The Latest on Atlantic Yards and Race in Today's Times 11/12

Subject: The Latest on Atlantic Yards and Race in Today's Times 11/12

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/nyregion/12yards.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


What are your thoughts on the article? I pasted and posted here if you want to read the article without photos and graphics. The graphics are very interesting though.

I dig Bob Law's thoughts.

November 12, 2006
Perspectives on the Atlantic Yards Development Through the Prism of Race
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

It was the first of three public hearings on the $4.2 billion Atlantic Yards development, and Umar Jordan, a 51-year-old resident of Bushwick, Brooklyn, strode to the front of the auditorium and offered a vigorous defense of the proposal. “I’m here to speak for the underprivileged, the people that don’t get the opportunity to work, the brothers that just came over out of prison,” he said.

Those who opposed the plan, he said, were not true Brooklynites. Their concerns about traffic and noise were trivial. And stopping the project would force “young black men” into a life of crime. “I suggest you go back up to Pleasantville,” he concluded.

It was not the first time race has bubbled up to the roiling, overheated surface of the Atlantic Yards debate, where charges of dishonesty and bad faith fly with abandon. Indeed, take any major debate about urban development in Brooklyn in recent years, and sooner or later, the issue of race has moved front and center — usually linked to the question of who wins and who loses.

Some of the racial rhetoric in this fight has inverted the classic development squabble in which affluent, usually white New Yorkers tolerate ambitious development, while working-class people, often minorities in struggling neighborhoods, fear they will not enjoy its fruits.

Like Mr. Jordan, many of the most fervent supporters of Atlantic Yards present the project as a beacon of hope for black residents living near the proposed 8.7-million-square-foot project.

Critics of the project — black and white — see merely the same old development debate, punctuated by what they describe as a cynical race ploy. They say the project’s developer, Forest City Ratner, has deliberately stirred up an imagined racial divide over the project, enlisting its black allies to falsely cast affluent white residents as the chief source of opposition and as insensitive to the needs of black Brooklynites.

“I think race was used from Day 1 to window-dress the project,” said the Rev. Clinton Miller, pastor of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene.

Bruce C. Ratner, Forest City’s chief executive, is white, as are most of his executives. Several local community organizations with black leaders receive funds from the developer as part of a “community benefits agreement” they negotiated last year.

But a closer look at the coalitions lined up for and against the project, and the arguments they have mustered, suggests that Atlantic Yards has drawn no true color line in Brooklyn, but only a blur of intersecting agendas, opinions and constituencies, both black and white.

The project, designed by Frank Gehry, would radically alter the neighborhoods near Downtown Brooklyn where it would be built, with residential and office towers and a basketball arena for the Nets. Proponents say the project would provide more jobs and low-cost housing where they are urgently needed.

When pressed, however, nearly all of those involved in the debate played down the suggestion that opinion on Atlantic Yards cleaves to any purely racial contour.

They point out that the project’s leading political booster, Borough President Marty Markowitz, is white, and its leading opponent, Councilwoman Letitia James, is black.

In neighborhoods around the project site, they say, the pressures of class and gentrification have been as potent as race — though both sides say they believe those pressures favor their view of the project.

“Some of my friends are in the opposition, and they’re blacker than I am,” said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a supporter and well-known Brooklyn pastor. “It ain’t a straight race question.”

Joe DePlasco, a spokesman for the developer, denied in a statement that Forest City had tried to use race to build public support for the project, or to isolate opponents.

“People say a lot of things, but at the end of the day you can only do what you think is right,” he said in a statement.

“From the start,” the statement continued, “we have reached out to diverse groups from all over Brooklyn — from Crown Heights to Marine Park from Sunset Park to Park Slope — to ensure that this project reflects the realities of life in this borough and addresses the unprecedented need for affordable housing, local jobs, small business development, health care, educational and training programs.”

He added, “Atlantic Yards is, among other things, all about inclusion, and we have worked hard to make it that way.”

Forest City, which is also the development partner in building a new Midtown headquarters for The New York Times, would not comment directly on past statements by its supporters.

In recent conversations, however, many of those involved in the Atlantic Yards debate spoke at length about the role that race has played — and not played — in shaping opinion on the project.

Though Brooklyn as a whole has been losing white residents for decades, the number living near the project site — in neighborhoods like Fort Greene, Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights — has grown steadily in recent years, according to census data.

