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January 22, 2009
It Came from the Blogosphere...
Brownstoner, Ratner Now Trying to Stiff the MTA
A week after the (not surprising) news that Forest City was "value engineering" its development plans for Atlantic Yards in an effort to cut costs, word comes that the developer is also trying to restructure the $100 million payment it committed to make to the MTA....
Noticing New York, Caroline Kennedy, in Our Defense Against Eminent Domain?: The Way it Might be
Michael D.D. White muses about how a Senator Caroline Kennedy might approach the issue of eminent domain, an issue now moot given her withdrawal from consideration for New York's junior senate seat.
Further, in Atlantic Yards you have perhaps the clearest possible example of a developer-initialed and -driven megadevelopment. In Atlantic Yards there is ample evidence of bad faith and incompetence on the part of the government in assisting that private enterprise and putting a particular private entity’s goals ahead of the public. That includes the way in which competitive bidding was avoided and the accommodations in structuring the project to make it the maximum possible subsidy sponge, despite what that means in terms of poor design and oppressive density. Since so much is being torn down and left vacant for so long, and since the subsidies are so great, the argument of any economic benefit is conspicuously undermined or totally nonexistent.
NYObserver.com, Columbia Expansion Holdout Sues To Block Eminent Domain
The owner of a set of storage buildings in West Harlem, Nick Sprayregen, has filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s use of eminent domain, he said this afternoon. The state has commenced actions to acquire the properties in connection with Columbia University’s planned 17-acre expansion in the area.
...Also in Harlem eminent domain-related news, a group of business owners in East Harlem has filed suit against the city in connection with the Bloomberg administration's plans to develop a large mixed-use project along 125th Street. In claims laid out in the press release here and the lawsuit here, the group argues that the city is violating a number of provisions associated with the urban renwal area where the site is based (including the fact that a large number of the planned apartments be market-rate).
BrooklynPaper.com, Cartoonist has gone country
[Brooklyn-based country crooner Andy] Friedman lives in Prospect Heights, near Freddy’s Bar, the Prohibition-era tavern that is slated to be torn down for Bruce Ratner’s basketball arena. The bar appears in a mournful song on Friedman’s forthcoming CD, “Weary Things,” which will be unveiled at Friedman’s Jan. 29 show at Southpaw. This week, he traded bons-mots with GO Brooklyn.
...GO: The most overtly local song is “Freddy’s Backroom.” It’s bittersweet. But isn’t the story of our borough and our city that we simply pave over the old, even if history gets lost in the name of progress?
AF: I don’t think that song is a protest song, or an anti-Ratner song. Heck, I’ve shopped at Target. But I love those bars and I’m entitled to lament. That’s all it is. I wrote that song sitting at the bar on a stack of beer coasters one night, just looking around, and thinking that soon it will be gone.
NoLandGrab: Gone? With Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project looking ever so shaky, Friedman might have to one day rewrite that tune to give it an ever-so-rare-in-country-music happy ending.
Curbed, Now Mr. Bruce Doesn't Want to Pay Mr. Sander & the MTA
Any day now, we expect a story about how the Atlantic Yards project has come across a new construction process that will allow everything to made from popsicle sticks and super glue, slashing the cost by 99.5 percent, with the remaining .5 percent coming from piggy banks stored at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Cleveland. Ah, but we jest.
City Room Blog [NY Times], Housing & Economy
Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project is in such financial upheaval that the developer is now trying to cut back on much-needed transit improvements, which he promised in exchange for approval for the $4 billion project. Sources said the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, is in talks with the cash-poor Metropolitan Transportation Authority about cutting costs on a revamp and move of the Long Island Rail Road’s Vanderbilt railyards, which he agreed to buy three years ago for $100 million. [New York Post]
NJ.com, Atlantic Yards developer seeks to cut transit costs
Gothamist, Ratner May Scale Back Atlantic Yards Transit Upgrades
Posted by eric at January 22, 2009 11:13 AM