The long-stalled plan to build a platform and new apartment buildings above the train tracks at Brooklyn\u2019s Atlantic Yards may soon get a major cash infusion not from a developer or private investor, but from New York state taxpayers.<\/p>\n
The plea for public funds comes less than a year after developers behind the project skirted millions in monthly fines for failing to deliver hundreds of affordable apartments<\/a> on time.<\/p>\n State economic development officials say public money is necessary to finally construct the platform over the MTA-owned railyard, a plan first hatched with a pledge to privately fund the deck in 2003 \u2014 five governors, four mayors and three development teams ago.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do acknowledge that there will need to be public resources to offset the value of, or the costs of the platform,\u201d said Joel Kolkmann, senior vice president for real estate at Empire State Development during a public hearing last Thursday. \u201cPlatform construction is incredibly complicated. It’s incredibly expensive. And I think if you look at a lot of projects throughout New York City that have platforms, there’s been public resources dedicated to them.”<\/p>\n A new development team made up of the firms Cirrus Real Estate Partners and LCOR has asked for $350 million in state aid to build the Atlantic Yards platform, where they say they will construct a new park, along with thousands of apartments and condos in new residential buildings. Assemblymember JoAnne Simon, who represents the area and co-founded a coalition to hold developers accountable to the project plan, described the request to Gothamist.<\/p>\n Simon said she expects the governor to approve the funding during the ongoing budget negotiations, but said it should also come with commitments to build more deeply affordable apartments under the terms of previously broken Atlantic Yards agreements.<\/p>\n \u201cIf that $350 [million] to help them build the platform helps address that, I\u2019m good,\u201d Simon said. \u201cWe\u2019re throwing public money at this project but what is the public getting?\u201d<\/p>\n Empire State Development spokesperson Emily Mijatovic said the agency is \u201cevaluating the request and New York State has not committed to providing funding at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n Gov. Kathy Hochul\u2019s spokesperson Kristin Devoe declined to say whether the governor and state lawmakers would issue the funds, but said the governor is \u201claser-focused on building more housing.\u201d<\/p>\n Cirrus Managing Partner Joseph McDonnell declined to comment.<\/p>\n The request for state aid was first reported<\/a> by the watchdog website Atlantic Yards\/Pacific Park Report.<\/p>\n More than two decades ago, the controversial effort to build 16 residential buildings and a sports arena, which became the Barclays Center, included a promise to build the platform and create 2,250 affordable units. But a parade of developers failed to break ground on both the platform and nearly 900 of those units by a May 2025 deadline, despite a legally binding agreement that was supposed to impose $1.75 million in monthly penalties. The original developer, Ratner Forest City, sold the project to another firm, China-based Greenland.<\/p>\n Change in plans<\/p>\n The project plans, and what gets built atop the platform, are also changing.<\/p>\n The original proposal included five residential buildings atop the platform, including one above a thicket of train tracks.<\/p>\n At a public hearing Thursday, McDonnell, the head of Cirrus, said building large apartment complexes over that section of track would be \u201cextraordinarily expensive\u201d and unrealistic given space constraints.<\/p>\n His venture has instead proposed building a park atop the platform and concentrating most of the new housing in buildings surrounding the covered trainyard<\/a>, including a pair of high-rises on a nearby, but separate lot known as \u201cSite Five,\u201d the longtime location of P.C. Richard and a defunct Modell’s on Flatbush Ave. across from the Barclays Center.<\/p>\n Those towers, and a third building proposed for the edge of the new platform, would contain 2,000 apartments, with 500 priced for low- and middle-income renters under the rules of a state property tax abatement known as 485x, officials said Thursday.<\/p>\n In all, the revised plan calls for nearly 6,000 new apartments across the Atlantic Yards sites for a total of 9,000.<\/p>\n McDonnell said at the hearing that he anticipated completing the entire development project, including the platform and new apartment buildings, by the late 2030s at the earliest.<\/p>\n “It’s an infrastructure project that becomes a housing development project,\u201d McDonnell said. \u201cThere\u2019s a long way to go here.\u201d<\/p>\n The Atlantic Yards project, decades in the works, is now just one of several similar mega-projects in five boroughs. The Related Companies, the firm that owns the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, is now seeking $2 billion to expand its existing deck<\/a> and add more luxury housing.<\/p>\n State officials are also leading the planning for a new residential neighborhood<\/a> along the industrial waterfront in Red Hook, and the Mamdani administration has revived a plan to deck over Sunnyside Yards in Queens, at an estimated cost of $21 billion<\/a>. In late February, the mayor visited the White House<\/a> to pitch President Donald Trump on investing federal funds into the project.<\/p>\n \u2018Never doable\u2019<\/p>\n To community leaders long frustrated by the chronic delays and broken promises at Atlantic Yards, the change in plans and the request for state funding are an acknowledgement that the original proposal was never realistic to begin with \u2014 and may have been merely a tactic for gaining public support for a controversial plan.<\/p>\n Simon, the state assemblymember who cofounded the coalition Brooklyn Speaks, which won the legal agreement to build the affordable housing, said the state seemed to \u201cfinally\u201d acknowledge that the original \u201cwas never doable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was never going to be self-sustainable,\u201d Simon said. \u201cThey were never going to be able to do it without state support.”<\/p>\n Gib Veconi, a director of the Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation and member of Brooklyn Speaks, said the request for state funding marks a \u201cnarrative change\u201d from the story state officials and developers have long told about the development as \u201ca snakebit project\u201d that would have been completed if not for unforeseen problems. It has dragged out so long, it\u2019s seen a few: the global financial crisis, the bankruptcy of the China-based developer Greenland and the COVID pandemic.<\/p>\n But he agreed with Simon that the original plan was unfeasible from the start.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project has been operating on a set of assumptions that were never verified and turned out to be completely inaccurate,\u201d Veconi said.<\/p>\n He also agreed that state aid should come with more housing affordable to low-income New Yorkers.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a very large new injection of subsidy, so the public needs to see if it\u2019s getting a good deal in this project,\u201d he said. \u201cIs there enough public good to justify such a large investment?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The long-stalled plan to build a platform and new apartment buildings above the train tracks at Brooklyn\u2019s Atlantic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-173499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}