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December 10, 2008
GL Analysis: Five Years of Atlantic Yards BS is Enough
Gowanus Lounge
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A thoughtful reflection from Gowanus Lounge on the occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of the unveiling of Atlantic Yards.
A quarter century from now, when the planners analyze what went wrong in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, they will have a lot to say (and none of it good) about the chain of events that started on December 10, 2003, when developer Bruce Ratner, flanked by a beaming Marty Markowitz and other public officials announced a magnficent plan called Atlantic Yards. There would be an arena for a basketball team call the Nets (stolen from New Jersey) designed by Frank Gehry. And, a sea of housing and office towers, also Gehry designed, that would become a new center for Brooklyn. By 2006, they said, the Nets would be playing ball at Flatbush and Atantic Avenues and all would be well. Taxpayers would pay little. An eyesore called the Vanderbilt Yard would be covered up and, well, we’d all live happily ever after.
Well, here we are five years later and Atlantic Yards has turned into a case study of how not to develop a major urban project. It has proceeded with a top-down arrogance that is almost unique in the annals of American planning history. The process has been one of the most anti-democratic we have witnessed anywhere in America in three decades of coverage of urban development. (Robert Moses and Richard Daley the First notwithstanding.) Neighborhoods have been excluded. City planners have had no say (not that the outcome would have been signficantly different). An epic eminent domain case and other legal battles have developed. And the process has been conducted in such a way that deep community divisions have been created that could easily have been avoided by creating an inclusive process rather than fostering a divisive and hateful one.
Deadline after deadline has been missed. Public costs have skyrocketed. Key details have been kept from the public. The mainstream media has totally abrogated its responsibility to investigate the somewhat sleazy goings on in Albany and Prospect Heights. And, in the meantime, the entire economy has changed and the financial systems has nearly collapsed. The developer has started trimming the project. First, saying that it could stall, and then noting that affordable housing would be cut and that its signature tower wouldn’t be built until a tenant was found. Even the architect involved in the project–Frank Gehry–has found his good name dragged through mud via his association with this out-of-context, community-destroying project.
...One thing is certain, when Mr. Ratner and his friend Mr. Markowitz held up Brookyn Nets jerseys on December 10, 2003, we’re pretty certain none of them imagined things would ever reach this point. We’re rather amazed ourselves. Here’s a solution that would seem to be a win-win: sell the Nets to a Newark investment group so they can play in the Prudential Center–itself a facility built by a public official who is now in prison because he was corrupt to the core and restart the planning process from the community level for redeveloping the Vanderbilt Yard. Of course, the problem is that the Bloomberg Administration does not have a good track record with this kind of thing. But, you know, hope springs eternal.
Posted by eric at December 10, 2008 1:33 PM