Ratner: Baiting-and-Switching or Just Evolving?

The Times, whose Atlantic Yards coverage has been criticized for being tainted by its own development relationship with developer Bruce Ratner, does a decent job this weekend of summarizing the arguments of the “bait-and-switch” critics:

The project’s size has jumped by a million square feet, and its dollar cost by 40 percent, to $3.5 billion. Commercial space, once a substantial portion of the overall square footage, has dropped dramatically, replaced by thousands of for-sale apartments and a hotel. Nearly three-quarters of the office jobs originally projected are gone; the new apartments do not count as part of the so-called 50-50 agreement under which 2,250 apartments are to be rented below market rates, and the park on the arena’s roof is to be accessible only to residents.

Forest City Ratner argues that a development project, particularly of this scale, is not static: “Projects change, markets change,” said the firm’s executive vice president for development, James P. Stuckey (pictured). “When you do a project over a long period of time, it’s very difficult – unless you’re Nostradamus – to figure out what the market changes and land changes and all those things are going to be.”
Brooklyn Is Cookin’ [NY Post]