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August 20, 2008
Panic in Sambôdia: From Crack City Nights To The New Light
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THE NEW WORLD LUSOPHONE SOUSAPHONE
Journalist, blogger and Brooklyn ex-pat Colin Brayton reports on a Brazilian urban renewal project land grab that sounds like Atlantic Yards on steroids, complete with exaggerated tales of blight, cheerleading media coverage, and questionable crime statistics. But his Atlantic Yards reference is a little off-base.
City government wants private enterprise to execute New Light urban renewal project, report G1/Globo.
The city plans to expropriate 106 acres in the downtown area.
Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, New York, for comparison’s sake, involved some 21 acres, and years and years of intense negotiation with the local community.
The local community in this case is simply being demonized in the media — Globo is a major culprit — as an homogenous army of crack-smoking zombies and evicted at gunpoint by the fabled Tropa de Choque.
Typical of Globo journalism, some 95% of the report consists factoids plagiarized from press releases by the city government, and dedicates only a token amount of space to opposition to the project by local residents whose properties are being sold off for pennies, in offers they cannot refuse, so that Microsoft can have a nice place to work out of for very, very cheap.
It cannot even manage to interview a single person so affected. It interviews one person who knows of, and sympathizes with, a person so affected.
Symptomatic: G1 follows the city government — the incumbent mayor is polling at about 9% in his bid for reelection, trailing even Paulo Maluf — in referring to the neighborhood as “Crackland.”
...Longtime residents and property owners are now seeing themselves socioeconomically cleansed from the area along with the crackheads.
NoLandGrab: "Years and years of intense negotiation with the local community?" We'll give Brayton the benefit of the doubt, and assume that either a) he's been absent from Brooklyn a few years or b) he's been getting his Atlantic Yards news from The Brooklyn Standard, Forest City Ratner's erstwhile fake newspaper.
The only "negotiation" Atlantic Yards has gone through has been between developer Bruce Ratner and a few hand-picked community groups, several of which didn't exist before the project was announced. The community's intense battle to stop the ill-conceived project, however, has been going on for years and years.
Posted by eric at August 20, 2008 10:05 PM