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September 21, 2009
Timothy P. Carney: ACORN and wealthy developers vs. hipsters and firemen
The Examiner
By Timothy P. Carney
This editorial uses a provocative headline for a piece that, at first, paints the Atlantic Yards fight as a racial conflict.
Wealthy and well-connected developer Bruce Ratner wants to bulldoze an old neighborhood in Brooklyn and turn it into high-rise apartment buildings and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets. Many locals, including the hipsters who live in Park Slope and the firemen who work at FDNY Squad No. 1, don't want this steel hulk named Atlantic Yards casting a shadow over their neighborhood and filling their streets with traffic.
Ratner is white, is wealthy and has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians. But his allies say they're working for the less fortunate who need "Change," fighting against privileged whites who want "resegregation."
"If this thing doesn't come out in favor of Ratner," said James Caldwell, a black man who runs Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, "it would be a conspiracy against blacks."
One Ratner ally is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN might have disappeared after last year's embezzlement scandal (the brother of the organization's founder pocketed almost $1 million in ACORN funds), but Ratner swooped in to bail the group out. He loaned ACORN $1.5 million at low interest rates.
ACORN's New York director, Bertha Lewis, is a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of Ratner's development. At a news conference announcing the project would proceed, Lewis, onstage, planted photo-op kisses on both Ratner and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Lewis has also framed it on racial terms: "The overwhelming folks who are opposed are white people and wealthier people and more secure people and people who just arrived. * We're tired of being pushed out."
It helps inspire Lewis, one imagines, that ACORN got that loan from Ratner and that Ratner gave her a hand in devising the low-income housing portions of his development. Ratner, it appears, has bought an ally, not just with cash, but with power -- ACORN will now be shaping who lives where. "We're developers now," Lewis told New York Magazine.
Lewis is correct about the racial makeup of the anti-development activists. Freddy's Bar on Dean Street is the mother ship of the Atlantic Yards resistance. Excluding the barmaid, there's no pigment in this joint when I visit on a Friday night.
The piece concludes that trying to understand the proposed Atlantic Yards project as a conflict between black supporters and white opponents only distracts an observer from seeing the land grab the project is based upon.
To understand what's happening on Atlantic Avenue, you need to shed Left-vs.-Right and white-vs.-black modes of thinking, as well as simple anti-corporatism. Without eminent domain, Ratner would never be able to get all the land.
The real dividing line is people with access to government power -- Ratner, ACORN and the politicians -- against people without such access. You can guess who's going to win.
NoLandGrab: As a groundbreaking for the project has been repeatedly pushed back over the years, it might not be a good idea trying to predict where this fight will end up.
Posted by steve at September 21, 2009 5:39 AM