The lawsuit claims that Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project violates the New York State Constitution's public use, due process and equal protection clauses, as well as low-income resident requirements. According to DDDB, the Court's decision means that oral arguments will be heard in the case sometime in March or April, with a decision then expected between late spring and fall 2009.

This is a major setback for developer Bruce Ratner, who recently told the New York Times that he planned to break ground in December. The project cannot move forward without using eminent domain. In addition, according to the Times, Ratner has brokered a contract with Barclays Bank that would provide $20 million a year for naming rights to the arena. This contract requires FCR to close on the land and secure the financing by the end of November.

--The people still living in the project's footprint, on Dean Street between Flatbush and Sixth Avenues, have been experiencing some serious side-effects of construction, including cracks in building walls, vibrations, loud noises, dust, "sewer aromas," and utility shut-offs. According to this post, "Some residents consider it a form of harassment, an effort to wear them down and choose buyouts rather than remain in lawsuits challenging the project." To make matters worse, the Environmental Impact Statement ignored these impacts. (Photo via AY Report)

--Developer Bruce Ratner has pushed back the projected opening of the arena again, this time to the 2011-2012 season.

--Meanwhile, Brownstoner reports that nine property owners and tenants have filed a petition against the Empire State Development Corporation in the Appellate Division Second Department of New York State Supreme Court challenging the use of eminent domain for the project.

More info after the jump.

Wednesday, July 23: UPROSE Community Education Forum, 6pm at UPROSE, 166A 22nd Street b/t 3rd & 4th Avenues

In October 2007, US Power Generating Company (USPowerGen) announced they would update the 560-megawatt Gowanus Generating Station located in Sunset Park. UPROSE and community residents have expressed some concerns regarding the environmental impact on a community already suffering from many adverse environmental influences.

On June 5, UPROSE facilitated a meeting to discuss the possibility of a drafting a MOU ("Memorandum of Understanding") or incorporating the community's concerns in the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation permit process for USPowerGen.

USPowerGen has prepared a presentation to address the many questions that were cited at the meeting. USPowerGen has agreed to have all their explanations in laymen's terms so everyone will be able to understand. You can RSVP by clicking here or call 718.492.9307.

Wednesday, July 30: Accountable Development Working Group Meeting, 6:00 pm at Fifth Avenue Committee, 621 DeGraw Street (near 4th Ave.)

The Accountable Development Working Group grew out of the People's Accountable Development Summit, organized by the Fifth Avenue Committee in May. This group is open to the public, and meets monthly to discuss and plot action around various development issues affecting South and Central Bklyn. This Wednesday’s agenda includes presentations from Assembly Member Jeffries’ and Assembly Member Brennan’s offices on legislation to reform the Atlantic Yards project.

For more information contact Dave at 718 237-2017 ext 148 or dpowell@fifthave.org.

Now, in today's New York Times, Tommy Craggs has weighed in with a criticism not only the cost of the new stadium in the Bronx, but whether it is necessary at all:

"Just a decade ago, New York Buildings Commissioner Gaston Silva noted that "from a structural perspective, there’s no reason why Yankee Stadium can’t be around for another 75 years if it’s maintained properly." (He was reportedly silenced by City Hall soon thereafter.)"

The irritating irony of this, as with many other building schemes in New York, is that the Times only pays lip service to the opposing voices to these projects, usually when the deal is done and dusted and it's too late to turn back.  After half a season of what Craggs refers to as "maudlin requiems" for the demise of Yankee and (to a lesser extent) Shea Stadiums, this is the first time I've come across a serious dissenting voice to the building of the new stadiums.  Still, we can but hope that the Times, and the rest of the New York press, asks a few more serious questions about the Atlantic Yards project before it's too late.  Unfortunately, I'm a natural pessimist...

The first time I heard the words “Atlantic Yards Project” I was a junior in high school, freshly  moved from NYC to Southern California. I figured the project was some maritime “beautification” project taking place in Baltimore or somewhere around there (Camden Yards jumped to mind I suppose). A few minutes on wikipedia changed my perception of the venture obviously.

