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September 10, 2012
The "Civic Developer" and the Culture of Cheating: how Bruce Ratner backed off promises to build Atlantic Yards in ten years and to build conventional towers with union labor
Atlantic Yards Report
There's nothing criminal about Atlantic Yards, nothing corrupt--at least nothing found or even investigated.
But many people feel uneasy about the project and the process, suspicions validated by a finding of serious civil illegality--the state's failure to study the impacts of a 25-year buildout.
That failure, left unresolved when the Barclays Center opens Sept. 28, was linked to the signing of a Development Agreement in 2009 after the project was approved. The Development Agreement, which gave developer Forest City Ratner 12 years to build the first towers on the arena block and 25 years to build the project, was initially withheld from public and legal scrutiny.
It's part of a pattern that pervades the Atlantic Yards saga. I call it the "culture of cheating," drawing on The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, a book by business ethicist David Callahan. (The book doesn't deal with Atlantic Yards, though an update could.)
Developer Bruce Ratner has made two self-sabotaging--if rather little-noticed--statements that back up charges of cheating:
- he repudiated the ten-year timeline to build the project previously endorsed by his company and the state
- he claimed that high-rise, union-built affordable housing isn't feasible, even though that's what he long planned and the state approved twice
...Ratner's been using the word civic a lot, but it's a weasel world. It means "relating a city," or to citizenship, but it does not necessarily denote the public interest. Ratner seems to be saying that, as long as he's building in the city, he's somehow helping the city. The reality is a bit more complicated, since he also gains things like public subsidies, tax breaks, and eminent domain.
Posted by eric at September 10, 2012 11:34 AM