Billion-dollar Brooklyn: Atlantic Yards, Part 2, the benefits
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
What does the public get for Atlantic Yards?
Ratner is building subsidized housing in a city where there’s a cruel 3% vacancy rate.
“Let them eat rent stabilization!”
He’s forecasting $1.5 billion in new tax revenues for the city [net present value over 30 years — Ed.] and 3,800 new permanent jobs.
Our forecast is right, more or less
Forget the permanent new jobs; those projections are notoriously unreliable, subjective, and generally falling.
The project is planned to have 2,250 affordable apartments — 50 percent of the rental units. [Ergo, another 2,400 for-sale condo’s, now projected at 1,930. — Ed.] Affordable is one of the great weasel words of modern marketing, however, and the eligibility tiers that Ratner drew up with ACORN, the low-income-housing activist group, leave just 900 units for a family of four with an annual income of $35,000 or less.
That’s the very low income standard for
Although 900 below-market apartments are far better than nothing, just as many spaces are reserved for families earning $70,000 to $113,000.
5. What’s the relationship between urban development and the need for infrastructure? Development means more use. It stresses the municipal infrastructure.
Atlantic Yards’ inhabitants, renters and owners alike, could be occupying the densest residential space in the
If that figure holds, it will be the highest residential density ever recorded. The
The environmental report’s section on traffic predicts that 68 of 93 intersections around Atlantic Yards would be “significantly adversely impacted,” many permanently. That sounds unpleasant enough. But what’s “significant adverse impact”? The study defines it a couple of ways: “saturated conditions with queuing” and delays “greater than 80 seconds per vehicle.” Stand alongside an already busy intersection anywhere in the city; count how long a random car stands still — ten, perhaps twenty seconds — and watch what results: drivers piling up behind the stationary car, blowing their horns, yelling, as the line gets longer. Now picture cars delayed for 80 seconds, for hours on end, in front of your building.
If driving gets difficult, there is always the subway, with the property being located conveniently right over a subway station:
During nine years of living in
Ten subway lines, plus the LIRR, converge there, and the stairways are a claustrophobic multilevel tangle, congested at any hour, as are the trains that stop there. But here’s what the state environmental-impact report on the expected effects of Atlantic Yards says: “All subway routes through Downtown Brooklyn are expected to operate below their practical capacity in the peak direction in the
How much infrastructure stress is justified? How much stress will there be? Might the elected officials be estimating with rose-colored spreadsheets?
6. What’s the proper role of government? To start with, government has clear standing. It owned most of the land being assembled for the Atlantic Yards property. And one — other —-eentsy-beentsy — little power of government:
No really, we’re telling the truth
Eminent domain for economic development (ED4ED).
But a guy named Daniel Goldstein, a graphic designer who had bought a condo in a building on
To create a large-scale property (like Stuy Town sixty years ago!), one has to assemble a large parcel, with ED4ED:
“I’m staying in this apartment to be a plaintiff,” says Goldstein, noting that the DDDB has hired eminent-domain lawyer Jeff Baker to fight on behalf of all 60 remaining footprint residents.
Baker’s against it
Foes of ED4ED like Ilya Somin argue that even without it, the ‘holdout problem,’ as Mr. Goldstein would probably be pleased to be known, is economically solvable.
Without eminent domain, this could a problem
(FCR has bought out some residents already, at premium prices. Others are holding out.) Here, however, is another potential public-policy use for holdouts, if they choose to use it so:
“My home is gone. I’m staying because this project is wrong, our City Council has no say in it, I have more say in it, and I’m gonna use that.”
Veto power gives standing. Standing gives negotiating leverage. But wait, why didn’t the City Council weigh in?
Ratner has skirted normal city zoning approvals because the project is centered on state-owned land.
7. How much input or control should the neighbors have? Like housing, cities are ecosystems, and in an ecosystem, everything influences everything else. At
some point, however, the influence becomes de minimis, not worthy of granting a veto or even an interrupt. So it’s a principle of zoning and urban approval is the radius of impact; abutters, or abutters of abutters, or possibly a little wider circle, have a say. Presumably the comment radius should make the impact radius:
Anyone inside the circle gets a vote.
Free assembly, and its Bill of Rights cousin free speech, knows no procedural boundaries:
There are, of course, those who don’t believe the hype. Just two days earlier, thousands of protesters gathered on the asphalt of Grand Army Plaza, under a broiling sun, to hear [Brooklynite] Steve Buscemi, local councilwoman Tish James, and the fiery leader of the Harlem Tenants Council, Nellie Hester Bailey, decry Atlantic Yards as undemocratic and grotesquely out of scale with brownstone Brooklyn.
Against
Thousands attended a July 16 protest rally at
AP; Paul Martinka
What gives the public any standing in the matter?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]
