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February 22, 2010
Jobs, Housing and Urban Development in Brooklyn: The Atlantic Yards Controversy
Regional Labor Review
by Lee Zimmerman
Hofstra University Professor and Brooklyn resident Lee Zimmerman examines ACORN's role in the selling of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project.
In an interview in the previous issue of the Regional Labor Review, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis addresses ACORN's relationship to Atlantic Yards (AY), a massive 22-acre high-rise real estate project that developer Forest City Ratner (FCR) proposes to build in Prospect Heights, a low-rise neighborhood in Brooklyn. Both her narrative and the explanatory endnote, briefly introducing the project, present extremely problematic accounts - perpetuating those that have more or less dominated the public sphere. In this, they occlude the degree to which Atlantic Yards represents: an egregious violation of democratic process; the obliteration of vibrant communities through colossally-scaled and instant gentrification; and (continuing the radical redistribution of wealth upward that has accelerated in recent decades) a massive transfer of public wealth to a giant developer far in excess of any putative benefits. Some of these benefits include affordable housing and jobs. Given how seriously housing and jobs were needed even before the recent economic decline has exacerbated the problem, the rhetoric of “we're getting housing and jobs so AY is a good deal” has remained powerful, especially when mobilized by an accomplished leader like Berta Lewis, speaking for a group that has done so much for disenfranchised communities.
Such rhetoric, though, evades the point. The question isn’t simply “will AY provide some jobs and affordable housing?” but rather “how much benefit, especially housing and jobs, will AY provide relative to the costs - the opportunity costs, of course (the housing that won't get built, the jobs that won't get created, the more appropriately scaled development that won't get built on the site, and the public services that won't get delivered, with the direct and indirect public subsidies that would go to AY), but also the costs to the environment and infrastructure, to public and fiscal health and security, to the urban fabric of Brooklyn neighborhoods, to the fight against the abusive use of eminent domain, and to the democratic process. That is, while Lewis acknowledges that FCR sought a Community Benefits Agreement to provide “political cover,” her narrative fails to account for why that cover is needed. In an effort to suggest what is being “covered” by narratives like Lewis's, I'd like first to tease out the narrative implicit in her remarks and in the supplemental “informational” endnote, and then to sketch a counternarrative about Atlantic Yards.
article [PDF]
Posted by eric at February 22, 2010 10:56 AM