De Blasio Blasts Ratner on AY Obfuscation

Last night Councilman Bill de Blasio held a meet-up for Brooklyn bloggers at which he spoke for a couple of hours about development topics including Atlantic Yards, rezonings, affordable housing, and what he’d like to accomplish if he’s elected borough president. Like Gowanus Lounge, we were most interested in what de Blasio had to say about Atlantic Yards: The councilman said he thinks there should be no more demolitions in the Atlantic Yards footprint until Forest City Ratner puts its current plans for the project into writing. De Blasio said he was “livid” about the interview Bruce Ratner gave to the New York Times last month since the likely stall “calls the entire Community Benefits Agreement into question.” The Councilman also said that he thinks the entire development should be reviewed again by the state if Forest City Ratner is now conceiving of a vastly different project, particularly one that reneges on its promised affordable housing. “I held out hope for the project because of the amount of affordable housing it would create, as well as the number of jobs it would bring,” he said. “But I have been constantly disappointed in the lack of community involvement…I’ve never seen anything that’s been mismanaged so fundamentally in terms of community involvement.” The councilman also talked about the possible Coney Island and Gowanus rezonings. While he’s not thrilled with either the city or Joe Sitt’s possibly competing visions for the area (“I’m not comfortable with the Manhattanization of Brooklyn” that both plans represent), he says that “by and large” he likes Planning’s draft framework for rezoning Gowanus because “the best way to get the canal clean is to get residential development around it.” As borough president, de Blasio said he’d like to be involved with “shaping more than just promoting Brooklyn.” In keeping with one of his primary platforms, affordable housing, de Blasio said he’d use the office to “start addressing the have-nots.”
De Blasio Calls for Moratorium on Atlantic Yards Demolition [GL]