Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Two legal experts, while not expressing support for the Atlantic Yards project, nevertheless said at a panel discussion last Wednesday at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law that they thought the pending eminent domain challenge would fail in a federal appellate court, given current legal doctrine. The court will dismiss the suit, as did the trial court judge, they said, because of the presence of some public benefits, and because judges are loath to set a precedent in which courts investigate the motives of decision-makers. The predictions by Cardozo law professor Stewart Sterk and University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein generated a forceful response from the third panelist, New York attorney Matthew Brinckerhoff , who represents the plaintiffs in Goldstein v. Pataki and argued the appeal, before an engaged but skeptical panel , on October 9. Brinckerhoff (right) stressed that eminent domain doctrine seems to be evolving. If the Supreme Court opened up the possib...

It's kinda cute, I guess, calling the Barclays Center "The Clays," a partial parallel to shorthanding Madison Square Garden as "The Garden" (which at least refers to an actual thing).  According to language maven Barry Popik , there were some fitful attempts to call it "Clays" or "The Clays" from the arena's 2012 debut, but the nickname was popularized by Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant on 10/22/21, in a post-game interview. “Next we got a young, athletic team in Charlotte coming to the ‘clays, so we gotta keep that intensity.” - @KDTrey5 — Nets Smoothies (@NetsSmoothies) October 23, 2021 Hey, KD's a trendsetter, he's cool. That was picked up by team owner  Joe Tsai , who also owns the arena operating company, and even the arena's own Twitter account.   BACK AT THE CLAYS😎 https://t.co/llMXZWEaou — Barclays Center (@barclayscenter) November 16, 2021 It's been mentioned by NetsDaily , the New York Daily News , and the Ta...

Atlantic Yards is not really a left-right issue, it's about good government and corporate accountability. Even though, in its second part of a three-part series ( coverage of Part 1 ), the right-wing watchdog group Cause of Action again comes up with rather conclusory results, the spotlight is still important. The report,  Political Profiteering: How Forest City Enterprises Makes Private Profits at the Expense of America’s Taxpayers , essentially repackages known information, and the graphic at right even uses the term "corruption." There's no legal corruption, just much sketchy behavior (I call it the Culture of Cheating ), as well as a pattern of negotiation--and renegotiation--with government entities that means that, whatever the public promises, subsidiary Forest City Ratner is not in violation of any formal agreement. Thus, Cause of Action's conclusion--essentially, clawbacks--sounds like it could come out of any good-government playbook: In order t...

I have a rather mixed response to the report issued yesterday by Cause of Action , a self-described nonpartisan Washington watchdog group that aims "to protect economic opportunity when federal regulations, spending, and cronyism threaten it." (Given the "economic opportunity" line, and the leadership of Dan Epstein, a  former staffer  at the Koch Foundation and for House Republicans, I'd describe the organization as libertarian, though they don't use that term.) While I think it's valuable to shine a spotlight on a little-known but quite powerful company, I don't find the numbers convincing, and I recognize that such strategic spending on campaign contributions and lobbying is not uncommon. Still, I don't think Forest City's defense is fully credible and Cause of Action--which plans additional sections--is likely to point out how the developer did not deliver on promises for project benefits in places like Brooklyn and Washington. I...

The Golden Age of White Collar Crime  was, published 2/10/20 by HuffPost's Highline, with the subheading "Elite lawbreaking is out of control. This is the grotesque story of an existential threat to American society," Michael Hobbes lays down some harsh lessons: OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible ...

With Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, there's been a new focus on the notion of "sportswashing"--of nations and individuals using sports success, and team ownership, to burnish their questionable reputations. I haven't used the phrase previously, but in 2010 coverage of the unwisely generous coverage of (then) new Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, I noted that "money cleanses."  In retrospect, that New York Times Magazine cover line, An Oligarch of Our Own , and that 60 Minutes profile, The Russian Is Coming , look even more questionable. A contrasting view from journalist Matt Taibbi at the time: "They privatized the jewels of Soviet industry into the hands of a few gangsters, basically... And then, ten, 15 years later, I come back to America and find out that one of them has become owner of the New Jersey Nets." And while Prokhorov has been mentioned up in recent coverage, there are several other examples, notably soccer team owner...

Anthony Flint ’s new book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City , is well worth reading, as it fills in (and goes beyond) the missing chapter of Robert Caro’s epic biography of Moses, The Power Broker . It contains two lively mini-biographies, coupled with accounts of major fights over a road through Washington Square Park. urban renewal in Greenwich Village, and the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway (aka LoMex). The first fight helped shape Jacobs's thinking about urban renewal, published before her landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ; the latter two she led, the second after she’d become a national figure. My main quibble is simply with the scope of the book. Anyone wrestling with the legacies of Moses and Jacobs, especially after major retrospectives on both at museums in New York in 2007, must tackle the latter-day conflicts between their legacies: could Jacobs’s un-slumming...