To put it simply, Atlantic Yards is a glorified housing project that’s landing right in the middle of some of the most prized real estate in the United States; Brooklyn, NY. Now for the people who still live in 1986 and think of Brooklyn as a ghetto, things have changed, for better or worse. Rich white kids from NYU started moving there around the turn of the century, listening to music that you’ve never heard of and usually sucks, and wearing jeans that even Chelsea deemed “too gay”. From then on, Bed-Stuy went from a place that worshipped the Mighty Mos and Grandmaster Flash to a place that plays way too much Ratatat and Animal Collective for anyones’ good. Williamsburg went from dive city to Hipsters Inc., though I guess hipsters do love dives anyways. All in all, Brooklyn went from a place that you had to live to a place that you wanted to live. If you want to see this phenomenon before your eyes check out 125th street or to see the finished project hop down to the Village and look at apartments that used to serve the poor and have become pent house for Britney Spears and the Olsen twins.

Technically, the word is gentrification, referring to the “gentry” entering places that are usually downtrodden, meaning cheap real estate and low economic risk. More often than not the “gentrifiers” will move in as a group, seeing a certain crop of what used to be tenements as “classic” and “charming”. In New York most of the money that gentrified the areas of Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Village came from people who had lived there before. Harlem went from a white area, to a Jewish area, and is currently known as a black and Hispanic area, with white areas on the outer edges. Brooklyn was mostly white and Italian until the suburban movement post-WWII (NB: Brooklyn, before it was incorporated into New York City, was the U.S. third largest city next to Manhattan and Chicago at 3 million people.)

The next time I ran into Atlantic Yards I was in a core curriculum writing course entitled “The City in American Culture” taught by a supremely self-conscious archaeological Ph.D who was more grammarian than author. I signed up for the class after having spent a year abroad and was ready to jump back into the urban studies thing. Suffice to say I was supremely disappointed, we read Jacobs and Mike Davis, some excerpts from larger texts, a couple New Yorker articles, but our assignments ranged from the banal to the frustrating. One of our last texts was the view of the Atlantic Yards Project from either side of the argument, and after 10 minutes of discussion we returned to basic college grammar prerequisites (who the fuck cares if my works cited wasn’t in alphabetical order?!). Needless to say this frustrated me, I came to the class expecting engaged urban studies students but found a trifle too many glossy eyed freshmen and upper classmen waiting for a class they can get an A in. I begged my professor to let me do my term paper on the social impacts of new housing projects with its cynosure being the Atlantic Yards, Frank Gehry, and Bruce Ratner. DENIED! With authority I was told that my paper would focus too much on content rather than technical skill. Um, what? Apparently the college writing program had decided to emphasize capitals and periods rather than what comes between them. Anyways, I decided to give my teacher a big “fuck you” and do the research and more or less write the paper, while doing my more “technically” sound one at the same time. So here’s what I found:

