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February 2, 2007
Why they lie
The Brooklyn Paper explains why NoLandGrab can't even squeeze in a vacation, much less retire:
Lately, it seems that no matter which development story we cover — Atlantic Yards, the so-called “Brooklyn Bridge Park,” the redevelopment of Coney Island — one common theme emerges.
Developers don’t tell the truth.
And the simple reason is that they don’t want you — the taxpayers who subsidize most development going on today — to know how much of your money they’re taking.
We write about this subject a lot, but it bears repeating because the lies and subterfuge blinds many of our readers to the hidden costs of some of Brooklyn’s biggest projects.
With Atlantic Yards, developer Bruce Ratner once boasted that his project would generate $100 million in tax revenues for the city every year for 30 years. That figure is now down to $15 million. Fifteen million! That’s coffee money for a city with a $57 billion annual budget.
The city once said it would only spend $100 million on “infrastructure improvements” at the Atlantic Yards site. That figure is now $205 million — and the mayor told our reporter this week that the final figure will be higher.
Posted by lumi at February 2, 2007 8:15 AM