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May 5, 2009
Forest City in the News
Here's some of the news from across the nation about Forest City Enterprises, the parent company of Atlantic Yards overdeveloper Forest City Ratner.
InsideBayArea.com, My Word: Russo divulge show his secret ballpark site
One of the owners of the Oakland A's mentions Forest City's Oakland boondoggle as he fires the next salvo in the public debate over where to site the team's new ballpark, which will allegedly be "financed with private funds."
But long before [A's managing owner Lew ] Wolff owned the team, the city decided to allow Forest City Developers to develop the downtown site with condos — and even provided Forest City with a $67 million subsidy. So instead of a baseball stadium, retail space and housing — at no taxpayer cost — the city, in a monumental example of bad planning, gave away the site to condos.
NoLandGrab: Regular readers will recall that Forest City's Oakland project is faltering. New condos are not selling and the latest idea is to turn empty lots into parking lots.
Unfortunately, you can count on interim parking lots in the footprint of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, and the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality won't save the developer from the next condo bubble.
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Moving On
Forest City Enterprises Co-Chairman Sam Miller says he's stepping down from the board of Cleveland State University. Though there are rumblings that he's not happy with the direction of the board, Miller would say only that he told CSU President Michael Schwartz when he was hired that he'd leave when Schwartz left. And Schwartz is retiring, too.
"I spent 10 years on that board, and I feel after 10 years of hard work and a lot of, let's say, material support, I feel that the progress that was made was more than was made since they started it. And I'm going on to some other colleges," he said.
Cleveland Plain Dealer, CWRU gets $8.7 million for medical school
Case Western Reserve University just announced "8.7 million in new gifts to [the] School of Medicine." Including:
A $2 million gift from Forest City Enterprises Charitable Foundation Inc. that will create a new Center for Surgical Skills Training and an endowed professorship.
Posted by lumi at May 5, 2009 5:24 AM