535 replies to this topic

[Lex]

I've always believed that Atlantic Yards is a gigantic real estate grab masquerading as a sports arena. You have to give Ratner credit. If he had said "I want to build 16 high rise apartment buildings for 15,000 people. Please give me a massive subsidy" the project would have had very tough sledding. Instead Ratner bought the NJ Nets and then promised to move them to Brooklyn. This played right into Brooklyn's historical sensitivity about losing the Dodgers. It provided a feel-good element that 16 massive apartment towers never would have done.

It worked. The Frank Gehry designed arena was the lead story in the media; the apartment towers were a sidebar.

[Lex]

Bait and switch.

Jobs:

The renderings for the massive modular complex for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yard were revealed Friday by Forest City Ratner Developments. Designed by SHoP Architects, the 32 storey building will be the world’s tallest prefab and will look like stacks of volumes akin to a college campus. Although the prefab project will save on both cost and waste, the initially promised 17,000 jobs it would create has been somehow reduced to a paltry 190, amongst other disappointments.

Around 60% of the modular complex will be prefabricated, which will cut down on congestion, noise and pollution from the construction site. But what it also cuts down on is the promised union worker’s wages- from $85 an hour on the construction site to $35 in the less dangerous factory site, not to mention the aforementioned fewer jobs than initially proposed.

Affordable housing:

Another discrepancy from the 2006 plan is the size of the affordable housing apartments. The new construction report announced 130 studios, 180 one bedrooms and 20 two bedroom apartments, which differs from the original claim that 50% of the units would be 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. A percentage of each will still become affordable rental housing, but larger families counting on calling the new Atlantic Yards home will have to look elsewhere.

Article

[Sneakeater]

I'll see if I can find it, but right when Atlantic Yards was first proposed there was a column in the Times setting forth the various stages recent major real estate development proposals in New York have typically gone through.

Stage One was, propose an architecturally significant building by a name architect to gain public support.

Stage Five or Six was, drop the original architect.

[oakapple]

I think it's the rare "Big Project" in NYC that gets built as first proposed. This is hardly original to Ratner.

[mitchells]

I think it's the rare "Big Project" in NYC that gets built as first proposed. This is hardly original to Ratner.

True dat. Read about the twists and turns of the new WTC.

[Lex]

Big development projects certainly have their twists and turns in NYC but Atlantic Yards was especially devious. Lets put aside the architect switch. We still have the "blighted area" fiction, the bogus union jobs, the bogus affordable housing, the sweetheart deal for the air rights, and the fudged environmental impact study.

Which brings us to Michael Bloomberg, in the case of Atlantic Yards, the indispensable man. The Brits have a great phrase which describes him to a T – an old man in a hurry. Bloomberg wants to leave behind monuments to his greatness. It helps that he never met a development project he didn’t like. Besides Atlantic Yards he greenlighted a giant swath of mega apartment buildings on the Brooklyn side of the East River, is gutting Coney Island, and tried to drop a mega stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan. He wanted something built in Atlantic Yards on his watch and he wasn’t too particular about what it was.

[Sneakeater]

This was almost comical. My mother-in-law died in 2004 or so. At her shiva in the suburbs of Chicago, I was chatting with a family friend. Knowing I lived in Brooklyn, they asked me what I thought about the Atlantic Yards project, which was then in the national news because the first challenges had just been filed. I responded that I thought it was wrong to use governmental condemnation to toss people out of their homes to make way for a private development -- especially people who had invested a lot of money and sweat in improving those homes.

"Yes, but it's a terrible neighborhood, isn't it?" my mother-in-law's friend asked.

"Actually, it's where [mother-in-law's precious daughter] and I live," I answered.

Very awkward pause.

