How Low-Income Can You Go?
The latest Atlantic Yards puff piece arrived in mailboxes earlier this week and the cover photo is something of a head-scratcher. We’re not so sure a family in matching $75 designer polo shirts was quite who Bertha Lewis had in mind when she sold ACORN’s support to Bruce Ratner for half a million bucks and…
The latest Atlantic Yards puff piece arrived in mailboxes earlier this week and the cover photo is something of a head-scratcher. We’re not so sure a family in matching $75 designer polo shirts was quite who Bertha Lewis had in mind when she sold ACORN’s support to Bruce Ratner for half a million bucks and a kiss. Of course, the mailer actually got the demographic just right: The large majority of apartments in the proposed complex ARE for the polo-shirt set. Too bad that wasn’t made clear to all the low-income folks Ratner got to spend the day in line at the first public forum who actually have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting an apartment.
yo pete: yes, ACORN has done any number of great things in Brooklyn and across the country. but if Bertha Lewis things she accomplished what she endlessly crows about, then she is clueless. (I don’t think she is clueless.) she sold out on this one and that is why she is being dragged through the mud. it’s not about right- or left-wing politics; it’s about whether the benefits (one side of the ledger) are greater than the subsidies and unmitigatable impacts (the other side). by my accounting, not even close.
Since no one else wants to say it, I will. This mailer is just another example of how Forest City Ratner is trying to further the divide on this development by race. As you can see, every person in this mailer is a person of color, further propagating the myth that the black community is going to benefit from this development while all of us who oppose it are just rich white racists who just moved to Brooklyn a week ago! Every person involved who supports this project has played the race card, from Bertha Lewis to Roger Green, who said that the “opposition” wouldn’t mind if FCR was going to build a huge opera house but we don’t want a basketball arena because it will bring the “wrong” kind of people to the neighborhood. Yes Roger, that’s why we oppose it; not because the project is out of scale, or becuase it will overtax all public service,or becuase people are losing their homes due to the abuse of public domain. And in the end, this development will end up costing all of us money while Ratner skips away with his gajillion dollars like he always does. I hope that everyone who supports this project and especially those whose support has been bought with Ratner’s money end up looking like the fools that they are for buying into his lies.
DDDB issued their own propaganda yesterday. Upon arriving home, I found a stack of their leaflets in my vestibule. As always, I quickly scooped up all of the copies and promptly tossed ’em in the trash. Before that, though, I glanced at one and was shocked to see that they were trying to align themselves with Hakeem Jeffries – the man that their members spent months defaming. I hope that he refuses to work with them in the future.
Hey Ratner did a bang-up job with the subsidies he got for Atlantic Terminal. That urban maze of a mall with improperly designed parking demonstrates his acumen for using the public dollar for his advantage.
Dropping approximately 15,000 people and thousands of more cars in an area defined by brownstones makes a whole lot of cents. I like how the Nets arena morphed into a monstrosity. But, hey, Bertha’s happy.
Actually, for the sake of being accurate, they ARE polo shirts, with a lowercase p!
Yes, it’s a ridiculous amount of subsidy, whose returns are dubious. (What else is new in this town?) I also don’t see how it answers the housing question. Would Propect Heights and Fort Greene really stand for it if, say, the city or state used that money to build a new high rise, all-low-income housing project on the site instead? Would adding another few acres of new middle-income row houses (like the ones on S. Oxford near Atlantic) do anything to deal with Brooklyn’s housing needs?
From Wikipedia…
The known subsidies are:
* $100 million – Direct cash from New York City
* $100 million – Direct cash from New York State
* ~$360 million – 30 Year Full Property Tax Exemption (if the lease for its full term of 99 years, the abatement would exceed $1 billion)
* ~$77 million – Mortgage Recording Tax Exemption
* ~$610 million – 9.1 Million Square Feet of Development Rights (A $910 million value for which Ratner pays approximately $300 million, including a discounted, closed-door price for the Rail Yards, without genuine competitive bidding; Vanderbilt Rail Yards appraised value: $214.5 million, Ratner bid $100, Extell bid $150 million)
* ~$555.3 million – Tax-Exempt and Taxed Bonding for the Arena
* ~$101 million – Housing Construction Subsidies
* $26 million – Forest City Pays $1.00 for a 99 year lease for all the land under the Arena, its garages and accessways, including City street, a total of 6.5 acres
Total Known Subsidy (approximate): $1.929 billion
In addition to the known subsidies, the unknown subsidies include:
* Unspecified (and unlimited) additional funds for “extraordinary infrastructure costs”
* Government subsidies and/or tax credits to provide for “affordable housing”
* Credit for any costs which Ratner incurs in relocating and installing public utility infrastructure
* Guaranties from the City, the Empire State Development Corporation and the EDC that they will “use their best efforts” to obtain energy cost savings for the Arena for an unspecified period of time
* Arena construction materials and fixtures sales tax exemption
* Credit under the Brownfield Program if Forest Ctiy has to spend more than $20 million in remediation of environmental hazards
For the sake of being accurate, those are not Polo shirts, they’re Lacoste.
I’m just perplexed by AY opponents’ contradictory arguments: That there should be more truly affordable housing in the complex and that AY should be much smaller. So where are these affordable apartments supposed to come from? Who pays for them? The federal goverment doesn’t give outright subsidies anymore. If anyone’s got other great ideas for alternative financing for affordable housing in Brooklyn, I’d love to hear them.