Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Amid the pious paeans to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer reminded people that, um, sports is a business: AT some point in the 1980s, Mr. Steinbrenner began floating the notion that the Bronx was too wicked a place for a sports franchise to survive. Unless, possibly, someone built the team a new stadium. He made these pronouncements as the team was entering an era of prosperity unmatched in its spangled history. During the 1950s, in the golden light of Mickey Mantle, the team never drew two million fans. Even in 1961, when Roger Maris hit 61 home runs and the Yankees won the World Series, attendance was just 1.7 million. It was not until 1976, when the Bronx was on the verge of burning, that the team drew two million spectators. The more homicides in the Bronx, the higher the attendance at Yankee Stadium . Of course, good left-handed relief pitching also helped. Still, Mr. Steinbrenner eventually won the day: one of the wealthiest sp...

The Internets Celebrities --guerrilla filmmakers and comedic investigators--have done short films on such subjects as bodegas and the "Ghetto Big Mac." They got some ink from the Times the other day as their more ambitious new film Stadium Status debuted. Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo . I'll get to the Atlantic Yards segment in a bit, but first, their explanation for the project: Our starting point for this movie was simply asking the question: why did the Yankees and the Mets get to build record-breakingly expensive stadiums in the SAME YEAR? Considering we were on the brink of a massive recession and now face massive budget shortfalls in New York state, it seemed problematic that so much public funding went into these buildings – with little assurance of any tangible public benefit. From there, we employed our usual investigation methods. Namely, go to a place and start filming. We actually got into Citifield and were able to film there. Yanke...

From today's New York Times, an article headlined Stadium Boom Deepens Municipal Woes : CINCINNATI — Years after a wave of construction brought publicly financed stadiums costing billions of dollars to cities across the country, taxpayers are once again being asked to reach into their pockets. From New Jersey to Ohio to Arizona, the stadiums were sold as a key to redevelopment and as the only way to retain sports franchises. But the deals that were used to persuade taxpayers to finance their construction have in many cases backfired, the result of overly optimistic revenue assumptions and the recession. Nowhere is the problem more acute than in Cincinnati. In 1996, voters in Hamilton County approved an increase of half of one percent in the sales tax that promised to build and maintain stadiums for the Bengals and the Reds, pay Cincinnati’s public schools and give homeowners an annual property tax rebate. The stadiums were supposed to spur development of the city’s dilapidated rive...

Despite transitioning from reporter to more analytical columnist, former New York Timeswoman Joyce Purnick, in her slender new biography of New York's singular mayor, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics , avoids rigorous analysis, praising Bloomberg as a productive pragmatist, who has governed mostly "prudently," while acknowledging he left some sticklers disappointed on issues like development. The book lasts only 227 pages before the Acknowledgments, and a good third concerns Bloomberg's pre-mayoral activities. That means no one should expect a thorough analysis of Bloomberg's two terms or an indictment along the lines of, say, City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York . City Council President Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, and Comptroller Bill Thompson each get a single mention. The Nets arena gets two. The terms "Atlantic Yards" and "Bruce Ratner" do not appear. Nor doe...

Given the often-uninformed level of discourse about Atlantic Yards, I'm not holding my breath, but there's a significant issue that deserves discussion: the questionable tax assessments in the arena block. I queried the four Public Advocate candidates--Bill de Blasio, Eric Gioia, Mark Green, and Norman Siegel--last week with the below information, but none offered a response (though Green's campaign asked for more time). The background: Yankee Stadium As shown in an after-the-fact investigation by Assemblymember Richard Brodsky, the New York City Department of Finance used questionable practices in assessing the land for the new Yankee Stadium, ensuring that the foregone taxes would be sufficient to generate the PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) needed to pay off construction: F. The Tax Assessment Practices of DOF, For Yankee Stadium And Elsewhere, Need Immediate Independent Review. "The NYCDOF inflated the assessed value of the new Yankee Stadium despite sworn pro...

