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September 28, 2007
De Blasio Talks Real Estate With Brooklyn Bloggers
Brownstoner reports on City Councilman Bill de Blasio's pow-wow with bloggers. Here's the excerpt about Atlantic Yards:
Thus, he thinks City Planning's initial framework for the rezoning of Gowanus is "legitimate," particularly in terms of the height and density that are being proposed for the Public Place site (where towers may be allowed to rise as high as 14 stories), since he believes that sort of height is necessary to support the creation of affordable housing. Similarly, he said he approved of Atlantic Yards in large part because of its "tiered approach" to affordable housing (whereby units are set aside for low- to middle-income residents), and that the project deserved the special subsidies it received through the revamp of 421-a tax abatement legislation because of the number of affordable housing units that Forest City Ratner has pledged to build. The councilman was critical of Forest City Ratner's lack of "transparency," especially in terms of keeping community members abreast of demolitions.
Readers should be aware of a few things:
For many large development projects which include affordable housing, it is common to have a "tiered approach."
De Blasio is using the large amount of affordable housing units (some of which on a per-sq-ft basis would cost more than the market-rate units) to justify Ratner receiving a larger affordable-housing subsidy than any other developer who would qualify. On the flip side, he said at the last meeting with bloggers that "I still think it's too tall.
The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) has been keeping community members abreast of demolitions by posting demolition updates on the ESDC web site every two weeks, though they have turned down requests from communtiy members to distribute the updates via email. NoLandGrab can forward them to the Councilmember's office upon request.
The general impression we get from de Blasio is that he is plugged into the Brooklyn Party Machine and will not do anything to upset the apple cart; he knows way more about the backroom dealings concerning Atlantic Yards than we do; but he is remarkably under-informed about significant details and impacts of the project, especially those about which his own constituents are most concerned.
Posted by lumi at September 28, 2007 11:19 AM