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January 30, 2008
Atlantic Yards, the E.I.S Game and the Destruction of Brooklyn
The Genius of the Development Industrial Complex
CounterPunch.org
by Christopher Ketcham
Journalist Christopher Ketcham, writing for the political newsletter CounterPunch, connects the dots among Bruce Ratner, the ESDC, Atlantic Yards, David Paget, Brooklyn Bridge Park, sprawl and subsidy-slinging politicians in an epic essay that's a must-read if you haven't yet had your daily fill of overdevelopment-driven outrage.
The game is called Developers Gone Wild. Non-sustainability, waste, carelessness, the privatization of public resources, and, of course, the packing of too many rats into too little space are its hallmarks. In New York City, a primary playing piece in the game, if not the queen on the board, is the ironically-named "environmental impact statement," or EIS, which for decades has greased the skids for development by creating the pretense of public environmental oversight. The artfulness and deceit of the EIS process underscores the fact that the most dangerous players in the game are not the private sector's array of bankers, mortgage lenders, construction companies, unions, big name developers, lawyers, consultants, investors, and speculators and elected officials-qua-boosters (think of the inane yet somehow insidious Marty Markowitz, porcine borough president of Brooklyn) that together comprise what we'll call the development industrial complex.
The threat, rather, arrives from public agencies that abet the private sector's predatory ways. The chief offender to sign off on the EIS process is the New York State boosterist agency known as the Empire State Development Corporation. The corrupt collusion of ESDC with developers has had predictable results: During a decade that saw a rush to re-zone or bypass zoning in favor of uncontrolled growth--the boom-time of roughly 1997 to the present--billions of dollars in new development was sausaged through the system without meaningful environmental review, without realistic assessment of impacts, and, by extension, without the public getting a fair understanding of the effect these megaprojects would have on the streets where people live, shop and play. As a political and corporate tool for profiteering, and also as a means of disarming the citizenry, the ESDC is indispensable--and in Brooklyn it has become the key to the kingdom.
NoLandGrab: Did we mention Ketcham's novel reaction to viewing "Brooklyn Matters?"
Posted by eric at January 30, 2008 6:16 PM