Mark Lamster has a nifty article in the July/August issue of Metropolis, headlined Play Ball: New York’s two teams build new stadiums. Both are designed by the same firm, which has made an industry out of translating the nostalgic impulses of baseball owners . Click to the article through for some excellent photos, including aerial shots that show Yankee Stadium and CitiField each next to its empty but not-yet-demolished predecessor. Are fans chumps? Lamster's conclusion: When I first started attending games on my own, some 20 years ago, a ticket to the Yankee bleachers cost $1.50, pocket change even for a kid on a tight allowance. That same ticket now costs $14: not an unreasonable sum, but more than a movie and enough to keep a student on a limited budget from making it too much of a habit. The new stadium, for that matter, doesn’t beg that kind of relationship. It’s a special-occasion place, somewhere to visit a couple of times a season. Why empty your wallet for an entertainme...

Will the city’s dubious practice regarding assessments of land for Yankee Stadium--in which the value of the site went up eight times in a single day, using dramatically different land sales as comparables--recur regarding assessments for the Atlantic Yards arena site? Well, we don't have an assessment for the arena block as a whole, but evidence of questionable decisions by the Department of Finance (DOF) is mounting. For some properties on the block, land assessments--which are a percentage of market value, and rise with the latter--have leaped 17 or 20 or 34 times in one year. Perhaps an oversight hearing is in order. Meanwhile, Forest City Ratner wants to lower the amount it pays upfront for another piece of the arena block, the Vanderbilt Yard, to a reported $20 million, instead of the $100 million it initially promised. (The arena block is above; click on all graphics to enlarge. The full AY footprint Block and Lot map is here ; the yellow indicates properties owned by eith...

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky , who chairs the state Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions, warned last week that, if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board accepts “less money” for the property destined for the Brooklyn arena, it would “be a violation of the fiduciary duty”--their obligation to act with the highest standard of care . Forest City Ratner, which agreed to pay $100 million for the MTA’s 8.5-acre Vanderbilt Yard, has reportedly offered only $20 million upfront for the segment of land it needs for the arena, with the rest to be paid at some later date. The MTA board meets June 24. Brodsky, who has applied tough scrutiny to the Yankee Stadium deal, has remained mostly agnostic about Atlantic Yards--some believe it's an unwillingness to tussle with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, an AY supporter--but his remarks last week indicate some concern. Ratner's deal The Vanderbilt Yard was appraised at $214.5 million, which included ...

New York City Department of Finance Commissioner Martha Stark has resigned , in the wake of questions about conflict of interest and concerns about her significant outside income. There's a brief mayoral statement . But none of the coverage so far--see, for example, the Times , Daily News , and Crain's --raises any questions about what may be the most significant cloud over Stark and her former subordinate (and current consort) Dara Ottley-Brown: their role in the swift and curious reassessment of the Yankee Stadium site.

Neil deMause in Metro got there first, with a piece headlined Popping the sports bubble : I went to a Mets game last week, and speaking as a Yankee fan, I have to admit that in the battle of the ballparks, the Mets won. Citi Field is far from perfect, but at least it feels like you’re at a baseball park — unlike the new Yankee Stadium, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a new Marriott with a really garish big-screen TV in the lobby. What I noticed most, though, was something I’d never seen at a baseball game: The upper deck was packed to the gills, while the acres of hyper-pricey seats down below were half-empty. It’s something you first saw in NBA games over the winter, as penny-pinching fans scurried for the rafters. The Times piles on Then the Times piled on, in a front-page article today headlined Is This Seat Taken? In Front Rows of New Ballparks, No : Instead, the Mets and the Yankees face a public relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after fai...

City Finance Commissioner Martha Stark is under a cloud again, this time for having a romantic relationship with a former assistant commissioner. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, formerly a staunch defender of Stark, says the city is looking into whether the relationship began while Dara Ottley-Brown was employed by Stark. However, as I note below, no one is yet looking into the potential connection to an even more questionable episode: Ottley-Brown served as the Department of Finance's (DOF) point person in ensuring that the land under the new Yankee Stadium would be assessed--re-assessed, it turned out--at a figure sufficient to generate the foregone taxes to be repaid by PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes). And the DOF faces similar challenges in ensuring that the assessments of the Atlantic Yards arena site are sufficient to generate PILOTs sought by the developer. Stark reasons for questions Certainly, as the New York Post first reported Sunday , there's a reason to ask questions. Ot...