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October 6, 2010
Atlantic Yards: ‘Garden of Eden’ or Bait and Switch?
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Op-Ed
by Jo Anne Simon
In 2003, Forest City Ratner Companies’ (FCRC) plans for the Atlantic Yards project were launched with great fanfare. Forest City promised, among other things, a “transit-oriented” mega-development at the apex of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues; a magnificent Frank Gehry-designed arena and adjoining towers, with 2.5 million square feet of commercial space, including the Williamsburgh Bank Building-topping “Miss Brooklyn”; 4,500 units of housing, half of which would be affordable; and eight acres of publicly accessible open space designed by world-renowned landscape designer Laurie Olin, in return for a sizeable public investment in the form of direct and indirect subsidies and tax breaks.
The increased vehicular and transit congestion, worsened air quality, construction noise and closed streets would be a small price to pay, we were assured, for replacing a “blighted” area with, in the words of Frank Gehry, “a whole new neighborhood” in just 10 years’ time.
Environmental impacts as laid out in the required Environmental Impact Statement would be negligible and mitigatable, and those that weren’t, would be worth the pain. Much like Ragú spaghetti sauce, everything was “in there.” Affordable housing? “It’s in there.” Environmental sustainability? “It’s in there.” Connecting communities? “It’s in there.” Well, not really…
...This past week, FCRC’s CEO Bruce Ratner publicly acknowledged what many of us concerned citizens had believed all along — that Atlantic Yards couldn’t be finished in 10 years — and was never intended to be.
NoLandGrab: Simon goes on to tout the efforts of BrooklynSpeaks, but one has to wonder whether things might have turned out very differently if the "respectable" community organizations allied in the group had instead joined forces with DDDB and others to aggressively fight the project, rather than foolishly holding out hope that Ratner could be reasoned with.
Posted by eric at October 6, 2010 9:18 AM