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December 13, 2009
Atlantic Yards Reports Sunday Observations
Crain's, unsurprisingly, calls for Columbia eminent domain decision to be reversed"
Here is a reaction to this morning's Crain's editorial endorsing eminent domain abuse.
Crain's is right that the two rulings seem in conflict--though it would be possible for the Court of Appeals to uphold the Columbia decision on narrow grounds.
What Crain's doesn't grapple with is the bad faith found by the court in the Columbia case, or its finding that underutilization--a factor in the dubious blight finding for Atlantic Yards, as well--was deemed illegitimate.
Apparently Crain's thinks there's no need to reform eminent domain, especially the definition of blight, in New York State.
Brutally weird Schumer flashback: "But you know what really enervates me abut this? 10,000 jobs."
Perhaps the most brutally weird moment in the trailer (below) for the documentary-in-progress Battle of Brooklyn comes at about 2:48.
"This is a great project," declares Sen. Chuck Schumer, at the 2004 State of the Borough address, which, as the Brooklyn Paper reported, focused on Atlantic Yards. "But you know what really enervates me abut this? 10,000 jobs."
...
But the Schumer segment deserves its own footnotes. Let's put aside the fact that the Harvard-educated lawmaker doesn't know the difference between enervate and energize.
More importantly, the figure of 10,000 jobs was bogus from the start. There was no market for that many office jobs. Forest City Ratner overstated the number of jobs that could fit in the four towers planned around the arena. And it neglected to explain that most of the jobs would not be new but transferred from Manhattan.
Now only one office tower is planned. But even Bruce Ratner told Crain's last month: “Can you tell me when we are going to need a new office tower?”
NoLandGrab: What really enervates Brooklyn are the massive public subsidies for a basketball arena that will return little or no public economic benefit.
Yards foes "real land-grabbers" (back in 1967)
From the notorious Stephen Witt, in the Courier-Life, May 2008:
Anthony Taylor sat on a metal folding chair in the St. Bartholomew's Church cafeteria, 1227 Pacific Street, and recalled the days when several buildings in the Atlantic Yards footprint held jobs, "We lost 40,000 jobs back there. We lost the Daily News building. We lost the bakery, the Chunky factory, the soap factory, the box company."
The Chunky factory at 603 Dean Street, it turns out, was sold in 1967. It later housed a machine works and, most recently, a homeless shelter, now apparently doomed.
Posted by steve at December 13, 2009 6:59 AM