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February 6, 2006
How Big Is It?
You say you "get FAR" — but what does it all mean?
Brooklyn Views offers another post, tying in everything we've learned on Floor Area Ratio (FAR) to the Atlantic Yards proposal.
Attempting to compare apples to apples, Jonathan Cohn uses Ratner's figures and takes a stab at calcuating the FAR of Atlantic Yards, first for the entire site, then subtracting the city streets to be assimilated by the project, and subtracting the arena.
| AREA | FAR | Notes |
| Enitre site | 9.5 | All 22 acres. |
Minus city streets |
11 |
FAR (a measurement used for comparison of density and for calculating impact on city services) for non-superblock projects do not include city streets. |
Minus arena |
12 |
The arena's air rights are distributed over the rest of the project, thus making the rest of the project seem less dense. |
Yes folks, that's an FAR of 12 for the non-arena portion of the site.
The BV post goes into detail about these calculations and compares this project to Downtown Brooklyn and the World Trade Center site.
Norman Oder of TimesRatnerReport goes a step further and considers the question of whether an effective FAR of 12 is appropriate for a site that's in Prospect Heights or Downtown Brooklyn (depending on who you believe).
Posted by lumi at February 6, 2006 10:55 AM