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June 21, 2009
Atlantic Yards won't be derailed
Crains
By Theresa Agovino
The proposed Atlantic Yards project, and its promised public benefits, have continued to shrink over the years. This assessment continues to inisist on the inevitability of the project.
Forest City Ratner's long-delayed, dramatically altered Atlantic Yards project faces two key votes this week on its latest changes. Critics say the modifications will dilute—or erase—the plan's pledged public benefits.
On Tuesday, the Empire State Development Corp. board is expected to weigh in on a timetable that would put the completion date for the $4 billion, 22-acre project far past the original 2014 target. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will probably vote the next day on a proposal allowing Forest City to delay delivery of a $100 million lump-sum payment to the MTA for development rights, and possibly reduce the payment amount.
Despite fierce opposition to the shrinking project, bets are running heavily in favor of state officials' reaching the necessary compromises to push it along. Far too much time and money has been invested, officials say. It's also unlikely that another developer could be found to take over in this economic climate.
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The reality is that a host of lawsuits and the recession have forced so many delays and design changes that, at this point, Atlantic Yards disappoints everybody, perhaps even Forest City—which declined to comment for this story.
“Is this still the best deal for the people?” asks state Sen. Bill Perkins, D-Manhattan, who chairs the committee overseeing the MTA. “It's a deal being done behind closed doors, and at the rate it is changing, it doesn't seem to deliver on the promises.”
Mr. Perkins has written Ms. Williams demanding to know why the MTA is renegotiating with Forest City and whether the agency has considered that the “alleged public benefits have since substantially diminished or vanished altogether.” Seven elected officials have asked that this week's vote be postponed to allow for public hearings.
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When plans for Atlantic Yards were announced in 2003, Forest City boasted that stararchitect Frank Gehry was the master planner and designer of the development's showpiece: an arena for the Nets basketball team, which the company owns. But by last year, the cost of his arena had hit nearly $1 billion, and Mr. Gehry was officially ousted from the project earlier this month. Though not everyone was enamored of his striking design, the initial renderings by his successor, architectural firm Ellerbe Becket, have been likened to an airport hangar.
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Foes point out that the Independent Budget Office, which monitors the city's finances, said last month that it no longer believed the arena would generate the $25 million net positive benefit over 30 years that the group had forecast. The benefit was wiped out by the city's doubling its contribution to the project to $205 million—a figure officials dispute.
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Affordable housing, which many in the community saw as a key sweetener, is also on hold. Three residential buildings were supposed to be up by 2010 offering as many as 633 units of low-, moderate- and middle-income housing. Construction on one of the buildings is slated to start later this year, and a second at an undetermined time after. The total number of units in each is not available.
“This was a classic bait-and-switch,” says Councilwoman Letitia James, a Brooklyn Democrat. “They [Forest City] made promises so they could get their arena.”
NoLandGrab: If the proposed arena is going to be a money-loser for the City, and the highly-touted affordable housing is pushed into a an ever-receding future, and there can be no jobs created without office towers, maybe those officials who say "far too much time and money has been invested" could instead realize that there's no public gain to be had from this money pit.
Posted by steve at June 21, 2009 6:28 AM