Oder Does The Times
After years of (rightly) criticizing The New York Times for its failure to bring a critical eye and adequate resources to its coverage of the Atlantic Yards project, Norman Oder, publisher of the Atlantic Yards Report, got his own essay (that’s what The Times calls it; he calls it an Op-Ed) in the paper of…
After years of (rightly) criticizing The New York Times for its failure to bring a critical eye and adequate resources to its coverage of the Atlantic Yards project, Norman Oder, publisher of the Atlantic Yards Report, got his own essay (that’s what The Times calls it; he calls it an Op-Ed) in the paper of record. A central point of the essay, and the one that he parses further in a follow-up post on his blog, is that public officials might have thought harder about handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies if they’d known that someone with unlimited financial resources–in this case Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov–would end up being the beneficiary. “All was forgotten as flashbulbs popped for Prokhorov, as was the notion that had a man worth nearly $18 billion put his hand out for subsidies, someone might have called foul.” Lest the appearance of Oder’s piece on The Times give the impression that the paper has changed tack on Atlantic Yards, it’s accompanied by another criticism-free profile, this one of Ratner, in today’s sports section, the main point of which appears to be to stir up conflict between him and Madison Square Garden chief Jim Dolan.
A Russian Billionaire, the Nets and Sweetheart Deals [NY Times]
Ratner Content to Succeed in the Shadows [NY Times]
My Time Op-Ed [Atlantic Yards Report]
Photo by gilly youner
Just as Dan Goldstein sold out for $3M, Norman Oder sells out by accepting an assignment from a paper he has wasted so much of his life criticizing. These anti-AY types are showing their true colors, but that’s hardly surprising.
Benson: “If someone were to take a look at the history of AY and point out how we could learn from it for the future, I’m all ears.”
here is one way to learn from it. dont allow developers to go to the governor and tell the governor what land he wants for himself by eminent domain and then not allow a single legislator to vote on the project. would that be a good piece of advice to start off?
“Given all this, I wonder why this project brings out so much venom and I come to the conclusion that Lech is right. It simply boils down to venom against a developer because he is rich and in the public eye.”
utter non-sense. a naked land grab was committed by this so-called “public private” partnership.
no, most public private partnerships do NOT happen this way. our government gave away the store, and that seems to be okay with you.
and FSRQ, the project is going to take 20 years minimum, so how can you say there is nothing more to say about it. maybe take your own advice and STFU about it if it is so utterly unimportant now?
I’ve aimed plenty of venom at Ratner, but I have hurled just as much at Emperor Bloomberg (who never met a billionaire whom he did not thing was a genius) and our dancing chimp, Markowitz
(who loves getting Ratner subsidies for his summer concert series). Shelly Silver, who could have killed AY as he did the West Side yards proposed stadium, gets lots of my venom also. As far as I’m concerned, they can all drop dead.
Still, the fact remains that the MTA has been crying poverty for several years now. And then they turn down HIGHER bids in order to give the property to the lowest bidder — and were prepared to give Ratner the property for $100 million less than they ultimately settled upon. And subsequently agree to allow Ratner to pay off even that below market amount over 20 (?) years instead of all upfront.
As to the housing itself, it remains to be seen when, and if, the subsidized, below-market housing will actually be built. It is highly likely that the first housing that will go up will be the high end apartments that will be the money makers and that Bloomberg will not be breathing down Ratner’s neck to build those lower-income apartments. Who knows if they will ever be built?
There were lots of other reasons to be against Atlantic Yards, none of which are invalid simply because Ratner pulled off his coup of draining badly needed public resources. From the statistics I’ve seen, stadiums seem to be money losers for the cities in which they’re located.
Slopey;
I could well agree that the manner in which these public-private ventures are hatched needs some fine tuning. In fact, I am dubious about them in a large way. However, the responsibility for their structure rests with our laws and elected officials, not with the developers. The latter are just exploiting (and I mean that in a good way) the opportunities that come their way.
If someone were to take a look at the history of AY and point out how we could learn from it for the future, I’m all ears. I would suggest to you, however, that the large majority of anti-AY commentary on this site has not been of their nature. In fact, I would suggest that the opponents have done their cause a dis-service by aiming so much venom at the developer.
Slopefarm.
Please keep your balance and logic away from this discussion. Stick to short, offensive, emotionally charged posts with no more than 30 words.
Thanks.
Jackal
hey, benson,
For me, not venom, but disagreement, and I care less about the developer than the development. Here are what I think are some of the main themes and questions:
1. Subsidies — Disagreeing with the subsidies here doesn’t mean you are against subsidies to leverage private investment, although I realize some are (it’s an easy target). The question is, what did you get as a marginal benefit of the subsidy? Did the subsidy leverage more in the way of investment and economic activity over what would have happened without it than the subsidy itself cost? AY is problematic on this score in part because of the value of the rejected bid. What exactly did the subsidies buy us over and beyond what we could have gotten without them?
2. Planning — The project is going to have a huge impact on all kinds of infrastructure, services and quality of life issues. That’s not an excuse never to build, but planning got little more than lip service here. the project’s density is huge. The site straddles areas that are apropriate for high-density commercial use and lower density residential areas. There had been nice growth along the Atlantic, Pacific, Dean and Fulton corridors nearby for a while, but this seems overwhelming. Would it have been wise to preserve the street grid a bit more? Scale back the east end of the project to knit the adjacent neighborhoods together rather than wall them apart? What about schools, traffic, etc.? It’s already a madhouse over there at times. There was really no entity in this process with accountability on these issues. Which leads me to . . . .
3. Process — there really was no process here to reconcile competing interests. I know you might view good process as merely a chance to kill development (good and bad), but absence of decent process undermines legitimacy. If an anti-development edict for the site had been adopted with as little input, process and accountability as AY was put into place with, I think you’d be up in arms.
I’m not arguing that three-story townhouses is all that should be built above all those train lines and next to all those shopping centers. But I do think overall that this is too big. Good planning lets sensible development proceed in a way that reconciles multiple and competing interests, although never perfectly. I wish that had been tried here.
This is kind of like talking to Southerners about the civil war. At a certain point you just have to remember that we won the war and all the talking in the world isn’t going to change that. Then you smile and pat them on the back and go about your business.
My venom’s based purely on the gross inefficiencies of the project. Was all in favor of developing AY. Was never in favor of it going to the firm that bid the lowest, and needed the most welfare for a project with the least economic benefit.
Affordable housing? Perhaps wise to check the plans at this point and see what decade that’s planned to be built.
In 20 years the best economic case is we’ll have an empty stadium and the bills from another relocated sports franchise that cost the relocating city hundreds of millions more than it received before it moved again. Standard story.
We paid hundreds of millions of dollars more to lease a team than it would cost to buy the team. The pricing inefficiency caused by lobbying and public indifference of course goes to the owner(s) of the Nets from we taxpayers.
Worst case is the Nets renegotiate at first opportunity, threaten to leave unless the taxpayers subsidize the team further. Again, standard story.