« BARCLAYS PAID $400M FOR BROOKLYN ARENA NAMING, $250M FOR LEHMAN! | Main | The More Things Change..., Yankees Edition »
September 19, 2008
Pink Face Does Not Equal Sweeny
Gumby Fresh
Gumby wades tentatively into the game of legal prognostication, based on his first-hand account of Wednesday's court hearing on the appeal of the challenge to the Atlantic Yards blight study and Environment Impact Statement.
I can imagine the political appointees on the appellate court deciding that there's not really much that can stop the ESDC, since it was born in the late sixties when were all terrified that New York was going to hell in a hand cart, and all the good jazz musicians would move to LA. Let them get on with the sordid business of stopping the city turning into Detroit. That land was then tuppence ha'penny an acre has not stopped our real-estate-olitical complex from using the law to get very, very rich off the back of grassroots gentrification.
Still, the fact that the ESDC is still defending the study that was used to determine blight, and still insisting that the area is not gentrifying, gives me a little hope. It may not be enough to get the decision overturned, but there might be enough doubt about whether the ESDC has the power to make up blight definitions to get the decision kicked upstairs again.
But hey, I should probably stick to making awesomely bad financial prognostications rather than expanding into the awesomely bad legal prognostications business.
NoLandGrab: Gumby's admission that he thought he was the "second-worst dressed person in there" means he must have espied this correspondent seated in the court room.
Posted by eric at September 19, 2008 11:33 AM