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October 2, 2009
What Forest City Ratner told Sheldon Silver (but not the public): affordable condos depend on "appropriate subsidy"
Atlantic Yards Report
As I've written, the affordable rental units planned for Atlantic Yards are not guaranteed but rather dependent on available public subsidies.
The same goes for the affordable condos promised by developer Forest City Ratner upon project approval in 2006.
Though the developer did not mention such caveats in its public announcement, it did offer such caveats in a letter to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver that I recently obtained via a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. Beyond that, the pledge has never been memorialized in project documents, despite a 2009 update to the Modified General Project Plan.
This is part of a pattern; as I wrote in June, the Empire State Development Corporation, while the Atlantic Yards project approached approval in December 2006, never revealed how project funding depended on scarce housing bonds, and Forest City Ratner's 2005 bid to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ignored the need for such bonds to build the residential buildings.
Click thru for Bruce Ratner's weasel words.
Posted by eric at October 2, 2009 11:54 AM