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February 12, 2009
The Brooklyn Paper mailbag
The Brooklyn Paper, Letters
Predictably, the Brooklyn Paper's mailbag is full of letters criticizing last week's editorial favoring the use of federal stimulus funds to build Bruce Ratner's near-billion dollar arena, including this response from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn board member Ron Shiffman and spokesperson Daniel Goldstein.
Ed Weintrob’s Feb. 7 front-page editorial (“Paper: Use fed $ for arena”) called for federal stimulus money to bail out Forest City Ratner’s proposed billion-dollar Barclays Center arena.
Weintrob wrote that “the most problematic, oversized components of Bruce Ratner’s proposal for Atlantic Yards should not be built, no matter how much federal money is being thrown around.” But the arena is the most problematic component of the project.
The arena, and the fixation on it, is the major impediment to the construction of affordable housing over the rail yards and job creation within any meaningful time horizon.
The Senate version of the bill specifically does not allow funds for stadiums. Furthermore, the intent of the stimulus bill is to generate jobs and kick-start the economy, not bail out a private developer — TARP took that approach and look where it got us.
...Most importantly, nearly all economists agree that arenas are not economic generators or cost-effective job creators. FCR has never even publicly estimated the number of new jobs the arena would create because it would be woefully few, especially in relation to the public cost of the arena. And the opportunity costs are dramatic. A new federal subsidy would allow FCR to triple dip by using federally “subsidized tax-exempt bonds,” city and state subsidies and stimulus funds — the federal tax-exempt arena bond alone is estimated to be a subsidy worth about $165 million.
Posted by eric at February 12, 2009 9:56 AM