As some of you may be aware, Bruce Ratner (who is probably the most well-connected realestate developer in New York State) just bought the New Jersey Nets basketball team with the intention of moving them to Brooklyn. This will require the second new stadium to be built in Kings county since 2000.

Ratner has decided on further developing the Times Plaza area where he set up his monstrosity of a shopping mall (Atlantic Center). Times Plaza, the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, was the original site to build the Dodgers a new stadium before Walter O’Malley decided to play some real hardball and move the Dodgers to L.A. and break Brooklyn’s professional-sports-heart. Everyone acknowledges that this is definitely an underdeveloped slice of the borough and pretty much the best place to put a stadium.

So, Bruce Ratner hires Frank Gehry to design the stadium and surrounding corporate office complex and asks the city to condemn and seize large tracts of land around Dean Street–as a private developer without political connections, Ratner would have to purchase the buildings in question. But as a friend of Governor Pataki’s and an all-around big makher in New York, Ratner plans to get the city to use eminent domain to steal the homes of Brooklyn residents. To quote the Washington Post story:

Ratner will ask state agencies to donate the rail lands and city agencies to pay for $150 million worth of utility lines and widened streets. He wants to use $28 million in city sales taxes to pay off his bonds. Ratner is adept at extracting such concessions. In 1996, he opened the Atlantic Center Mall, across the street from his proposed Brooklyn arena. City officials gave him a $18.5 million subsidy and a 23-year property tax abatement. When he had vacancies this year, officials installed two state agencies and paid him $1.6 million in rent.

Basically, Ratner wants the city not only to pay him in tax abatements, but also to “buy” the land for him by using eminent domain. Fortunately, Ratner is also building the New York Times a new headquarters (similarly financed by having the state seize prime midtown property and handing it over to Forest City Ratner and the Times company, who are now business partners), so coverage of the proposed plans in the Gray Lady usually amount to grandstanding for the plan.

Opposition to Ratner’s machinations come in the form of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, as well as the area’s City Council and State Senate representatives, Laetitia James and Velmanette Montgomery, respectively.

The stadium/development issue is significant to me for several reasons. First of all, I grew up in Prospect Heights. I lived there from the day I came back from the hospital to the day I left for university. Secondly, I currently live in the MetroTech BID*, home to Forest City Ratner Inc. and one of Ratner’s most successful projects. Basically, Ratner tore down a vast swath of 50 to 150-year old slum buildings and built a corporate plaza which includes JPMorganChase (then Chase Manhattan Bank), Verizon (then NYNEX), Keyspan (then Brooklyn Union Gas), and the Polytechnic University campus.

I happen to like what Ratner has done here, for the most part. MetroTech happens to be one of the cleanest blocks in the city, and fairly safe. I live in a dual-use resdiential/commercial zoned loft, and I love the nieghborhood. One of the interesting things about Metrotech is that walking around, you’ll hear pretty much the same conversations one would in midtown Manhattan (worrying about pension plans, complaining about spouses and kids, etc.); the difference is that the ratio of whites to non-whites here is exactly inverse to midtown’s (I’d say roughly 70:30). Not that this has anything to do with Ratner per se.

Racial politics are always lurking behind the surface of New York City politics. The Metrotech development project got off the ground fairly easily–the neighborhood Ratner tore up and replaced with office buildings was occupied mainly by blacks. Traditionally, homes for Navy Yard workers and flophouses for visiting sailors were the norm here, but since the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966, the area had become fairly depressed. Ratner did build a number of subsidized residential housing units as a compensatory measure.

When I was growing up, Prospect Heights was mostly black; I recall that ours was one of three or four non-black families on the block… until that summer (was it 1993?) I came home from sleep-away camp to find the neighborhood crawling with young white couples. Those are the folks who are joining the PHAC in droves to prevent their neighborhood from being taken over by Ratner. PHAC and others say the plan will drive rents through the roof, as well as increase crime around the stadium and create a traffic (and parking) nightmare. These are all very valid points and hopefully they will be heard by our billionaire mayor, or perhaps by our law-school-friend-of-Ratner’s governor. Or maybe not. Being that there are more whites in Prospect Heights nowadays (the average PHAC member quoted in the press seems to have been a resident for the past 7-10 years), they will likely have a better chance than the old rowhouse residents on old Johnson Street here in Downtown Brooklyn.

As you can see from this image I’m borrowing from the New York Times, Ratner’s plans don’t just involve a stadium, but a whole commercial district carved out of the northern part of Prospect Heights. It is elsewhere noted that the square mileage Ratner wishes to claim from the city’s eminent domain is equivalent to seven World Trade Centers.

Ratner also happens to own the property right across Atlantic Avenue from the proposed stadium site. The aforementioned Atlantic Center Mall stands on the site which was actually proposed to be used for the new Dodger stadium. Today, that parcel is saddled with what most people agree is a hideous mockery of dodger stadium, a big-box retailer mall crudely shaped into a faux-Ebbets configuration. Ratner also owns the new building being built directly west from the Atlantic Center Mall, facing Flatbush Avenue. That building will become an office complex anchored by the new Bank of New York headquarters and the entrance to a revamped Atlantic Avenue subway/LIRR station. So, essentially, Ratner is just making a huge landgrab for the rest of the area.

Several PHAC-types have suggested that Ratner build the stadium on land he already owns, which would pretty much force him to tear down Atlantic Center. I agree. Here’s my proposal:

Ratner should be forced to tear down Atlantic Center and build the stadium on the originally proposed site of the downtown Brooklyn arena. The MTA should sell Ratner the “air rights” to build over the unsightly LIRR railyards which are truly a “blight” (to use an eminent domain legal term) to the area. The existing garage under Atlantic Center ought to be expanded, and area residents should be given parking tags and priority in finding spots in the neighborhood. Ratner is already getting a huge property tax abatement for his property there, so the city minimizes the losses of tax revenue. Brooklyn gets the Nets, who are, in turn, required to change their name to something less stupid.

Tune in next week when I figure out exactly what’s going on with Ratner’s Downtown Revitalization Plan, in which I may lose my own apartment!

Links:

Field Of Schemes, which follows the stadium/tax break game across the country [building a stadium is usually a loser for municipalities]
PHAC
The New York Post on the New York Times on the Ratner deal
HoopsWorld editorial on the Nets deal.

*Business Improvement District, basically a zone which is maintained by the local merchants’ association which is given tax breaks from the city. This is the program which would allow me to use city funding to hang a sign promoting my business if I so desired (basically, we have to settle on a design).