How Anti-Ratner Groups Got Extell On Board
July 8, 2005, NY Daily News — Historic brownstones! Prospect Park! Brooklyn Museum! That’s how a band of Prospect Heights activists tried to attract rival developers to bid for the downtown Brooklyn site where Bruce Ratner wants to build a $3.5 billion arena and housing complex – and it worked. The group along with Develop…
July 8, 2005, NY Daily News — Historic brownstones! Prospect Park! Brooklyn Museum! That’s how a band of Prospect Heights activists tried to attract rival developers to bid for the downtown Brooklyn site where Bruce Ratner wants to build a $3.5 billion arena and housing complex – and it worked. The group along with Develop – Don’t Destroy Brooklyn stuffed more than 100 envelopes with photos and fancy cover letters trying to court developers from Illinois to Singapore. The Manhattan-based Extell Development Co. took the bait and put in a last-minute surprise bid yesterday for the 8.4 acre stretch of railyard along Atlantic Ave. The MTA put out a request for proposals for the site in May and bids were due by Wednesday. Ratner wants to build an arena and 17 soaring skyscrapers – the tallest reaching 620 feet high – along the yards and extending into Prospect Heights. The Extell plan is a much smaller and does not involve taking private land. “We went through all the developers and read about the kind of things they worked on,” Hagan said about choosing who to target.
Continued on the Jump…
A Coney Island Dream [NY Daily News]
The promotional package included aerial maps of Brooklyn and color photos of quaint restaurants, brownstones and luxury lofts. Photos of the dilapidated stretch of railyards also were included along with a copy of the request for proposals from the MTA. “We encourage interested developers to make competing bids,” read the cover letter. “The yards are an incredibly valuable opportunity in an exceptional location.” But it wasn’t the meadows and museums that attracted Extell. “They didn’t do this based on a photo image,” said Extell spokesman Bob Liff. “This is a serious company that does serious work. What attracted the developer to this is that it’s one of the great developable sites in Brooklyn. We’re surprised there weren’t more people,” Liff said.
Ratner’s plan is far from a done deal. Check out the Slatin Report online. It gives you an idea of the tone of things to come.
The 50% affordable housing figure is incorrect. It was the number put forward by Ratner when the agreement with ACORN was first announced. Since that time, the amount number of apartments in the development has been increased, and the figure is now at 30%, which is typical for this kind of development. By the way, the subsidies for affordable housing would be available to any developer.
I feel that poor coverage of this development by New York media has contributed to the confusing concerning the facts about the Atlantic Railyards project.
David, there is no “cut-off” regarding height. Why are you demanding an absolute here? So you can imply that there’s no rationality to it?
As for most things in life it’s merely a sliding scale of preferences. At three times lower, 20 floors is preferable to me than 60 floors, IMHO.
Does anyone know at this point how much ’eminent domain’ would be needed? I thought most of property had already been purchased or at least ‘optioned to purchase’.
Besides from Mr. Goldstein how many owners are
steadfast in refusing to sell?
I’d say the criticism has been the scale of the development and the eminent domain. If someone wants to buy their own land and do what have you, feel free. It’s just really a raw deal to have someone come along and use our government (which we’re compelled to pay taxes to) to evict us from our houses so that s/he can make money.
It seems pretty ridiculous that people could criticize Extell for putting in a bid, or us for supporting that bid. From day one, critics of the Ratner plan were told that they had no right to criticize if they didn’t have a giant development plan of their own, immediately, complete with floor plans and traffic flow analyses. Even if Ratner himself didn’t have these things. So now we do. And people still are dismissive. And try to pretend that the two plans are pretty much the same. They’re not. The Ratner plan is gargantuan, would increase traffic by a multiple, and uses unfair eminent domain to take away people’s houses. Look, I’m sure the Extell plan will not be too pretty. And, having grown up in a building that was bought by Extell when I was thirteen, I can tell you they’re no joy to deal with, and certainly they’re not doing this altruistically. But it’s on a human scale, and that is important.
The “don’t Manhattanize Brooklyn” argument doesn’t hold water with me. Just because the landscape of downtown Brooklyn and Prospect Heights may change drastically does not mean that the face of the entire borough will change. People act as though one will fall off the side of the earth upon crossing Church Avenue. Brooklyn is a huge place, and if you desire a low-rise community, feel free to move to any of the other several dozen Brooklyn neighborhoods that fit that description.
Ultimately, I think the reason why many people hate the Ratner proposal is because they moved to Brooklyn b/c they didn’t want to live around enormous high rises, sports centers or congested shopping mall cultures. Obviously neighborhoods change over time, but developing enormous swaths of land in the center of brooklyn (and using eminant domain to do so) isn’t exactly development — it’s a form of piracy.
Rationalizing an absurdly large development using economics doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It’s the fact that we’ve all now seen plenty of this kind of development all over Manhattan (albiet on a smaller scale) and it most often turns interesting, organically developed neighborhoods into abysmal shopping-mall-esque small business killing neighborhood character destroyers.
Obviously a bit dramatic . . . I’m not against the Arena. I’m against the Arena, and the Commercial, and the Housing, and the traffic, and the subsidies.
I’m also a bit put off of what the “new” skyline of brooklyn will look like:
http://www.bball.net/documents/jpg/north_elevation.jpg
What people are forgetting is the amount of $ that each developer can afford to pay the MTA. The more that is built, the more valuable the underlying land is.
One of the articles on the recent bids cited the MTA’s claim that the land should have a FAR of 10 which means you can build 10 sq.ft for each sq. ft. of land. The Ratner proposal has an 8+ FAR and the Extell proposal has a 5+ FAR.
A developer is willing to pay more if they can build more. There’s a basic cost to build a sq. ft. of housing or office space. Add to that the cost of a buildable square foot of land and you get your total cost per sq. ft. To make a profit you have to be able to rent or sell at a rate the market will bear that is higher than your costs.
Since Ratner is going to build 8+ square feet per foot of land which is more than the 5+ that Extell will build, the land is more valuable to Ratner. He can pay more for the land and still make a profit. This is the reason that I believe Ratner’s bid will be superior.