Portrait of the activist as a young condo owner
While the Supreme Court mulls the potential landmark urban redevelopment eminent domain case, Kelo v. New London, on which I posted a couple of days back, and while I slave away on a forthcoming major post about eminent domain equitable principles, today’s New York
… of a respectable building …
“Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
… in a tough neighborhood:
The approach to the building is not the grandest. Across the street are the dormant subway cars of the
Mr. Goldstein is the only resident of the condo, now called the Atlantic Art Building, who has not sold his or her apartment to Bruce C. Ratner and his Forest City Ratner company in the last year to make way for a development that is to include a new home for Mr. Ratner’s New Jersey Nets.
In addition to the new home for his basketball team, Mr. Ratner hopes to put up office and apartment towers designed by Frank Gehry. Company officials say they are poised to sign a memo of understanding with the city in a few weeks.
It would erase the area’s most recent incarnation as a yuppies-on-the-edge outpost of Prospect Heights, one organized by developers like Shaya Boymelgreen [featured in this AHI blog post -- ed.], whose conversion of the former Daily News printing plant at 700 Pacific Street into condominiums spurred hasty copycat conversions of other industrial buildings, including Allied Storage.
Even the august liberal
The fact that he has lived for only a year and a half in a condo building that, according to its president, Matt Klein, has been plagued with construction problems (poorly insulated pipes cracked during the cold snap last month, as did the boiler, leaving the building without heat or water for a week and a half) lends a piquant air to his solo stance.
Then there’s this entertaining pose:
Jane Jacobs’s manifesto on new urbanism, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” [terrific book -- ed.] lay on a coffee table.
The 89-year-old Ms. Jacobs has been hauled out of Canadian retirement (for 37 years, she’s lived in
“I was looking for a place that I could live in a long time,” he said, “one that the hypothetical kids could be in for a while.” Mr. Goldstein moved here with his fiancee in May 2003.
“It was definitely a place we made together,” Mr. Goldstein said. They have since broken up. Her office space is now empty, save for boxes of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn T-shirts, in red, black and pink.
Even without the developer resorting to eminent domain, residents who sold (after a failed attempt to have the building declared historic!) evidently received a premium over as-is market value:
[T]he word on the street is that owners got about double what they paid.
“Most of us were first-time homeowners,” Mr. Klein said. “We bought into a complete lemon, but it was the best investment we could have made, given what happened.”
But Mr. Goldstein continues adamantly active:
“The way to win this is to delay it, to tie it up in the courts, to tie it up in the court of public opinion. To make it so uncomfortable for the politicians and for Ratner, that he just drops the whole thing.”
Kelo, when issued, may well provide some needed clarity.
