« Power Lies! It turns out state was wrong — A’Yards will tax electric service, raising rates | Main | Yards mess continues »
June 1, 2007
The Beep Flexes Muscle
The Brooklyn Eagle, Editorial
By Henrik Krogius
Finally, an editorial supporting Borough President Marty Markowitz's purge of Community Board 6 of members who voiced criticism of Atlantic Yards.
Using words like, "vituperative," "negative mindset," "holdouts" and "provacateurs" to describe Atlantic Yards critics and their position, Kroguis swallows the myth of Marty and Ratnerville and slams the competition for facing facts:
Markowitz saw as his gift to Brooklyn the idea of buying the Nets and bringing back a major sports franchise after the decades of mourning the departed Dodgers; it was he who persuaded Bruce Ratner to buy the team and create the arena around which Ratner then developed the Atlantic Yard project, in a dismal area on a major intersection that was crying for a major undertaking that no one before had had either the resources or imagination to develop. To Markowitz, as to many others, the virtue of the concept was self-evident. However, he didn’t reckon with the depth of opposition to change that can be found among quite a few in Brooklyn. The vituperative nature of the opponents’ campaign was apparently more than he expected, for all his years in politics, and he is said to have felt unfairly stung.
It is not as if the opponents, including so much of Board 6, ever dispassionately considered this arena-cum-offices-and-housing concept in terms of benefits vs. drawbacks, or looked at how it might be improved. A purely negative mindset invoked a host of reasons, some absurd, for why the whole idea should be thrown out. Instead of an arena at a hub of public transportation, there were suggestions that it should be put — if indeed anywhere at all — in some non-transit-served place like the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The absence of a school in the original plan was given as a reason to reject it. Traffic was looked at not in terms of mitigating its effects but as a reason for denying the project; even the fact that the site has unrivaled access to public transit — in itself a traffic-mitigating factor — has been used to argue that the project should be rejected because it will overburden the subway system. While most of those living in the project’s footprint accepted generous buyouts, 13 holdouts are fighting an eminent domain court battle in hopes of blocking the whole thing. Politically, there is a fear that the arrival of a more affluent population may shift voting patterns to the disadvantage of current office holders. Following its “crusading” practice of converting every negative scrap into a screaming headline, the Brooklyn Paper has tried to make a case out of a sponsoring British bank once having had ties to slavery, and it recently even bannered that a bagel shop changed its name rather than endure more hostility from the anti-Yards provocateurs.
NoLandGrab: Suffice it to say, thanks for trying to stay awake, but Henrik, you missed the part about:
- the Community Board hearings held last summer,
- the Coney Island option,
- erroneous and/or old data used for the study of public school capacity,
- Ratner's absurd traffic mitigations,
- the question of transportation capacity for what would be the densest residential community in the nation (like, it has never been tried, ever),
- the "holdouts" suing to uphold their constitutional right to own private property,
- the fact that the Brooklyn Machine Politik stands squarely behind the project because Ratner "owns the whole area" and is "the biggest guy around", and
- The Brooklyn Paper being recognized for covering the events that most papers can't/won't.
Posted by lumi at June 1, 2007 12:45 PM