•    Frank Gehry, everyone’s all-American architect, designer of those crawling titanium buildings, MIT’s “leaking” research center, among other masterpieces (or monstrosities), is kind of a jerk. To paraphrase, Gehry says he knows what’s best for Brooklynites and that they don’t appreciate art enough to see that the Atlantic Yards project is beautiful (if you want what he really said it’s in an article aptly called “Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood”). Now I had always thought of Gehry as kind of an overrated architect in the first place, Bilbao is breathtaking but if you read the “making of” story Gehry becomes a prima donna before he’s know as a master, the new Disney Opera House in Los Angeles blinds people in surrounding apartment buildings because of the ultra-reflective titanium that has become his signature, and MIT sued the architect because their building, actually, well, leaked. He does a bang up job designing jewelry for Tiffany’s though.
•    The new Brooklyn Nets stadium will be the centerpiece of the project and I mean, yeah, Brooklyn needs a basketball team. But does anyone else see a similarity between new stadiums and the areas that surround them? Places like Fenway, Wrigley, Ebbets (R.I.P), and even Pac Bell Park in S.F., they all did excellent jobs by integrating themselves into the neighborhoods they inhabit. Given for all of those examples except Pac Bell, that happened over a hundred years ago. Stadiums nowadays are built on land that is more or less unwanted, the Meadowlands in N.J., my beloved Dodger Stadium (though it was actually built on top of what used to be a Mexican suburb and displaced thousands, but that’s a story for another day), and the Oakland sports arenas are all located within or around low-income areas. Now the question is, do they, the sports arenas, create them or does the low cost of the real estate attract them? It’s a question I’m posing to you, but it’s something that I’ll definitely be writing about in the future.
•    Bruce Ratner, the manager, stands to make, well, billions. The Atlantic Yards would house thousands of Brooklyn residents displaced by the project, and would of course be a gathering point for “artists” and “writers” that desire the Manhattan lifestyle with Brooklyn moodiness. Usually when a project manager stands to make anything with 10 digits (or 8 or 9 for that matter) the true nature of the project goes to shit.
•    The people who are most adamant about Brooklyn staying the same are the people who’ve most recently moved there. The brooding authors, the terribly untalented but trendy musicians, and the “the stars are just like us!” section of US Weekly usuals are all dedicated to the cause of keeping Brooklyn in its current form: brownstones, coffee shops, and “dive chic” bars. The residents who have lived there for generations however, tend to fall into two camps. The first being those who look towards Co-op City and Marcy as glimpses into the future of Brooklyn and are supremely pissed off about it. The second group being those who have been paid off not to see it like that. And honestly the second group isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, a lot of Brooklyn is still poor and the influx of rich college kids has artificially raised prices in their area, the creation of an “income controlled” neighborhood isn’t a completely ridiculous idea in their minds. Two great projects that have a lot of interesting things to say about Brooklyn are ACORN and DevelopDon’tDestroyBrooklyn. Another blog named NoLandGrab is a great source too.

So that’s my simple take on this very, very complicated situation. If you’re even remotely interested in housing policies, urban studies, Brooklyn, the projects, or shit just people in general than read up. It’s one of the most interesting housing endeavors taken up by a US city in a while. This barely scratches the surface of the project. As always, please comment, I want to hear what you all have to say.

Homework: let’s see. Hmmmmm. Go punch a hipster in the face. It’ll make your day, my day, and everyone around you will appreciate it.

In the mean time I’ll give you my candidates, sticking mostly to the U.S. and places I’ve spent a good amount of time in and you can just sit there and think about all the amazing, nuanced comments I have. So here goes:

New York City. My home sweet second home. I was discussing this with a friend of mine I met in college and realized that she thinks I’m from California while most of my friends from high school think I’m from New York. I love that. Truth be told I spent less than 2 years in New York after living in that ubiquitous place, right-outside-the-city, CT (for those who don’t get the joke, most people you meet who say they’re from New York aren’t actually from  New York per say. It’s usually a mix of Westchesterians, Greenwichites, and Scarsdalians who want to be from Manhattan so badly that they prey on the unassuming by claiming to be from New York. I was among them, sigh) The years I spent on the upper east side while finally living there and not living a lie taught me a lot about good city planning and is where I can trace my flowering interest in the city from.

Simply put, New York’s planning scheme has been nearly perfect from the beginning of urbanization. Two distinct business zones (midtown and Wall Street), balanced commercial and residential zoning, adequate green space (Central Park was one of the most challenging urban endeavors in the country’s history), and relatively mixed income levels combining in neighborhoods (save for the upper east side and more recently Greenwich Village). This is all well and good for flyovers and 3D modeling, but the truth is that New York’s planning department has been heading down hill since the 70’s and 80’s saw development of government housing projects in all 5 boroughs. Schools have attempted to improve by segmenting themselves into smaller, more focused institutions but are facing the same problems their behemoth predecessors endured. And the biggest building project New York has seen in decades, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Project, is an ostensible humanist project at best. New York is a lot like a ballplayer who is getting a little too old to play his position; he’s trying to do things the way he’s done it but doesn’t realize the game is being played by different rules now. What it needs is a new way to play, or some steroids, both work.

