Community Corner

Exporting Atlantic Yards

Other cities in other countries are looking to learn from Atlantic Yards. Here's what it can teach them.

This blog post was written by Gib Veconi

I’ve heard people comment that the depth and tenacity of community opposition to the Atlantic Yards project has ensured that a similar scheme will never happen again in Brooklyn. But even without advocates, it would be difficult to imagine the same circumstances coming together here anyway. Atlantic Yards, after all, required a developer with the resources and political connections to add to its portfolio at the busiest intersection in Brooklyn by brazenly subverting State urban renewal law, while at the same time staging a multi-level communications campaign to create the impression by doing so it was actually providing benefits to the public. The success of the strategy was dependent not just on the limited bandwidth of local elected officials to see the end game, or even on the lock-step sponsorship of Mayor Bloomberg and four New York State Governors (a major help), but also upon the developer’s brilliant timing of the Brooklyn real estate market: in retrospect, it seems pretty clear that 2003 was about the last year it would have been possible to claim with a straight face that the ground Forest City Ratner wanted was blighted and therefore warranted a solution as disruptive and one-sided as Atlantic Yards.

If it’s unlikely another Brooklyn developer could manage a coup on the scale of Atlantic Yards again, however, that doesn’t mean other firms in other markets aren’t trying to repeat the strategy. For instance, last month I was approached by teams from the Netherlands and from Canada visiting Brooklyn to investigate how the Atlantic Yards model might apply to projects in their countries. I’m sure these folks had occasion to interview representatives from Forest City as well, but they were also interested in accountability for promised public benefits from a community perspective. Here is some of what I had to tell them about fostering transparency and accountability in developer-driven redevelopment projects based on our experience in Brooklyn.

Create a competitive environment. It’s a lot easier to for the public to get a good deal when developers compete to participate in projects that involve public land or zoning overrides. For instance, at the Hunters Point South project in Queens, the first phase was bid through RFP with three developers selected. It’s no wonder that all of the 925 units in the first phase will be affordable. Even in the area rezoned under the developer-sponsored Downtown Brooklyn Plan, more than ten developers will have delivered more than 950 affordable apartments by 2016—many with deeper affordability than what we’ve seen so far at Atlantic Yards.

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Conversely, single source projects like Atlantic Yards tend to be sold to the chief executives of state and city governments based on developer access, and are greenlighted from the top before details can be negotiated by agencies. Remember how the MTA announced its intention to sell the development rights over the Vanderbilt Yard to Forest City nearly two years before it issued an RFP, then gave the other bidders a scant few weeks to respond? And the lack of other developers in the mix made it easy in 2009 for Forest City Ratner to demand a 15-year delay in completing Atlantic Yards’ residential component—without much leverage for the State to push back.

Involve local elected representatives early. Projects that are justified by delivery of public benefits like affordable housing and new jobs are only credible when decision-making is informed by people representing the communities who are expected to receive those benefits. There will always be trade-offs when assistance is given to a developer in exchange for benefits received by the public. With its elected leaders at the table, the final result may not get local residents everything they want, but it’s more likely to be the best outcome possible. After approval, project decisions should be made by a board that includes directors appointed in conjunction with local officials to retain a focus on promised benefits.

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But the Atlantic Yards project was specifically designed to foreclose any local input. Because it was approved under the New York State Urban Development Corporation law, Atlantic Yards was able to skip review by local Community Boards, and was never voted on by any elected official from Brooklyn. And unlike other State projects, Atlantic Yards doesn’t benefit from a local development corporation dedicated to achieving the project’s goals. Instead, decisions made by its developer are rubber-stamped by the board of the Empire State Development Corporation, all of whose members are appointed by the Governor.

Quantify the benefits in both degree and time. It’s tempting to believe that a big redevelopment project is a rising economic tide that will lift the boats of local businesses and create jobs for unemployed community members. The reality is, unless the desired outcomes are quantified, they probably won’t happen. It’s not enough, for instance, for a project to simply claim it will create affordable housing, even in the hundreds or thousands of units. To make sure the expectations of the community will be met, the degree of affordability must also be specified, and schedule on which apartments will be made available must be spelled out.

The Atlantic Yards experience so far has shown that local business doesn’t automatically profit from a facility like a sports arena (which after all is designed to capture as big of a share of its patrons’ wallets as possible). The “jobs” benefits described in the Atlantic Yards Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) in fact turned out to be job training—not exactly the same thing as a guarantee of employment. The “affordable” housing will be based upon much higher income levels than are the average for Brooklyn. And residents at risk of displacement now understand that there is a big difference between an apartment made available now versus 25 years from now.

Make sure the commitments are enforceable. Benefits that are important enough to trade for public land and zoning overrides must be part of an agreement that can be enforced if necessary. The government conferring land and approving variances should be in a position to claw back if a developer does not meet its commitments. If a CBA is used, the parties negotiating on behalf of the community should not have financial relationships with the developer that could limit their ability to enforce the agreement. In any case, both the developer and community counterparties should be able to agree that any resident, elected official or community-based organization has standing to enforce the terms of a CBA.

In the case of Atlantic Yards, courts have ruled that the remedies in the Master Development Agreement between Forest City Ratner and the State of New York that are supposed to ensure project completion in the 10-year time frame under which the project was originally approved are too weak to warrant an expectation that will actually happen. The Atlantic Yards CBA states that only the developer and the community signatories can enforce its commitments; under the CBA, several of the signatories receive funds from Forest City Ratner, and two of those are no longer in operation, making enforcement especially unlikely.

Move in phases. The longer a development project is expected to take to be completed, the greater the risk that the public will never see all of the benefits promised. If a large area needs many years for redevelopment, government should bid out development in phases to manage the public’s exposure to the risk of individual suppliers falling on hard times.

Unfortunately, both phases of the Atlantic Yards project were awarded to Forest City Ratner in 2006. As we’ve seen, that set the stage for Forest City renegotiating the project completion schedule from 10 to 25 years, pushing much of the promised housing. The State has in effect allowed the warehousing of most of the 22-acre site until as long as 2035.

For other cities looking for examples of successful public/private partnerships, Atlantic Yards is a cautionary tale of the difficulties in bringing best practices to a single-source developer-driven project. If a developer’s promises sound too good to be true, they probably are, and the public and its elected representatives must insist first and foremost upon strong controls to ensure transparency and accountability will be maintained.

It’s also not too late for lessons from Atlantic Yards to be applied here in Brooklyn. A 2011 court decision effectively reversed ESDC’s 2009 approval of changes to Atlantic Yards’ second phase that extended the project from 10 to 25 years. ESDC is responsible not only for preparing additional environmental analysis on the effect of such a delay, but must also consider alternatives that get Atlantic Yards done on the schedule under which it was originally approved. We and our elected leaders must demand those alternatives include concepts like competition among developers, local oversight, and real commitments that can be enforced. If we can win those things at Atlantic Yards, we’ll really have something to show the rest of the world.


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