[Sneakeater]

One thing I've always found surprising about major New York projects - the Highline, Yankee Stadium, Mets Stadium - is that they have largely given contracts, food contracts at least, to things like Arte del Gelato, and Terroir, and Blue Bottle Coffee, and Shake Shack*. I would imagine that part of the reason for this isn't that Canora can afford to bid more for The Highline wine bar, but that a Bud Light Beer Garden on the Highline wouldn't be creating the public space that the City wants there. Now, it's more difficult for a sports arena which, by its very nature is going to attract a crowd that has very different preferences from the neighbourhood residents, but, still, there are a number of alternatives that wouldn't be nearly as culturally offensive to the Sneakeaters of this world.**

*Which is, above all, a New York chain.
** Especially since, rightly or wrongly, the fight against big chains and monoculture is often seen as a losing one. One of the things that makes Lower Manhattan (or, I add, Toronto's West End) great, is that there are few chains and this creates a very different cultural environment.

Just to make an obvious point, this is different from the High Line or the inside of stadiums, because in those cases there's some entity responsible for either granting licenses or entering into leases for the whole unit, which entity can impose a vision on what kind of services will be available. Aside from any friendship with Danny Meyer, I think the people who run the Mets realized -- like the authorities that run the local airports -- that in the current cultural climate food with pretensions toward quality is a selling point that could set their stadium/airport apart from others and make them more attractive to potential consumers/users. As for the Highline, the City just has a vision of what they want that park to be like. (You can fault the Bloomberg administration for favoring big developments, but its cultural orientation has been very sophisticated.)

The area around the Barclays Center is all just private property, though, owned by a number of different landlords. Each individual landlord decides who to rent to. There's no single entity to decide what they want the area as a whole to "be" like. So if the national chains want to be there, and are willing to pay top dollar, it's only the scruples of individual landlords that could keep them out.

Market forces have kept Lower Manhattan fairly chain-free, as you describe. But while such forces kept chains out of Prospect Heights* and Park Slope up to now, they are in the process of reversing their effect.
________________________________________________________
* Full disclosure: there's a McDonald's at the edge of the neighborhood, at Vanderbilt & Altantic. But that's the frontier.

[Wilfrid]

"Yes, but it's a terrible neighborhood, isn't it?" my mother-in-law's friend asked.

"Actually, it's where [mother-in-law's precious daughter] and I live," I answered.

Very awkward pause.

Oh I love these stories. Like talking to a lawyer acquaintance some years ago about where my daughter would go to school. He had turned down some school for his daughter because he didn't want her to be the "only white face in the class."

"My daughter's not really white."

Awkward pause.

Even better, I gave an expensive dinner at The Four Seasons to impress a valued client. I took a colleague along with me. Colleague tells an Irish joke. Client: "My wife is Irish."

Awkward pause.

Can we have a thread for these?

[oakapple]

The Highline and the Barclay's Center seem to be totally opposite. Everyone agrees that the Highline has improved the areas it touches. No one who lives there thinks that about the Ratner project.

It's worth noting, though, that the neighborhood was initially opposed to the Highline restoration. Most residents wanted it demolished. The NIMBYs are wrong sometimes.

[irnscrabblechf52]

HAHAHA NIMBY HAHAHA

eta: sorry for the caps etc., but I think the NIMBY's are wrong always

[Wilfrid]

Just because you don't have a BY.

[irnscrabblechf52]

Just because you don't have a BY.

"The Orwellian disgust that makes something seem actionably political in the household is akin to the disgust that makes us squeamish about something foreign suffusing our shirts, our breakfasts, our most intimate space. It's fine if I know it's happening, as long as it's not happening right here. This is the slogan of the NIMBY movements: not in my backyard. Once you think about it, the disgust is itself a bit disgusting. Yet one asks oneself whether there can be any politics without it—without a provisional reinforcing of borders and hierarchies, privileges and property lines that we know to be more or less illegitimate." that's Robbins, The Sweatshop Sublime

I do have a by by the by

[Daniel]

I like the Bruce Springsteen version of NIMBY

"Do what you like, but don't do it here"

[irnscrabblechf52]

I like the Bruce Springsteen version of NIMBY

"Do what you like, but don't do it here"

followed by some jumping, spitting, rolling around. seizure from toxic waste.