And now for something completely different. Los Angeles. Now, given I’ve never actually lived in L.A., but then again neither has anyone else. But I’ve spent a good amount of my rambling life around it. LA is in a lot of ways the Bizzaro New York; while people from New York hate people who say they’re from New York and are actually from the surrounding areas, people in LA know that you don’t actually live there but somewhere around there. Los Angeles actually refers to a 100+ mile stretch of land north of San Diego and reaching up to Santa Barbara, and anyone who lives in that expanse is for better or worse from LA.

Los Angeles is terribly planned. Plain and simple. The downtown is a ghost town between the hours of 6 PM and 8 AM save for some swanky bars frequented by powerful yuppies. The residential areas, wait Los Angeles has residential areas? Let’s say you want to go from Pasadena to Santa Monica for dinner one night, both of which are within the L.A. county line. Unless you catch the I-10 on those wondrous nights when only a few hundred cars are on it, expect to leave at 6 for 8 PM dinner reservations. Did I mention the two places are less than 15 miles apart? That’s what LA is, a labyrinth of highways and completely separated commercial and residential zones. I mentioned it being the bizzaro New York though, right? Well for all it’s faults, LA still has some of the most breathtaking real estate in the world, some of the most generous homeless programs in the US, and some of the nicest (and best looking) people you’ll ever meet. Los Angeles has in unexpected pleasures and intangibles what New York has in technical masterpiece (though New York has plenty of those other ingredients too), which makes it a terrible city but a really great place.

And here’s what most of you have been waiting for, my 3rd favorite city in the U.S., San Francisco. Given a place is what you make of it, and I’ve made a lot of the city by the bay in my extensive time over the last 5 years. A great place to live, a great place to party, a terrible place to love sports teams (with the exception of the Go-Go Warriors). LA and SF are such diametrically opposed places that I’m surprised by the fact that more has not been made about their mirror images. SF has the technical planning down pat, LA has the real estate that people from all over the world are looking for. If you dropped one on top on another there’s no doubt that San Angeles would rival New York as America’s tourist destination.

Sorry I’m going on about San Francisco’s comparative qualities and not talking about the city itself. Well first of all, the Giants suck, let’s just get that out of the way. Second of all, SF proper has done an amazing job with the space it’s been given. Originally of course, cities were built on hills for defense purposes, you can see it in many of the classic metropolis’ of the world. I see such distinct similarities between Istanbul and San Francisco that I’m wondering if the SF’s planner wasn’t a Turk. The difficulties of building a modern city on a hill are obvious, water drainage, building integrity, transportation difficulties, the list goes on and on. San Francisco has handled each with a stunning amount of grace and precision. A well manicured grid system has kept road traffic light, a bus system that is both sustainable and well-directed, and a populous that is knowledgeable and vigilant have made San Francisco the Paris of America. If you’re into that.
Last and certainly least is Boston. Now I’ve only lived in the city for slightly under a year but already the planning has driven me insane enough to actually apply to Department of Transportation and the MBTA in the hopes of making things a little better. From afar, Boston is an obvious mix of old and new. Certain areas are rounded and roundabout much like farm roads while others are strict grids based on the Mormon model (yes most gridded cities are based on a model from those yokels in Utah, dear Lord the irony). This makes for roads that split off and turn without warning leaving most out of towners lost and angry, adding to the dismal driving that Boston harbors (NB: people think New York drivers are some of the worst, this is a common misconception. They are just extremely aggressive but equally knowledgeable. Boston drivers are the previous without the latter).

It might sound like Boston draws most of my ire in terms of city planning, and well you’re right. There are some great areas, don’t get me wrong, but Boston suffers from an overabundance of bars and a lack of truly cosmopolitan ambience which any city worth its salt knows is important. And it’s road system and public transportation is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Cambridge is cool though.

So there’s my list. Feel free to yell at me, tell me I’m wrong, call me names, the usual. I’m sorry I didn’t get to the international cities but I would have been getting above 2000 words doing that so I figured most of you would be bored enough with the 1500 I already have. I want to hear from you all! That’s why I write!