Those new arrivals are more likely to be affluent and highly educated, especially compared with residents of the nearby public housing projects, where most residents are black and many are unemployed.

As white transplants have boosted the area’s median incomes, they have also forced up housing prices. In Fort Greene, for example, which borders the project site to the north, average apartment prices rose faster from 2004 to 2005 than in any other Brooklyn neighborhood.

“If you live nearby, you have a nice home and you have a job, you’re probably not that excited by the benefits, and you’re swamped by the drawbacks,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, citing the project’s potential to worsen traffic and overshadow the brownstone communities nearby.

“If you live a little farther away, and you don’t have a job and a nice house, then you probably get a lot more of the benefits,” Mr. Lander added. “None of that is about race per se. But when you layer on that the people who live nearby are more likely to be whiter and wealthier, and the people who live farther out are more likely to be people of color without good jobs or housing, the race elements have become stronger.”

That is one reason, say opponents and supporters alike, for the high-level interest in the project among the area’s black working-class and poor residents. Thousands of people, most of them black, packed a July information session about the project’s subsidized housing.

“The devil could bring in a project and say it’s jobs and affordable housing, and some of us will go for it, because we’re on a survival level,” said City Councilman Charles Barron.

But Mr. Barron also calls the project “instant gentrification,” a view shared by many opponents.

Atlantic Yards would include a substantial portion of subsidized housing for families at different income levels; but only about one-seventh of the project’s roughly 6,500 housing units would be classified as affordable for tenants making less than half of the median income for the New York City area.

Mr. Barron and other critics say a different project could provide as much or more moderately priced housing, with less negative impact on the area.

Most recent public polls about the project show supporters outnumbering opponents. But those polls have generally been too small to reliably measure sentiment among specific ethnic or racial groups in Brooklyn or the city as a whole.

In interviews, activists on both sides said they believed support and opposition cut across racial and class lines.

But some in the debate previously expressed less benign views.

Last year, James E. Caldwell, the president of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, a job-training group known as Build, said it would be a “conspiracy against blacks” if Forest City did not win its bid for rights to build over the railyards on the site. Bertha Lewis, the New York executive director of Acorn, a national advocacy group for low-income people, attributed concern over the project to “white liberals.”

Interviewed recently, both Mr. Caldwell and Ms. Lewis backed away from those remarks. “Everybody said crazy things on both sides,” Ms. Lewis said. “I’ve apologized to folks, and folks have apologized to me.”

Both Build and Acorn — as well as a group Mr. Daughtry heads — receive funds from Forest City under the community benefits agreement. And both have been instrumental in turning out black participants who boost the project at community meetings, rallies and hearings. That, opponents say, has helped fuel perceptions that black support for the project is high.

In May, in an e-mail message to a Daily News reporter, the spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Daniel Goldstein, wrote of ties between those groups and what he termed their “wealthy white masters,” referring to Forest City. The reporter later wrote about the message, which sparked an outcry from the project’s black supporters.

Mr. Goldstein apologized for what he termed “unfortunate remarks.” But he and some black allies say his underlying criticism of Forest City and its supporters was legitimate.

“Interestingly enough, the African-American leaders who have supported us, or who we have worked with, every single one I spoke to said, ‘Sorry about what happened, you didn’t really say anything wrong, but you weren’t the person to say it,’ ” Mr. Goldstein said.

Opponents of the project say they had to fight against a perception that black Brooklynites tend to favor the project. Ms. James said that because black opponents of the project were likely to be less well-off, “they just don’t have the luxury of going to these meetings and reading 2,000-page documents.”

Others, however, suggest that the main anti-Yards organizations — their manpower, energy and funds provided largely by white members — have not reached out effectively to the older, more established network of black community activists.

“The problem that whites who are organizing are having, groups like Develop Don’t Destroy, is that they really are a one-issue organization,” said Bob Law, a radio program host and business owner who is a member of Develop Don’t Destroy’s advisory board.

Mr. Law does not spare Forest City. He said that the developer tried to “inject race” into the debate, urging its surrogates to cast whites as solely concerned with traffic and building height, and blacks as interested in basketball, housing and jobs.

But the leading opponents of the project, Mr. Law said, “are only concerned with the project, so they play into Ratner’s hands.”