By Sierra Brown
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a 3-foot-tall bobblehead, according to a press release distributed by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a coalition that opposes the Atlantic Yards megaproject and that plans to protest during the ceremonial groundbreaking on Thursday.
The coalition, which consists of 21 groups, is working with 30 other community organizations to oppose the Forest City Ratner plan for the development. The group will have its own event, Groundbreaking to Bury the Soul of Brooklyn, one hour before the official groundbreaking.
“The community is angry, pissed off, livid about this project and the way it went down,” said Daniel Goldstein, spokesman for the organization. He added that community members need a place to show their anger to Bloomberg, Gov. David Paterson and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.
After a State Supreme Court ruling on March 1 granted Forest City Ratner the right to eminent domain, the $4.9 billion much-delayed Atlantic Yards megaproject is scheduled to rev up construction immediately.
Since the court ruling, opposition groups have begun mobilizing in anticipation of the groundbreaking. The project, they contend, has become the collective bane of a community unhappy with the development plans, which they say have changed dramatically since 2006. The new plans, they say, have largely dropped assurances to protect affordable housing and create jobs.
Forest City Ratner says that’s not the case. According to a fact sheet sent from Dan Klores Communications, a public relations firm representing the developer, the project will generate more than $5.6 billion in new tax revenues over the next 30 years and create a net positive fiscal impact of more than $1.3 billion. The fact sheet also states that the project will uphold the promise to ensure affordable housing units and create 8,000 permanent jobs. A spokesman for the real-estate group was not available at press time. The representative from Dan Klores Communications said he could not speak on specifics concerning the project.
Representatives from Brooklyn Speaks, a collective of nine local organizations that have been critical of the project see it otherwise. The coalition, created in 2006, aims to ensure ongoing decision-making that is transparent and accountable and that involves the public. In a March 2 meeting at the Fifth Avenue Committee on Degraw Street, the group discussed its views that the development will affect local tenants, that closed-door negotiations have undercut the public interest and that there has been a lack of transparency by the government and the developer.
In 2006, the Atlantic Yards project, approved by the Public Authorities Control Board, included 2,250 units of affordable housing. The current master agreement cuts that number to 300, according to figures from Brooklyn Speaks. The annual savings over market rates would have totaled $34 million; today that figure is $29.7 million.
Brooklyn Speaks also claims that the total number of residential units was decreased to 1,005 by 2022, from 6,430 by 2016.
“The housing that was promised as affordable housing should be built,” Deborah Howard, executive director of the Pratt Area Community Council, said, calling it “the most important promise that this project made.”
The Forest City Ratner fact sheet maintains that the developer will build 2,250 affordable and middle-income rental units, 10 percent of which will be for senior citizens. The developer has also made an agreement with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to build between 600 and 1,000 affordable homeownership units.
Four hundred units of housing, including an 88-unit homeless shelter, have already been removed to make way for the 22-acre project in Prospect Heights. The expansive development, which may take years to complete, is set to include a basketball stadium — for the Nets, the N.B.A. team that is moving to Brooklyn from New Jersey — 16 luxury high-rise buildings and mixed-use space.
Though developers have promised the project will create jobs and provide a lift to the city budget, organizers said the project would yield negative dividends to the economy over the next 30 years. While the December 2006 plans projected a $25 million economic benefit to the city, the new plans decrease that number to minus $8 million, Brooklyn Speaks representatives say.
Brooklyn Speaks contends that lack of transparency in the decision-making process for the project has allowed vast amendments to the original plan to be made over the past few years.
“Every public hearing has been a theatrical event, of sorts,” said JoAnne Simon, Democratic district leader of the 52nd Assembly District, representing a number of Downtown Brooklyn neighborhoods who condemned the project that she says has excluded local elected officials, community boards and community groups from the planning and approval process.
Howard said many of the plans for Brooklyn Yards were made and approved by select political insiders who have something to gain from the project and not by the people of Brooklyn or groups that directly represent the area such as Community Boards. Because of this, she says, the project gained endorsement although it was widely unpopular with the citizens it is meant to serve. “The accountability is really to the people,” she said.
Gib Veconi, board member of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, an organization that addresses housing and economic development concerns in the area, agreed. “It is a public/private partnership where the public has not been represented,” he said while addressing the audience at the Brooklyn Speaks meeting.
For all of the quarrel surrounding the project’s eminent domain standing, Forest City Ratner claims that most of the land needed to for the project was made up of a Long Island Rail Road storage facility, empty lots, gas stations, auto repair shops and underused or vacant industrial and manufacturing buildings. The developer said it had acquired 85 percent of the land needed for the project without use of eminent domain and has promised housing in the planned facility to relocated tenants for the same rent they pay now.
Though resistance to the Atlantic Yards development has not delayed the groundbreaking, Brooklyn Speaks isn’t ready to concede defeat. This past December seven of the Brooklyn Speaks member groups filed a lawsuit against the Empire State Development Corp. and Forest City Ratner in objection to amendments made to the general project plan. Litigation continues.
“We will all still be here and we will be living with this,” Howard said of Brooklyn residents. “There are principles that are ongoing; principles that outlive controversies.”
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