Bonus: Irvine, CA might be the best planned city in the world. There is no blade of grass that was not placed there with the overall plan in mind. I tell you man, those White and Chinese planning teams can really do conformity well. Take a look at its stats and you’ll realize that if there was ever technical perfection in “urban” planning, Irvine would be it.

DDDB explains: "The appeal focuses on the plaintiffs’ charge that the lower court erred in numerous respects, including the following:

• The State’s determination that the project site is “blighted” was illegitimate, was illegitimate, and manufactured by the developer to take valuable private property via eminent domain.

• The State had no authority to approve the Barclays Center Arena because it is not a “Civic Project” as defined under the Urban Development Corporation Act (UDCA).

• The State violated the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) by failing to consider the possibility of terrorism and other security breaches on the Project.

• The State violated SEQRA by grossly misrepresenting the project’s construction timeline, thereby minimizing the project’s impacts, and not requiring adequate mitigation.

• The State violated SEQRA when it failed to adequately study alternative locations for the proposed Project, including locating the arena in Coney Island.

• The PACB violated SEQRA by approving the project without considering its environmental impacts and failing to make its own SEQRA findings."

A victory in this lawsuit would require a the developer to undertake a new environmental impact study, and would also require a new vote on the project by the Public Authorities Control Board.

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In a statement, lead attorney Matthew Brinckerhoff of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP said, "We are, of course, disappointed that the Court declined our request to hear this important case. This is not, however, a ruling on the merits of our claims. Our claims remain sound. New York State law, and the state constitution, prohibit the government from taking private homes and businesses simply because a powerful developer demands it. Yet, that is what has happened. Recent events have revealed that the public, and the Public Authorities Control Board were sold a bill of goods by Ratner and the Empire State Development Corporation. We now know that Ratner’s project will cost the public much more than it will ever receive."

According to the NY Observer, Jeffries said, "Atlantic Yards is a public project built on public land using public money overseen by a public entity for a public purpose. It therefore deserves maximum public participation during the life of this project." However, the Observer also points out, a majority of the trust would be appointed by the Governor.

"These decisions are being made in secret in these Soviet-style meetings and it is outrageous."

Personally, I want New York teams to have stadia that befit the teams playing in the sports capital of America. However, I do believe that there needs to be a serious investigation in to how these new facilities are approved and funded. The sports representatives of New York have to realise that they aren't bigger than the city, and that the opinions of the residents of the city, sports fans and non-sports fans alike, have a right to see that both the planning and funding of these new stadiums are above board and proper.

It seems the planning permission for the new Yankee Stadium and Atlantic Yards projects were granted without the considerations of the local populace of the South Bronx and Brooklyn respectively being taken into account, while there is much controversy over the funding of both Yankee Stadium and the Mets' new Citifield. I believe that some sort of independent investigation should take place into the procedures for granting and funding new stadia within the five boroughs, however, there is a very long history of large-scale developments in New York City going ahead without proper public consultation and I hold out little hope for transparency in these cases.

Having a major sports franchise in your borough can bring immense benefits, as well as great pride for the residents, but these teams must realise that they are not more important than the neighborhoods in which they reside.

Many opponents and elected officials believe that the rally (for which Ratner is footing the bill), is an attempt to generate a false sense of community support for the project, as a prelude to asking for more government subsidies.

According to No Land Grab, the Building and Construction Trades Council has actually shut down all Downtown Brooklyn job sites so that members can attend the rally. But what of the average Brooklynite? How out of touch with Brooklyn must Ratner be to sponsor a rally at 11am on a Thursday, when most regular people are at work? Or perhaps he knows that community members wouldn't attend anyway.

Develop, Don't Destroy Brooklyn's Daniel Goldstein summed it up nicely: "For a project long sold as a 'done deal' today's 'rally' is a desperate attempt to boost a deal that's come undone and is on the precipice of failure. Confident developers simply don't manufacture extravaganzas like today's."

