The folks at Big Cities Big Boxes are none too pleased about the lawsuit against Ikea getting rejected. According to BCBB, Ikea has purposefully overstated the unemployment situation in the area to push their case:

Ikea claimed that unemployment among racial minorities in Red Hook was epidemic. Ikea systematically incited racial divisiveness in the community, but its claims about unemployment were simply false. As revealed on the blog BigCitiesBigBoxes, publicly available evidence proves that Ikea secured City Planning Commission approval for the gigantic Ikea-Red Hook big box store by misrepresenting the number of unemployed residents of Red Hook Houses, a public housing project. Ikea stated, misleadingly and repeatedly, that there is a twenty per cent unemployment rate at Red Hook Houses, the local public housing project, which as of the Year 2000 census had 7,278 residents, most of them African-American. The records of the Department of City Planning, however, show that in fact there were only 568 unemployed persons of working age in Red Hook Houses as of the 2000 census, not 1456, as Ikea’s arguments suggested. In addition, hundreds of retail jobs are already available within walking distance of Red Hook Houses, at Lowe’s and Home Depot, and another 200 union jobs will be available when Fairway opens.

Press Release: Ikea Lied [Big Cities Big Boxes]