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July 14, 2006
On the cheap
Brooklyn Papers
By Ariella Cohen
More than 2,000 New Yorkers lined up this week hoping for a shot at a cheap rental within Bruce Ratner’s proposed $3.5-billion Atlantic Yards development — but many left the developer’s affordable housing presentation disappointed by the harsher reality.
“I’m not sure what kind of chance I have to get one of their nice apartments,” said Canarsie resident Jennifer Haynes, a retiree who left Tuesday night’s presentation at the Brooklyn Marriott before it ended.
Ratner billed the event as an “affordable housing information meeting,” promoting it with full-page newspaper ads and targeted postcard mailings in neighborhoods far removed from the site of the 22-acre, 6,860-apartment, basketball arena and office space development, which the developer says would include 2,250 units of low, moderate and middle-income rentals.
Attendees shared a common frustration over the lack of affordable options in the city. Those frustrations were not resolved on Tuesday.
Some complained, for example, that they received a survey rather than an application for an apartment. Others wondered if they would qualify for the housing if their earnings didn’t fit into any of the development’s income-dependent programs.
This week's editorial takes a skeptical view of the affordable housing meeting:
And, indeed, thousands of people, from all over the city, showed up, eager to put in an application for a cheap rental in a Frank Gehry-designed high-rise.
Oh, but wouldn’t you know it: No applications were available — and won’t be for at least three years — because this full-house event was not really about serving apartment hungry New Yorkers, but about using them as props in the Forest City Ratner media campaign.
Posted by lumi at July 14, 2006 8:15 AM