Affordable Housing Institute : US

If Sun Tzu did not observe that strategy in war consists of creating a battlefield of grossly unequal forces, he should have ….

 

 

“I never said all the things I said.”

In his push to make Atlantic Yards a reality, Bruce Ratner has crafted the most sophisticated political campaign the city has seen in a very long time, better than any professional politician has mounted to win elective office, complete with gag orders and aggressive polling. And even if Atlantic Yards was wildly disproportionate to the surrounding neighborhoods, its pillars seemed laudable (the subsidized housing) and potentially cool (Gehry; having the NBA’s Nets nearby). The developer, Ratner, seemed downright enlightened: a commissioner of consumer affairs under Ed Koch who’d gone out of his way to hire women and minorities to build his other projects.

 

 

A massive complex grows in Brooklyn? Atlantic Yards

 

 

Even as the one billion-dollar battle is taking place in Manhattan, with Stuyvesant Town’s affordability future uncertain, another is being fought out in Brooklyn, about Atlantic Yards. The mixed feelings and intellectual questions involved are captured nicely in a lengthy New York Magazine article, by journalist Chris Smith’s [No relation. — Ed.], that thoroughly explores the complex issues surrounding large-scale urban redevelopment, specifically Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn:

I have tried to avoid this story. Some, including my employer, might consider that irresponsible. I cover politics for the magazine, and Atlantic Yards is an epic New York tale of money, influence, social policy, race relations, and real estate.

 

 

Well, okay,a Brooklyn tale

Hey, where can I get some?

 

But mostly, my avoidance came from trying to be extra-responsible. Living in Fort Greene, two and a half blocks from the site, meant that anything I wrote needed to be dispassionate and purely fact-based; I might decide I didn’t like Atlantic Yards, but I wasn’t going to write any nimby screed. So for months, I tried to resist any personal reaction to the project by focusing on a professional take:

 

 

In Favor
Bruce Ratner’s supporters include Borough President Marty Markowitz, left, and Michael Bloomberg, pictured with local community leaders, upper right.

Writer Smith also has a fine pink-resistant heritage:

 

I grew up upstate, in the people’s republic of Ithaca during the seventies, when a day didn’t go by without an anti-nuke or a Free Leonard Peltier rally. Even when the protesters were right, their self-righteousness was hard to take.

 

 

Not the one Odysseus left.

It’s impossible for any excerpts to do full justice to Smith’s meandering and multiply-iconoclastic narrative, so you should read the whole thing, but we can pull out the major issues:

 

 

1. What is the property? Mammoth, complex, mixed-use, mixed-tenure, and mixed-income — all the things I endorse! — on a dense and complex parcel, redeveloping an arguably (very arguably!) blighted area of Brooklyn:

The story of Atlantic Yards starts back in 1957, when the Dodgers left for Los Angeles.

 

 

The year before, 1956, it was finally “next year”

Most of the site for the proposed project, the Long Island Rail Road yards, is quite literally a hole in the ground, flanked by a number of decaying buildings.

The area’s been economically depressed for half a century? And in its place, is proposed to rise:

 

A $4.2 billion, 22-acre, Frank Gehry–­designed collection of residential towers and office buildings and a basketball arena known as the Atlantic Yards.

Sounds like Stuy Town with retail amenities, doesn’t it?

 

 

Atlantic Yards’ 2,250 subsidized apartments are among its strongest selling points, a seemingly ­apple-pie benefit trotted out in every press conference and direct-mail flyer. Not once does [Ratner executive Jim Stuckey] mention the 4,610 market-rate (unaffordable?) apartments and condos to be built.

Really sounds like Stuy Town, doesn’t it?

 

 

2. Who is the developer, and what is its motivation? The developer is Forest City Ratner, the New York offshoot-outgrown-its-parent of Cleveland’s Forest City Enterprises:

 

Ratner, 61, doesn’t have the biography of a greedy developer. His father founded Forest City in 1921 and turned it into one of Cleveland’s biggest companies. Bruce’s siblings are all confirmed lefties: His brother, Michael, runs the Center for Constitutional Rights, and his sister, Ellen, created the Talk Radio News syndicate and is one of Fox TV’s token liberals; she’s also openly gay. Even Bruce had such a zeal for public service that, after graduating from Harvard and then Columbia Law, he was touted as “the next Ralph Nader” during his four years as head of consumer affairs under Koch. But in 1982, Ratner decided he needed to make more money than his $52,000 civil-service salary, and he joined the family business, eventually running the New York chapter, Forest City Ratner.

