all 300 of its units designated as affordable and available to prospective tenants through a city housing lottery. Half the apartments, though, we...

So, remember that New York Times article reporting on a free VIP experience at the Barclays Center? As I wrote last December, even though Sarah Lyall's report was partly tongue in cheek and thus didn't function as an advertisement for the $6,189 VIP experience, I did believe that, given the prominent placement, in print and on the web, with many photos, it sure promoted the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center. (The Times Public Editor, as well as some but not all readers, also raised eyebrows . I wondered how many--if any--people ever purchased that VIP experience.) Well, guess what, arena managers must still appreciate the article very much. All publicity is good publicity? It's reproduced in full, without permission or credit, on the web site of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Experiences , with a link from the main page. There's no link to the original Times article , which would have led people to critical comments. It's also listed at the to...

Check out two troubling and well-reported articles for the Daily Beast by Brooklyn College professor (and former New York Newsday staffer) Paul Moses:  In New York City, Local Coverage Declines—and Takes Accountability With It  and  The New York Times Turns Its Sights Away From New York City . This confirms what I've seen covering Atlantic Yards since 2005--though I often criticized spotty coverage of the project a decade ago, at least the project merited coverage. Today, as news outlets shrink staff and coverage diminishes, what we do see is too often driven by press releases, thanks to a growing number of public relations staffers and a shrinking number of reporters. That has to do with the changing metrics of the journalism business, as managers chase national audiences and national ads. Queens as a weathervane In Moses's first  installment , he suggests that Queens--which could be the nation’s fourth largest city, at 2.3 million people--is critically unde...