No Land Grab

An impassioned opponent of Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development plan, Phyllis Wrynn, has been trying to recruit us for the opposition. She believes the six-block project would destroy the character of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Wrynn also questioned the objectivity of this newspaper’s coverage of the controversial proposal.

Some excerpts from our e-mail exchange:

“Dear Erik,

“Is it true that your publisher is the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and refused to have an official function on the Ratner proposal open to the public and reporters, as was originally announced? I really need to know if we can trust your paper’s reporting of the development of the Atlantic Yards if that is true.”

“Dear Phyllis,

“Dan Holt, the co-publisher of my paper, is the current chairman of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. I just read a story in the Brooklyn Paper about Daniel Goldstein [of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn] and the Hagan sisters [Patti and Schellie of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition] being barred from some meeting the chamber held. Apparently there was a fear those three would be disruptive. Reporters were also not allowed, which I believe was the plan all along and not a change of plans. Was this Dan Holt’s decision? I doubt it. But if so, who cares? A private institution is not obligated to open its doors to reporters or anyone else. Our reporters didn’t attend either.

“Anyway, Dan Holt does not interfere with our reporting of the Ratner plan or anything else. Most newspapers have a wall between the business and editorial departments. I’m not sure if that’s the case at the Brooklyn Paper, where Ratner’s people believe publisher Ed Weintrob assigns and rewrites his reporters’ stories to give them an anti-Ratner slant.”

(We forgot to mention that Weintrob bought the URL forestcityratner.com and redirected all visitors there to his paper’s own Web site.)

Wren also wrote, “And, do you really believe that your life will not be affected one iota by a construction project which will take decades? Do you go from neighborhood to neighborhood? Do you breathe the air? Do you ever have appointments that might be affected by traffic delays? Do you have a sense of the difference in light and air quality between Brooklyn and Manhattan?

“I’m sorry. I’ve always had respect for your diligent coverage of the news. Your take on this just doesn’t make sense to me.”

We replied, “I suppose ‘one iota’ might have been an exaggeration. Perhaps I’ll have to bike around the construction zone to get to Fort Greene Park to play tennis. The traffic won’t affect me much because I don’t own a car and I rarely drive. On the air quality issue, the problem is not tall buildings so much as vehicles. Right now, nearly every fan at the Nets games drives there. With the new arena, most will be able to take the subway or bus.”

Wren: “I urge you to read studies done of transportation to sporting events country-wide. There is solid evidence that the people buying the huge numbers of luxury boxes and other seats they are projecting as needed to make this concept viable don’t and won’t take public transportation to such venues.”

Us: “The bulk of the seats at any basketball arena are not courtside or in luxury boxes. I’d guess about 80 percent of the ticket revenue comes from 20 percent of the seats. These are the folks who would be taking taxis to the games.

"You’re asking me to look at transportation data from other arenas. Do these arenas have 11 subway lines under them or two blocks away? Plus a commuter railroad and six bus routes in front of it? You can't compare apples and oranges, or Minneapolis and Brooklyn.

*"A major factor in my thinking is the philosophy to build up, not out. Building out is sprawl; building up is efficient. I suppose in a perfect world we could all live in four-story brownstones a few blocks from the subway, but...”   We tossed in a quote from Riverkeeper’s recent sprawl report:

"As sprawl degrades the environment, it also impairs the local economy. New infrastructure in sprawling areas, including new roads, water lines, and sewer lines, along with expenditures for new schools and increased police and fire protection cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Planning that keeps development in community centers leads to more efficient distribution of services, and therefore lower property taxes.”

Wren: “But Erik, we have close to a perfect world, so why would we want to corrupt that? The humanity of our neighborhoods is so evident! We are NOT talking about creating sprawl; we’re NOT talking about not developing the yards. We are talking about reasonable alternatives that enhance our neighborhoods and bridge them, not puncture the sky and cast historic cityscapes in shadow, lining developers’ pockets, giving them sweetheart deals as far into the future as they could possibly live.”

Us: “You’re missing my point. Building up is efficient; building out is not. If you build up in Brooklyn and create 4,500 units near public transportation, that’s 4,500 1/3-acre lots that won’t be developed in the wilderness of upstate New York and New Jersey with highway-widening and Wal-Marts and strip malls to follow. Sprawl is worse than some shadows from Ratner’s buildings.

"The world may be perfect for those of us lucky to already live in low-rise housing near mass transit. Not everyone is as lucky as we are.”

All of this got us exactly nowhere, as Wren wrote back, “Desecrating historic neighborhoods so that sprawl doesn’t happen elsewhere is the most specious argument I have ever heard.”             We realized that, like Winnie the Pooh, we were tracking the very footprints we’d left at the beginning of our journey. Still, we compulsively replied.             “Which historic neighborhoods would be desecrated? Park Slope? Fort Greene? Prospect Heights? HOW WOULD THEY BE DESECRATED? Explain to me how a typical day in the life of a resident of these neighborhoods would be desecrated.”*

We’ll stop now before we put the sleeping-pill companies out of business.

OK, one more thought. A decent studio apartment in a Prospect Heights co-op (34 Plaza Street) is being listed for $275,000—plus you need a six-figure salary to be approved by the co-op board. That’s insane.

Brownstone Brooklyn is wonderful for those who live there, but most people can’t afford it. More housing units, and more “affordable” housing units, such as those Ratner wants to build, would increase the supply/demand ratio and thus counterbalance the astronomical rise in property values of the last 10 years.

This is not to express support for the tax breaks Ratner would get. We’d like to see a federal law forbidding states or municipalities from granting tax privileges on an individual basis. That would help end sweetheart deals and competition between local governments that lowers taxes for some at the expense of everyone else.