Increasingly, urban development requires large-scale capital assembly, and the developer who can brave the tortuous and expensive approval protocol is one with large capitalization, and experience:

 

 

It helps to be experienced

To this point, FCR’s biggest New York project has been Metrotech, 6.4 million square feet of office and retail space between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, opened in 1990, before Brooklyn’s boom began.

 

To put that in residential terms, it’s equivalent to about 6,500 apartments.

 

Ratner declines almost all interview requests and usually appears only at staged promotional events. He’s described himself as “an old lefty.” But old lefties in middle age are often the most voracious capitalists. For all his devotion to progressive causes, Ratner can play rough.

 

Many of today’s successful developers — with quite a few of whom I’ve done business over the years — graduated left, drifted right. Even today, they are simultaneously social liberals or committed philanthropists and cynically effective operators. Most of them are the children of Depression-era urban neighborhoods, places that were once Jewish, then black, now polyglot. They know what is wanted by urban constituents, market and political:

 

 

According to his aides, Ratner directed that the project be structured according to seven social goals, including increasing minority employment and boosting the borough’s supply of mixed-income housing. Giving Brooklyn a new architectural icon was on the agenda as well, perhaps to atone for the design of his previous buildings, and so he turned to Gehry, the reigning king of statement architecture, who would appeal to Brooklyn’s growing aesthetic class (though Gehry’s few public appearances on behalf of Atlantic Yards have not gone well: At a press conference in May, he blasted the project’s opponents, saying, “They should have been picketing Henry Ford”). The final list of goals and projections for Atlantic Yards is impressive: 15,000 union construction jobs, billions in tax revenues, upgraded transit infrastructure, and seven acres of publicly accessible open space.

 

 

Can you find all seven virtues in this picture?

 

How many goals, children? Seven, or just one?

Bruce Ratner didn’t get to be a multimillionaire by operating on whims. He’d long been aware of the gaping space stretching east beyond the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. He built two large projects overlooking that congested hub and the LIRR yards: Atlantic Center mall, in 1996, and Atlantic Terminal mall, in 2004.

 

 

You’ll lose your shirt if you operate on whims

 

3. What’s at issue, and who’s playing? In urban development, the public is a de facto partner, and the campaign to secure public approval is protracted and complex:

Jim Stuckey is Bruce Ratner’s right-hand man, the executive vice-president for Forest City Ratner Companies, and leader of the charge[…]. For his efforts, Stuckey, 52, has been loudly abused in community-board meetings and vilified by opponents appalled by the idea of adding sixteen towers and 15,000 new people to a Brooklyn neighborhood defined by four-story brownstones.

 

This morning, though, Ratner’s team racked up another win: The Empire State Development Corporation has just certified an environmental-impact report on the project and decreed that its benefits are worth the inevitable increases in traffic, noise, and shadow.

 

Somewhere along the way, ’shadow’ became a negative externality. Curious, that, especially given that urbanization means greater density.

 

 

Who knows what evil lurks in urban canyons?

4. Will it be good for Brooklyn? For cities to grow, they need their blighted areas — or if not blighted, clearly stagnant — to revive. They also need greater density, and they need income mixing, and all the things Atlantic Yards is offering:

 

 

For a long time, I’ve shrugged off the complaints of Atlantic Yards opponents as shrill and reflexively obstructionist. More housing is good; more jobs are good.

Shouldn’t government in fact support these endeavors? Well, in fact, government is:

 

 

The city and state are kicking in $100 million each in cash to help Ratner; tax breaks could push the public bill to anywhere from $500 million to $1.5 billion.

$500 million is what it would take to protect Stuy Town, isn’t it? Are Stuy Town and Atlantic Yards in competition?

 

 

Dollars, not marks, but yes, 500,000,000 of them

Yes, from a public-policy perspective, they are.

Manhattan or Brooklyn, who’s getting the half-bil?

A city has only so much money, only so much regulatory approval horsepower to study particular proposals, only so much political clout to put behind schemes. So yes, this is a fight between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the heart and soul of Mayor Bloomberg, the city council, and the governor.

Why is there a fight?

 

 

The release of the environmental-impact statement, however, forced me to confront just what Atlantic Yards is going to mean—not just for my neighbors in Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Boerum Hill, and Downtown Brooklyn but also for the city as a whole.

 

 

In 1,400 numbing pages of charts and bureaucratic jargon are the details of a traffic, noise, and cultural nightmare on the horizon: Colossal shadows sweeping across 50 square blocks. Some 60 intersections choked with traffic. More kids than the local schools can possibly handle.

Okay, that’s infrastructure stress, all right. What do we get for it?

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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