« A Developer Wants to Take My Tax Money to Destroy My Neighborhood and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt |
Main
| The City Council Economic Development Committee
PUBLIC HEARING ON ATLANTIC YARDS »
May 24, 2005
NY Post, Opinion: A BIG WIN FOR BROOKLYN
Mayor Bloomberg had good news yesterday: Developer Bruce Ratner may be able to start work as soon as next year on a $2.5 billion plan to bring housing, commercial space and, not least, the Nets to Brooklyn.
That's great news for the city — particularly the long-languishing Atlantic Avenue section of Brooklyn, where the project is to be built.
The announcement won Mayor Mike a big wet one (literally!) from Bertha Lewis, head of the radical activist group, ACORN. Support from that group and from the Working Families Party, of which Lewis is co-chair, would be a big boon to Mayor Mike's re-election bid.
Of course, there was a price to pay: Half of the new apartments must be offered at below-market rates.
Which is not only bad housing policy, but it also affirms the belief that there's always a vigorish to be paid to do business in New York.
That's not exactly the kind of message you want to send if you hope to lure investors and businesses to the city.
Then there's the ideological price: Hizzoner must cozy up to radicals like Lewis, who's backed numerous awful, even dangerous, movements (including UFT President Randi Weingarten's volatile charge that Bloomberg's own Education Department practices racism).
Not that Mayor Mike is unusually picky about his friends; after all, he actively encourages the backing of the Independence Party, despite the leadership role it gives to Lenora Fulani, famous for her anti-Semitic and anti-American rants.
The Brooklyn deal is part of Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace initiative, which aims to spend $3 billion on 68,000 mixed-income units. So not only does the mayor get to tout an exciting project for an outer borough, he also gets to plug his program for low-income housing, which is popular in liberal Gotham despite its misguided economic underpinnings.
The truth is, housing in New York City already is outrageously over-subsidized, what with rent control, rent stabilization, public housing, federal vouchers, city shelters and the growing requirements for "affordable housing." These programs, as many economists will tell you, help explain the city's housing shortage and perverted real-estate market.
Still, Ratner's Atlantic Yards project will be a real boost to a moribund section of Brooklyn. And bringing the Nets to that borough — on the very site where Robert Moses barred the Dodgers, prompting them to leave the city — is nothing short of terrific.
This is surely a win for New York.
Posted by lumi at May 24, 2005 07:25 AM