Published: February 27, 2008
The New Jersey Nets move to Brooklyn is still in for a fight. In an interesting, if little-known (outside of New York City) news tidbit, New Jersey Nets owners Bruce Ratner and Shaun Carter (Jay-Z), along with Barclay’s Bank of England, are being sued by legendary DJ Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc) and a Brooklyn-based organization, Da Black Defense League, for $5 billion. In the claim Campbell said Ratner and Carter conspired with Barclays and:
“Profited from the African Slave Trade and continue to profit from these gains, through a conspiracy dating back hundreds of years and continue to date to oppress Black people, enslave them, unlawfully deport them to all corners of the Earth.”
The Atlantic Yards project, a $4 billion investment, would include a basketball arena for the Nets, more than 6,000 apartments, middle-income housing, commercial offices, retail establishments, and a boutique hotel – all located within downtown Brooklyn.
Bruce Ratner, president and CEO of the New York division of Forest City Enterprises and currently the real estate developer for the project, has been accused of having links with the slave trade through Barclay’s Bank. Ratner, who also co-owns the New Jersey Nets with Jay-Z, a huge supporter and endorser of the project, plans to bring the Nets to Brooklyn upon the construction of the Arena.
Barclay’s purchased the naming rights to the arena for $400 million for the next 20 years.
This suit comes on the heels of the dismissal of another lawsuit against Ratner by Judge Joan A. Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. It was filed by a coalition of 26 groups claiming that the environmental impact statement the state of New York used in evaluating the project should be annulled:
The groups contended that the review did not fully address the project’s potential impact on traffic, security and open space in the neighborhood, and that it had failed to take a “hard look” at alternative sites for the project.
But in a detailed 71-page decision, Justice Madden disputed most of the groups’ arguments.
In rejecting a claim, for example, that the review failed to properly address the prospect that the project would provide a tempting target for terrorists, the judge said the project did not have as many inherent hazards as “facilities with some degree of dangerousness, such as an oil supertanker port, a gas storage facility or a hazardous waste facility.” She also noted that state law did not require the developer to consider in its environmental impact statement “the potential security issues and impacts of a terrorist attack.”
Justice Madden also rejected claims that a timetable for the project was inaccurate, and that the environmental impact statement did not consider the major effect the project would have on traffic in the neighborhood, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and on the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.
“Petitioners submit no competent proof from a traffic expert to support their objections,” the judge wrote in her decision.
The coalition of groups will appeal the decision.
From the moment the move of the Nets from East Rutherford, New Jersey to the New York borough of Brooklyn was announced in 2003 the proposed gentrification of the area has been contended by various community and activist groups. The headline to a 2005 op-ed in the New York Times, critical of the details of the move, was “The Project That Ate Brooklyn.” In the piece, the author took umbrage, not with the move of the team to Brooklyn but the scale of the project and its potential as a financial boon to Ratner at taxpayers expense:
…the Atlantic Yards proposal doesn’t stop with the Nets. The 14-million-square-foot project includes a 620-foot-high office building, taller than the neighborhood’s landmark, the 512-foot-high Williamsburgh Savings Bank. The proposal replaces 162 dwellings with 8,300 new units, 40 percent of which will be allocated to low- and middle-income housing. The influx of new residents will swiftly overload the neighborhood’s social services and commercial amenities, and the project’s footprint will encroach on historic neighborhoods like Prospect Heights.
Still more disturbing than the scale of the project is the active support that Forest City Ratner, a private company, has received from the borough, city and state governments. All told, Forest City Ratner’s Brooklyn plan will cost the public $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies and noncompetitive bidding. (Forest City Ratner is also the development partner for the new headquarters that The New York Times Company is building in Manhattan with the help of $26.1 million in tax breaks.)
The idea behind such generous infusions of public money into private enterprise, presumably, is that the returns will benefit government as well as the developer. But quite apart from being a misuse of public funds, a project that relies heavily on subsidies rarely works. If anything, the very fact that a developer can’t make a project float on its own should signal that something is wrong with its scale.
