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June 6, 2011
The Battle for Brooklyn
Meadowlands Matters [NorthJersey.com]
by John Brennan
One event that club executives won’t likely have time for is tonight’s premiere of “Battle for Brooklyn,” a 93-minute documentary that kicks off the Brooklyn Film Festival at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema.
The film, which is opening to strong reviews, chronicles the seven-year battle to get the Atlantic Yards project off the ground – and the controversial use of eminent domain.
The filmmakers have said they had no interest in demonizing Nets owners Bruce Ratner and Mikhail Prokhorov, or New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
But the circumstances of activist Daniel Goldstein’s saga are such that I suspect Nets owners and city officials would be right to flinch at mere mention of this film (which I will try to see and review sometime this month, since I have covered this tale from Day One).
...So the simple facts of the case would seem to lend itself to a “Joe Everyman vs. the power structure” theme for a documentary. The relatively recent practice of government using eminent domain for private benefit - rather than typical uses such as building a highway or a hospital - also is extremely unpopular nationwide.
For the Nets, the city, and the state, their side has been clear from the beginning: They say that the thousands of construction - and then permanent - jobs created, and the affordable housing units constructed, will justify the hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies to the developers.
But only a fraction of the construction jobs promised so far have developed; the project’s timeline now is for 25 years or more; and it’s not clear that some of the buildings will ever be built. The affordable housing promised also appears to be several years away, if not longer.
It’s still too soon to say that the government investment in the overall project was a financial blunder, although the public investment in the arena is not likely to ever be fully recouped. Promises by arena and stadium developers around the country also, more often than not, have proven to be overly – and, one might argue, conveniently - optimistic. We’ll know the results here eventually.
Posted by eric at June 6, 2011 10:48 AM