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October 4, 2006
Partnership Working To Revitalize Downtown Brooklyn
The NY Sun
By David Lombino
To set the stage, Mr. Chan promises a host of new initiatives to make transform the area into a more vibrant 24/7 environment, one of the signature goals of the Bloomberg administration’s economic development strategy. That includes a creating a pedestrian friendly Flatbush Avenue, hiring a landscape architecture firm to create open space around the BAM cultural district, attracting a mixed-income housing project east of Flatbush Avenue, and connecting downtown to the low-rise brownstone neighborhoods to the south.
Deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff said that downtown Brooklyn will compete for tenants with Jersey City. To spur the area’s development, he said the city will direct nearly $500 million in public funds towards parks, open space, infrastructure improvements and to pave the way for the nearby Atlantic Yards project and an accompanying basketball arena.
Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff helps keep a Downtown Brooklyn myth alive:
“We lost 50,000 to 60,000 jobs to New Jersey in the nineties because we didn’t have the space,” Mr. Doctoroff told the Sun.“Downtown Brooklyn is changing dramatically over the next five to ten years. What we have to sell will be very different than what we have had to sell before. We will have the ability to attract a totally different kind of corporate tenant.”
NoLandGrab: If there was such a lack of office space in NYC that corporations left for New Jersey, then why did the City of New York have to bail out Bruce Ratner's Metrotech by becoming the project's biggest tenant?
Posted by lumi at October 4, 2006 8:05 AM