That's why I'm against the Atlantic Yards Development, at least as it stands. Believe me, as a Nets fan, no-one would be happier to see them return to Long Island, and nowhere deserves to have a professional sports team again more than Brooklyn. However, it shouldn't be as part of a development that will further rip the soul out of the borough.

I am not against high-rise development (and like many of architect Frank Gehry's previous projects). On the contrary, inside me beats the heart of an old-fashioned modernist who loves tall buildings. I love walking around Manhattan's man-made canyons. Atlantic Yards, however, is something else. These plans, for 16 skyscrapers in the center of Brooklyn is simply too much. It would dwarf everything around it, dominate the surrounding community, and plunge large swathes of it into shadow for much of the day.

Yes, parts of Brooklyn are ripe for, and in dire need of, redevelopment. Unfortunately far too much of the redevelopment that has taken place in recent years has been at the expense of the traditional beautiful townhouses and buildings that give the borough its charm, in favor of soulless condos. Along with that, too much new housing has been out of the price range of the local residents. Yes, Atlantic Yards has promised to provide apartments for low and middle income families. On closer inspection of the figures, these are still above the going market rate for similar properties. That's not to mention the residents and businesses who will be displaced by the development.

Yes, I want an arena for the Nets in Brooklyn (even though the arena itself will make up just 10% of the development), and I want the borough to prosper, and attract large businesses and investment. I don't, however, believe the Atlantic Yards Development is the correct and proper way for this to be achieved, and, it seems, neither do most of the local residents, whose opinions, like those in the South Bronx concerning the new Yankee Stadium, seem to have been ignored.

For those who want to learn more on the subject, here's the Atlantic Yards official website, the site of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, a coalition of local organizations opposed to the development, and the Atlantic Yards page on Wikipedia, which also features more links to supporters and opponents of the scheme.

“David vs. Goliath: Neighborhood Planning in the Face of Large-Scale Development”:
Many observers opine that community-driven plans—official and approved through a city process or unofficial but widely recognized—are no real hedge against unwanted development. But in the cases of West Harlem, Midtown East, and Atlantic Yards, would developers have had carte blanche without community plans? How do community planners believe alternative plans can be more effective? How can alternative plans guarantee that future development will fit consensus-based neighborhood visions? We’ll look at some recent cases—West Harlem, Midtown East, and Prospect Heights/Fort Greene—where developer-driven plans threaten to undermine community vision, and examine the place of community-based planning in these struggles.

Panelists: Anthony Borelli, Director of Land Use, Planning, and Development for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer; Marshall Brown, Architect/planner for the UNITY Plan for Atlantic Yards; Candace Carponter, Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods; Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, former Chairman, Manhattan Community Board 9; and Ed Rubin, Land Use Chair, Manhattan Community Board 6.

Moderator: Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, Executive Director, El Diario/La Prensa.

Refreshments will be served.

RSVP to rsvp@mas.org or 212-935-2075.

Funding for the Campaign has been provided by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Following up on this weekend's Call Time-Out on Atlantic Yards rally, the Municipal Art Society has released renderings of what the area might look like as demolitions continue and only a small piece of the proposed project is actually built. Visit atlanticlots.com for a slide show.

Image via Brooklyn Speaks.

“Miss Brooklyn” is dead — but Bruce Ratner has released new renderings (above) of the 511-foot tower that he hopes will take her place.

Ratner has said he won’t build the Frank Gehry–designed tower, now called “Building B-1,” until he finds an anchor tenant. And he told the New York Times last month that the entire Atlantic Yards project consists of the publicly financed basketball arena (which has taken on even more of Gehry’s signature look) and two smaller buildings around it.

Source: brooklynpaper.com

NowPublic

Tags: RATNER | Tech & Biz

"As originally proposed, the Atlantic Yards project would overwhelm surrounding neighborhoods, further clog already overburdened streets, create outdated superblocks that deaden street life, overtax public transit, streets, water and sewer infrastructure and create eight acres of “temporary” parking lots that could blight Brooklyn for decades.

