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August 6, 2008
Building a Technology Park in Baltimore by Rehabilitating a Neighborhood
The NY Times
By Eugene L. Meyer
From the newspaper that has never seen a Forest City project it didn't like, today The New York Times ran a fairly uncritical story about how the development company and Johns Hopkins Hospital "have joined forces to demolish a neighborhood to save it." [No joke!]
Though the article contained this disclosure, "One of its affiliates, Forest City Ratner, was the development partner for the new Manhattan headquarters of The New York Times Company," it doesn't mention that the Times Company and Forest City Ratner (FCR) now co-own the building.
Also absent from the article is any mention of "eminent domain," a controversial component of the plan to build The Times's headquarters and FCR's Atlantic Yards project. Instead, The Times dances around the topic:
To accumulate land for the site, the city, state and Johns Hopkins in 2003 created East Baltimore Development Inc. to acquire buildings, tear them down, and then sell the land to developers.
[Read: In order to acquire enough land, the government and Johns Hopkins created a public-private corporation empowered with the use of eminent domain to force people to sell their homes and/or businesses.]
Check out the rest of the article, which cheerily ends with a quote from a Forest City executive: "Hopefully, this is the last time we’ll have to demolish a neighborhood in order to save it.... It’s a real opportunity to create a new model of inclusive city rebuilding."
Posted by lumi at August 6, 2008 5:11 AM