« ATTN, NYC Reasonoids: Reason.tv urban renewal doc and Battle for Brooklyn screening tomorrow | Main | Lawsuit prompts Brooklyn Paper to take tough (and partly misleading) look at BUILD and failure to deliver project jobs to supporters »
December 1, 2011
Out of work! Ratner ally BUILD got just 15 jobs for black Yards supporters
The Brooklyn Paper
by Daniel Bush
The organization that promised to deliver jobs for black supporters of Atlantic Yards has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from developer Bruce Ratner to help train workers for the positions — but has only secured work for 15 people at the $5-billion mega-project.
The mostly black members of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development who were promised some of the 1,500 jobs per year over the project’s 10-year buildout loudly supported Atlantic Yards during the approval process, often appearing in hard hats at rallies and hearings and presenting a contrasting face to the project’s mostly white opponents.
BUILD’s President James Caldwell said that the group has helped 400 people find work around town — but he admitted that only 15 of those positions were on Ratner’s Prospect Heights development, which currently consists of only the under-construction Barclays Center near the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues.
Residents filed a lawsuit against Ratner and BUILD last Tuesday in federal court, claiming that executives at BUILD and Ratner’s company falsely promised them union memberships and jobs in exchange for completing a “sham” 15-week training program run by the Downtown nonprofit in 2010.
Caldwell disputed the claim, and blamed his failure to secure more Atlantic Yards jobs for local residents on the economy and lawsuits from Yards opponents.
“There would be [more jobs] had all these things not taken place,” he said. “The bottom fell out of the economy.”
But the Great Recession didn’t hurt BUILD’s bottom line: the organization’s annual operating budget increased from $191,721 in 2007 to $279,395 in 2009, according to the latest available documents from the Internal Revenue Service.
NoLandGrab: Wow, who could have predicted that? We had Bruce Ratner's word, after all.
Posted by eric at December 1, 2011 11:06 AM