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October 13, 2006
News Analysis: Blight Fight: DDDB vs. ESDC
Brooklyn Downtown Star
By Norman Oder
At the center of the Atlantic Yards fight is whether or not the project footprint is "blighted," a designation necessary for New York State to use eminent domain to seize private property.
Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) Chairman Charles Gargano has no doubts about the 22-acre site slated for the Atlantic Yards development. "We have declared this a blighted area, and there's no question in anybody's mind that drives around there or walks around there, that a lot of the site is," he asserted, in an interview on the Channel 13 show "New York Voices," broadcast last Friday.
Host Rafael Pi Roman didn't buy it. "How can you declare a site blighted that has apartments of over $750,000?"
It was a microcosm of the blight fight going on, in which the state, in order to justify the use of eminent domain, claims to find the Prospect Heights site blighted, while critics and opponents offer counter-examples.
The article continues by citing some key points from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's detailed rebuttal to the ESDC's Blight Study.
DDDB argues that the conditions Gargano cited are significantly an artifact of the Atlantic Yards project itself. Development within the site footprint has been frozen since the project was announced in December 2003.
...
There's the tension between gentrification and blight. DDDB quotes Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) executive director Bertha Lewis, who told New York magazine in August, "If we can stop one iota of gentrification, we're gonna do it!" DDDB argues that either the project is necessary to stop gentrification, or the area is so blighted as to be unlivable: "Blight and gentrification simply do not happen simultaneously in the same location."
Posted by lumi at October 13, 2006 10:36 AM