The op-ed mirrors a 2005 NYT article, “Routine Changes, Or ‘Bait and Switch’” that spelled out the problems local Brooklyn groups saw with Ratner’s ever-evolving plan. At the core of the argument set forth by Brooklyn residents and various coalitions opposed to Ratner’s plan was that fact that in two years the project’s size has grown by a million square feet and its dollar cost jumped 40 percent, to $3.5 billion. Commercial space, once a substantial portion of the overall square footage and source of hope for jobs in the area, dropped dramatically and has been replaced by thousands of for-sale apartments and a hotel.
Nearly three-quarters of the office jobs originally intended for the project are gone. Additionally, the new apartments in Ratner’s amended plan are no longer a part of the previously agreed to “50-50? solution under which 2,250 apartments are to be rented below market rates and the park on the arena’s roof is to be accessible only to residents.
These alterations to Ratner’s original plan were seen as a just another scam by a developer to buy land on the cheap in a working-class area, craft a plan that relies on little personal financial investment and much in the way of taxpayer money. Then, the plan is expanded by the developer without input from the denizens of the to-be-affected neighborhoods and the final vision leaves these people behind and priced out of their own community with no opportunity to earn a living commensurate with the new cost of living in the newly-developed area.
Ratner’s plan appears to be an example of the complaints from communities in cities nationwide that must contend with owners of professional teams and their constant wishes for newer stadiums. The common complaint from the owners is that their present structures are antiquated and cannot generate enough revenue for the team to stay afloat in the cities in which they presently do business. Their solution is a new stadium or arena with the latest bells and whistles and amenities and more high-priced luxury seating.
In the meantime, the communities in which these stadia are built are almost always ruined as a result of the building effort. The promise of new jobs and heightened community value that is alleged to equal a more attractive image is but a pipe dream repeated by snake oil salesmen at every stop on their tours. In every city, influential members of these cities indicate that these efforts by team owners are nothing more than financial windfalls for the owners and destructive forces for the communities which they impact. The Ratner-Carter-Barclay’s Bank effort is perceived as particularly heinous because, not only is a new arena being built, but their wish is to, without compunction or meaningful contention, actively reshape the entire Brooklyn-area community in their preferred image.
It appears that in order for them to come to their place of work in peace they want to level the community then destroy and replace it with a skyline that is a testament to their wealth, the power they have and an ode to and playground for the moneyed connections they have developed.
According to New York City councilman David Yassky, the Ratner-led Brooklyn Nets neo-gentrified arena-community revamping effort is:
…of course, the single biggest example of corporate welfare is the proposed Yards development. The Bloomberg administration has agreed to give the project’s developer at least $100 million in direct subsidies, plus another $400 million to $500 million in tax breaks. In the current financial climate, this handout is impossible to justify… (emphasis added)
It’s even worse; the total benefit of government-backed financing through cash, breaks, exemptions, tax-free bonds, and a lucrative zoning override is likely to be closer to $3 billion.
Should the Ratner-Carter-Barclays plan be allowed to come to fruition it will set a new precedent for all other owners to follow. The primary team owner allies himself with a local icon and a huge corporation or bank. The local icon smooths the way with the locals while the huge corporation or bank buys naming rights to the arena, plus works with important players in the business world ———- and all involved take home a nice slice of the pie, all at the expense of people they removed from their eyesight forever.
Apart from Campbell and Da Black Defense League, New York City Council member Letitia James and organizations such as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the Washington D.C. based National Trust for Historic Preservation and Democracy for New York City (DFNYC) are a few of the organizations opposed to the project as it stands.
As the time for the Nets to move grows closer, it will be of interest to keep watch on these issues. Should they garner national attention David Stern will be forced to make public statements and takes stances that may define his lengthy tenure – and legacy – as NBA commissioner.
