With today’s unveiling of the latest designs to date for the Nets’ proposed Barclays Center, developer/creep Bruce Ratner admitted it would take longer than a decade to complete the entire Atlantic Yards project. Trouble is, as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn’s Matthew Schuerman points out, Ratner’s quoted 10-year-timeline “was also used by the city, state and Ratner™s own consultant to determine that the financial benefits to the public outweighed the roughly $300 million in direct subsidies the project is receiving.”
The longer the construction schedule, the longer it will take the government to accumulate the benefits”in terms of income taxes from people who move into the complex, property taxes on the new buildings and other sources.
Daniel Goldstein, a chief opponent of the project who until recently lived in the project™s footprint said that Ratner™s admission undermines the official reason for state support of the project: to remove the blight on the six Brooklyn blocks that make up the footprint.
œWhat we have now is a site that was not blighted turning into a dormant site, nearly 20 acres of vacant lots and parking lots for 20, 25, 30, 40 50 years, Goldstein said. œWhat was not blighted has become blighted for a very long time.