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February 7, 2008
‘Confrontation Politics’ No Longer Viable Over Atlantic Yards Project
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By Raanan Geberer
This writer has agreed with many, if not the majority, of the arguments put forth by the Ratner project’s opponents. But now, it seems to me, with Forest City Ratner demolishing buildings left and right and publishing weekly “progress reports,” the opponents should take a realistic look around them and shift gears from confrontation to negotiation — perhaps sitting down with Ratner, Borough President Marty Markowitz and others and working out a deal — for example, possibly to reduce the sizes of the buildings, to modify certain aspects of the plan (such as the proposal to de-map several streets) or to minimize the damage from eminent domain.
NoLandGrab: Um, that's what Brooklyn Speaks has been trying to do for over a year now, without anything to show for it, clearly no fault of their own (we blame Ratner).
In the anti-Atlantic Yards movement, however, they seem to have adopted the all-or-nothing tactic of “confrontation politics” — one of the worst legacies of the 1960s, in this writer’s opinion, and one of the main reasons the ‘60s student movement failed. They should realize that at this late date, the odds of totally stopping the project are less than 50 percent. If they don’t at least partially change tactics, their movement could unfortunately meet the same fate as the anti-World Trade Center movement in the 1960s, the anti-Verrazano Bridge movement around the same time, the anti-Cross Bronx Expressway movement of the 1950s and so on. And no amount of celebrities, artists and writers on an advisory board will be able to change that.
NoLandGrab: Win, lose or draw, developer Bruce Ratner made it very clear when he handpicked the groups to "negotiate" the Community Benefits Agreement that he wasn't going to negotiate with any others. Like the student movement of the '60s, if Atlantic Yards gets built, it is everyone's sincere hope that attitudes will change and that an all-powerful developer will not be able to collude with the City and State in this fashion to circumvent local zoning and local land-use review (oh, and uh, democracy) to pull a fast one on the community again.
Posted by lumi at February 7, 2008 5:33 AM