Brooklyn's Bickering About Atlantic Yards

Metrotech disfigured downtown Brooklyn? Have you ever walked around the Metrotech area BEFORE it was built? Poly nerds used to get mugged or beat up just walking down Lawrence or Bridge. At worst it is safe today to venture in that area.

There is only a 6% vacancy rate for office space in downtown brooklyn - by most definitions a shortage.

The area where they are proposing building is a dump - it is just a hole in the ground. As for the areas surrounding being "destroyed" - this is a red hearing, Brooklyn Heights is right next door to the core biz,civic,govt center of Brooklyn - it is far from destroyed.

Rhubarb,

I'm with you on item #1. There is no reason why Ratner can't come up with the money from private sources if his deal is so profitable. Perhaps one of his issues is "control" and he will only get that with city hall's blessings AND their checkbook, as opposed to going to lenders who demand more control and higher capital return.

As for item #2 regarding the economic feasibility of copious office space-- let him eat his own mistakes. The problem is, he wants to you the taxpayer to eat his possible mistake by financing the project so that in the event it fails, it's your money down the drain. Of course the solution to this "social-cost, private-gain" is to take the public funding out of the equation, and fund it completely with private means.

If he backs down from that, you certainly know that he has not done his homework on the entire plan, and was hoping to make a gamble with other people's money.

As for the "impact on the neighborhood" arguments, I hold it to specious. One does not and cannot own his neighborhood individually nor "collectively". He merely owns certain parcel(s), and thats it.

For the public school which is now suddenly overwhelmed with new students, and any other exasperated community services- well guess what- you just dug your own graves. You cannot have a claim on other people, to hold them back from moving to a certain location because you decide to give people of a neighborhood/city/state a freebie.

The equivalent to that would be the city stupid enough to offer each citizen a new car every year. Suddenly, massive influxes of people want to move to your city. If the city can't handle it, the answer is to remove the freebie, not to stop people from moving there.

Aside from the dramatic impact on the neighborhood, the real questions in this debate 1) why in the world would any city give taxpayer money to support an arena or stadium? If they were investments that were actually worth it, wouldn't sports team owners be building them; and 2) whether there is any need whatsoever for the office space Ratner plans to build. There's a huge surplus already, and there promises to be one for decades.

"How can you harm a community that's a dump already? How many of you have actually walked around downtown Brooklyn?"

apparently you haven't ... because the areas that are going to be most affected by this project are not "dumps" to say the least ...

yay capitalism and displacement.

I'd hardly call it bickering Brooklyn. A property developer and his hired lackeys (those hired by, or hoping to be hired by, him) finally get some scrutiny and, um, yes, some abuse.

To the first commenter, I'd just explain that the idea is to prevent some of the prettier parts of Brooklyn from turning into another Metrotech, the earlier, DOWNTOWN attempt by Mr. Ratner to disfigure the Borough.

Anyway, Gothamist, you're a blog, not the effing Times. None of this "some people say this, some the other". Shoot all the clowns and SORT IT OUT.

This is what happens when the egos of real estate developers get WAY out of hand. Nothing keeps them in check anymore. Next thing, Ratner will have his own reality show where he meets with resident of prospect heights and tells them "you're evicted" after not completing the weekly team task of trying to add a starbucks to the park slope food coop.

I think the problem is that people are calling a massive office park a "stadium plan" and while there is definitely room for improvement, the plan as it's setout is waaaay too much for the neighborhood.

The way I see it, there should be revitalization. But not the wholesale plopping of an incongruous office park into an urban neighborhood.

And traffic? Look, I have lived in this part of Brooklyn for the past 5 years. And the reality is this. The traffic here is insane! And it only gets worse with each new Ratner project. Just try driving or even crossing the street at the junction of Flatbush, Atlantic and Fourth Avenue. It's simply insane.

I would love to see the Atlantic Yards paved over and integrated naturally into the existing grid. But these plans as they are set down are simply insanely too much.

>>How can you harm a community that's a dump already? How many of you have actually walked around downtown Brooklyn?

If you mean Fulton Mall and the stretch of Flatbush between 4th and Fulton, there's room for improvement there, but Fort Greene, Boerum Hill and northern Park Slope, the regions most afftected by the Ratner plan, have made strides over the last few years and can hardly be called dumps.

It's true that the old LIRR Flatbush Avenue terminal was a hole in the ground for 20 years, due in part to community opposition to the various plans proposed for it. I get frustrated by this, since the longer the bickering goes on, the longer nothing gets done. Look at ground zero. 4 years, and still zero.

It seems, however, from a cursory view that the Nets arena plan is way too overwhelming for what is now primarily a residential area.

As far as the Brooklyn Nets go, people primarily drive to get to sports venues, and you would have the same problem with a downtown Brooklyn stadium you would have had with a west side stadium: lots of cars, and no expressways...

www.forgotten-ny.com

let's bulldoze downtown brooklyn and make it a wasteland... FOR FREEDOM!

How can you harm a community that's a dump already? How many of you have actually walked around downtown Brooklyn?