But now it’s even worse.

Recently, developer Forest City Ratner acknowledged to the New York Times that it doesn’t even have the resources to construct the signature first phase of the project that would surround the arena.

Now the arena will not be nestled in dramatically designed residential and office buildings. Instead, it will be surrounded by vacant space or more temporary parking, creating a dead zone where vitality was once promised. It’s so bad that New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff (a previous supporter of the project) called it a betrayal of the public trust and a creator of new blight. He even called upon architect Frank Gehry to walk away from Atlantic Yards entirely.

It’s time to call a time out on Atlantic Yards before more demolitions, displacements, and disruptions scar our neighborhood, and more tax dollars go into a hole that doesn’t seem to have a bottom.

Join the sponsors of BrooklynSpeaks.net, the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Assembly Members Hakeem Jeffries and Joan Millman, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, NYC Council Members Letitia James, David Yassky and Bill de Blasio and others at a rally next Saturday, May 3rd at 2 PM at on Pacific Street near Carlton Avenue to demand Governor Paterson call “Time Out” on Atlantic Yards."

Image: Brooklyn Speaks

"As the battles over mammoth-scale development grow more heated, developers and their marketing teams have become extremely cautious about the information they release before a project passes review, for fear of inciting a public outcry... The images released to the public are often restricted to a few renderings that are carefully scrutinized in advance by marketing experts. As a result the public is often left without the visual tools it needs to make thoughtful judgments about a development’s impact."

Ouroussoff once again uses the Hudson Yards as his example, but this phenomenon goes far beyond this one project. Atlantic Yards Report has a breakdown of these tactics at work in Brooklyn. After the jump, another choice recent example.

This is Toren, a condo tower planned for a busy stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn. That's right, Flatbush Avenue, not exactly the pastoral parkland depicted above.

Have you come across this phenomenon in your neighborhood?

Rendering via Curbed.

It's all about the access, baby.

He's performing at the Brooklyn Ball to raise funds for the Brooklyn Museum and honor the lousy developer of Atlantic Yards, Bruce Ratner.

Bruce Ratner is bringing the New Jersey Nets franchise to Brooklyn and building a shiny, sexy arena for them. Bruce Ratner had to promise affordable housing to grease the city and state wheels to have his sexy arena at Atlantic Yards approved. Thanks to the economy doing its thing (i.e. tanking) the affordable housing portion of the development is sorta kinda not going to happen but the arena will rise. (2011? 2015? 2034? Who knows!)

One cannot expect Kanye to know (nor care) about the tangled integrity of the Brooklyn Museum honoring such an emblem of how NYC development only benefits the rich and sneaky. Kanye's riding the wave.

But I do hope someone crashes that sucker and disrupts it like a motherfucker.

It won't be Tallulah because I'm committed to other types of insanity.

Now, I'm going to listen to Harry Belafonte discuss Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This documentary explores the ramifications of the project as proposed and the controversy surrounding it. It features a number of Community-Based Planning Task Force members, including Council Member Letitia James, Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society, Tom Angotti of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development, and Ron Shiffman of the Pratt Center for Community Development. (Shiffman and Angotti both worked on the community-based UNITY plan for the yards). Watch the trailer below, and visit Brooklynmatters.com for information about upcoming screenings, including one tomorrow night at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Ft. Greene.

Streetsblog breaks down the latest on congestion pricing - including a public hearing coming up on Monday.

Some Queens preservationists feel that they have been ignored, but the Landmarks Commission has responded with a 12,495-building survey of the borough, reports the Daily News.

The post goes on to note that when it comes to substance rather than aesthetics, there can be a disconnect between community goals and City Planning's actions, exemplified by DCP's rezonings of Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn. AYR's message seems to be, once again: don't be fooled by pretty pictures.

Also of note on AYR this week: Crain's reports that the Atlantic Yards project has a 50% chance of being built.  However, according to the Daily Eagle, Forest City Ratner is one of only four developers that will receive the state’s allocation for tax exempt bond housing funds for the project.