atlantic yards phone survey

whynot_31 wrote: It seems I am the one who is confused.

....there was some arena thing built in the DC area that was supposed to bring great things the the local 'hood, but since it was build the neighborhood actually declined.

I forget which one it was. It was similar in that it was boondoggle where lots of tax payer money was spent to build a privately owned project. (the name and location might not be important).

....hopefully this AY thing will not turn out as bad as everyone thinks it will. I would LOVE to be wrong on this issue.

Well, sounds the most like Nats Park, which brought an MLB team to the Anacostia river. It's not quite in SE, but it hasn't exactly delivered on economic promises made to the neighborhood. That could be because the overall decline in the economy made redevelopment a riskier prospect after it was completed. Or it could be because it simply had no potential to deliver on said promises in the first place.

Either way it's not analogous to AY, however you feel about it. AY is a transit hub, and the Nats Park location is a relative backwater; a lot of the handwringing over its construction centered on Metro's ability to deliver adequate public transit service to the area, which given AY's proximity to a major MTA hub should not be an issue. Parking, of course, is another matter entirely.

Also, Ratner clearly promised much, much more in the development phase than it finally agreed to build. Gehry? Affordable housing? Nonsense. Nats Park, in contrast, made hand-waving motions in the direction of the Metro stop, suggesting that there might be brisk development between said stop and the stadium, which would enrich the surrounding neighborhood.

Blah blah. I guess the point stands, that a stadium's development has an unproven ability to spur benefits, economic or otherwise, to its surroundings. I'm just saying that Nats Park and AY can't really be realistically compared.

AY could suck the life out of its surroundings while adding a lot of dead parking spaces and untold auto traffic, it could have no net effect, or it might be a boon. You could use any number of recent stadium development stories as cautionary tales or proofs positive. The fact is there are a lot of variables at work, and no study I'm aware of can definitively predict one outcome or another.

Personally, I'm skeptical about Ratner's claims and hopeful that the build won't cause much more damage than it already has (ie eminent domain seizures).

shekb wrote: Personally, I'm skeptical about Ratner's claims and hopeful that the build won't cause much more damage than it already has (ie eminent domain seizures).

For the record, the Environmental Impact Statement downplayed the possibilities (you may prefer the word "lied") of lane closures on Flatbush. It turns out there will be a "temporary" closure of one lane on Flatbush between the bucolic block between Dean and Atlantic. Luckily, it's only temporary, which officially means 17 months.

I kind of miss those cab messages. I always meant to buy one of the message repeater thingees so I could use it to torture people but never got around to it.

hmm time to check ebay.