We already know who the big winner of the Jets stadium battle is. It's mega-developer Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner. As the city's focus remains riveted on the west side story, a much bigger and less scrutinized deal is underway at the Atlantic Avenue Railyards in Brooklyn.

That's where FCR aims to build 17 towers ranging from 20 to 58 stories, 2.5 million square feet of office and retail space, and 4500 units of housing. For nostalgic Brooklyn baby boomers like Borough President Marty Markowitz, the cherry on the sundae is a new basketball arena. FCR recently bought the New Jersey Nets for $300 million and plans to house them in a Frank Gehry-designed flying saucer at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. Ratner is bringing professional sports back to Brooklyn and for that, he can have pretty much whatever he wants.

It's hard to imagine FCR wanting more than they're getting. Without any competitive bidding or formal public processes, the governor, mayor and borough president have given FCR exclusive rights to develop a prime hunk of real estate about 1.3 times larger than the World Trade Center footprint. City zoning rules have been rewritten to allow FCR to build Brooklyn's tallest skyscrapers in the midst of low-rise brownstone neighborhoods. The state is pitching in by invoking eminent domain. About half of the land FCR intends to develop is privately owned. Three hundred residents and 33 active businesses will either be bought out or evicted (many have already accepted offers). And FCR is asking the city and state to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies.

If that weren't enough to worry the neighbors, there is FCR's Brooklyn track record to consider. The developer's crown jewel is Metrotech, a 14-building office complex in downtown Brooklyn. Devoid of street-level retail, windswept and barren, Metrotech feels like a fortress (or downtown Cleveland). It is, according to Hunter College professor of urban planning Tom Angotti, "bad planning on a grand scale."

Less grand but equally bad is FCR's notorious Atlantic Center mall, an enormous beige box with a big "A" slapped on the side. When it opened in 1996, it was unlike any mall you'd ever seen. To ward off undesirables, there was no food court or central social space. Stores each had their own entrances and were connected only by long forbidding hallways. Until a recent renovation, the mall was failing so badly that the state DMV had moved in, a sort of backdoor government subsidy.

FCR argues that its developments have kept thousands of jobs in Brooklyn and have contributed to the borough's renaissance. Perhaps. But its developments have also all been heavily dependent on government subsidies, offered design and architecture that turns its back on the public realm, and facilitated the invasion of big box-style chain stores to the detriment of smaller, local businesses.

To best understand the problems with FCR's plan for Atlantic Yards, you need to see an alternative. I'll share one with you next week.

11:04 AM | Link |