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March 18, 2010
Disdainful Bloomberg damns "naysayers" who delayed Ratner, says Atlantic Yards would be bigger and arrive faster "if we'd let him go ahead then"
Atlantic Yards Report
During his weekly radio appearance (audio, transcript) on WOR's John Gambling Show last Friday, Mayor Mike Bloomberg damned Atlantic Yards protesters as naysayers and made multiple dubious claims about the project.
Then again, as developer Bruce Ratner said at the groundbreaking, Bloomberg was behind the project from the get-go.
He'll be back on WOR/710 AM shortly after 8am Friday.
..."You’ve got a sports crazy borough and no professional sports," he said. "You’ve got a market for shows and circuses and things like that that it’s right there. They don’t have to come from anyplace."
Yes, there might be a good market for the Barclay Center, despite the arena glut. What Bloomberg won't grapple with is whether it would be a good deal for the city, given warnings by the New York City Independent Budget Office of major losses.
"You’ve got all of Long Island, Nassau and Suffolk County. They can get there a heck of lot easier than they can get to West Side of Manhattan," Bloomberg said.
Not exactly. The Long Island Rail Road terminus in Brooklyn does offer significant rail access to Nassau and Suffolk counties, but MSG offers the same and more. (Note that the Port Washington branch, according to the LIRR map, only connects to Penn Station.)
Jobs and blight
"And there are people- and we need jobs and it’s a blighted area that’s been there for a long time," Bloomberg said, casually dispensing with two hugely contested issues.
Dissing DDDB
Bloomberg continued: "And you know there’s some people who still say, ‘Oh, no, no. It’s the wrong thing. Build, don’t destroy.’ And that sort of thing. Come on." (He couldn't even get the name of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn right.)
Who's got the vision
"This is one of the great things," the mayor said. "This is a good example- and in all fairness to Bruce Ratner, who’s fought this for seven years and the people that have delayed him made it so much more difficult and so much more expensive and he’s not building as big or as fast as he would’ve if he’d gone- if we’d let him go ahead then."
NoLandGrab: Plenty more uniformed whining where that came from.
Posted by eric at March 18, 2010 11:44 PM