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October 4, 2009
What Purnick Has Purged: The Bloomberg Bio Mysteriously Missing Atlantic Yards
Noticing New York
Michael White has read Joyce Purnick’s "Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics", a mostly adulatory biography of Mayor Bloomberg. One way that the bio manages to look so lovingly at Bloomberg is to ignore his mayoralty's failures in the areas of development and urban design.
A prime example of ignoring significantly errant Bloombergian megadevelopment is Purnick’s lack of mention of Atlantic Yards. Her book contains only an oblique misleading sliver of a reference. Neither Atlantic Yards nor Bruce Ratner or his Forest City Ratner are mentioned anywhere in the book. Similarly, you won’t find mention of Yankee Stadium in the index, though there are two paragraphs about the new Yankee and Mets stadiums into which there is tucked the slight hint that there might be plans for a megadevelopment far more problematic than either stadium. On page 207 Ms. Purnick breezes through this topic area thusly:
After blocking Giuliani’s subsidies to new stadiums for the Mets and the Yankees in his first year, judging, in his pragmatic businessman’s fashion, that the city could not afford them, Bloomberg later relented. He was lavishly generous to the two teams and their ultraluxurious stadiums, as well as to a new basketball arena in Brooklyn.
The stadiums benefited (sic) from tens of millions of dollars* in city investments, tax breaks and subsides, bundled into complex deals whose true cost to the taxpayers may never be clear. The city will gain from economic activity in the long run, the mayor said, as all mayors say about sports stadiums everywhere. Rarely do the predictions meet the promise but the stadiums are built anyway.
(*Only “tens of millions of dollars”? Total public subsidies for Atlantic Yards are in the hundreds of millions aggregating up to $2-$3 billion and the subsidies that come from the state and other levels of government should not be disregarded: Those are funded with taxes from NYC taxpayers too, and divert resources from other city projects. ESDC and the MTA just piled on hundreds of millions of extra subsidy on the basketball arena alone.)
Posted by steve at October 4, 2009 7:53 AM