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July 13, 2007
Is Kohen Ridge Ratner?
The Brooklyn Paper
By Matthew Lysiak
Bruce Ratner and Atlantic Yards have become the measure against which all other developers and projects are compared in Brooklyn.
Developer Andrew Kohen wants to build a new Home Depot and hundreds of units of housing along a vacant Bay Ridge railyard, but faced an Atlantic Yards–sized backlash from local preservationists and Community Board 10.
In fact, Bruce Ratner’s taxpayer-underwritten antics have inspired an uprising by community boards against developers.
Locals fear that Kohen’s ambitions are too large for the surrounding area’s infrastructure and that the developer is more concerned about his wallet than the interests of the community (sound familiar?).
Of course, Kohen isn’t Bruce Ratner and Home Depot isn’t Atlantic Yards. In fact, in many ways Kohen is the anti-Ratner...
NoLandGrab: Rightly or wrongly, Atlantic Yards has become the posterproject for development run amok: every developer who pretends to "listen to the community" is a "Ratner" and every project that's out-of-scale is an "Atlantic Yards."
Frustration with the Atlantic Yards "done-deal" behemoth and all of the other changes in the neighborhood over which residents have no control may be causing knee-jerk reactions to anything new and different.
At this point, neighborhoods in Brooklyn are experiencing such rapid change that once-stable communities are observably under stress and communities that have been demanding change for years, even decades, fear being left out of the conversation.
Posted by lumi at July 13, 2007 10:10 AM