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January 28, 2010
Did New York City Planning Officials Sidestep Looking at the Bigger Atlantic Yards Picture?
Noticing New York
Forest City Ratner owns air rights that would allow it to build three high-rise buildings atop its Atlantic Center mall, which was constructed in such a fashion as to support the additional structures.
NNY wonders if City Planning had taken those extra buildings into account in its "review" of the Atlantic Yards project.
Given all this focus on whether the mega-project was too large, combined with the fact that Ms. Burden and her city planning officials took credit for downsizing it when they actually didn’t, we wondered whether City Planning’s review of the mega-project looked at it in terms of its inescapably larger proposed size, 19 new towers rather than 16. We think they should have. Instead, the evidence is that City Planning again played along with the effort to depict Forest City Ratner’s overall plans as being for just 16 new towers.
...Why is it important whether the City Planning Commission or the City Planning Department dealt with the larger project as a whole rather than just participating in the manipulation of public perceptions about the project size? Because that is what city planning is supposedly about, looking at how planned city developments operate as a whole, integrating with the environment around them. The focus of City Planning officials is not supposed to be minimizing reviews and coordinating with the developers’ PR.
Posted by eric at January 28, 2010 11:19 AM