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November 22, 2009
Mapping Out Forest City Ratner’s Monopolistic Strategy of Subsidy Collection
Noticing New York
This blog post points out how Forest City Ratner, developer for the proposed Atlantic Yards project, has pursued a strategy of sucking up available public subsidies by being the only developer considered for any given project. Atlantic Yards is a perfect example of the developer being given a huge chunk of Brooklyn real estate, and subsidies, without competitive bidding.
The ever-growing Ratner monopoly is illustrated with maps showing growth starting from 1 Pierrpont Plaza and spreading further into Brooklyn.
The post finishes with the following:
We conclude simply with this. If monopolies have always been recognized to be bad, such that we have national laws against them, and if monopolies facilitate “rent seeking” behavior that enables developers like Forest City Ratner to manipulate gains for itself at society’s loss, why is the government fostering these real estate monopolies for one real estate company’s unprecedented takeover of so much of Brooklyn? It doesn’t make sense to us but it’s a really BIG question. We hope that our mapping it out helps to visualize just how big.
Posted by steve at November 22, 2009 7:16 AM