If Cirrus/LCOR Now Might Gain $175M in State Budget, Is That a Cut, or Just a Sequencing Issue?
Developers earlier sought $350 million for platform over railyard. Current budget now has half. But the railyard is two blocks.
Atlantic Yards project in line for $175M in NY state budget, Gothamist reported yesterday, noting that the development team, Cirrus Real Estate Partners and LCOR, had previously requested $350 million—as I first reported in March—to build a platform needed for vertical development over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s two-block Vanderbilt Yard.
Details remain murky, as the long-delayed state budget is expected to be approved next week. No one from the state or the developer would comment or could be reached by Gothamist.
Questionable numbers
Note that $175 million is a neat half of the original request. Does this mean state officials decided the developers were asking for too much and cut it in half?
If so, you’d think they might say so.
Or might the request have been broken up into stages: $175 million in the first year, then the same amount a year or two later? That could make it more politically palatable.
Heck, we don’t even know whether the original $350 million request applied to the full two-block railyard or just the first block, between Sixth and Carlton avenues (above).
If the latter, that would leave room for a future funding request for the second block, between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues (below).
So it’s not implausible that the reported $175 million might be just a quarter of the state funding eventually sought.
It’s another sign of the need for transparency. As former City Planning Commission Chair Dan Garodnick recently told Vital City, “But if a single dollar of public money is going into a project, the public should have absolute transparency as to what’s going on.”
A union booster
Unsurprisingly, Building and Construction Trades Council President Gary LaBarbera, whose member union pension funds are invested in the Cirrus affiliate Cirrus Workforce Housing, is a supporter.
“It’s going to lead to desperately needed housing for the community and it’s going to lead to economic justice for workers,” he told Gothamist. “The state is doing something very laudable.”
LaBarbera and representatives of the building trades have long been unequivocal boosters of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, attending public hearings and rallies. Understandably, their priority is getting work for their members.
Then again, one interested party’s “laudable” might be a more objective observer’s “special benefit.”
However, there’s so little transparency around the state budget that the lobbyists—and, rest assured, Cirrus has hired a top firm—likely know more than the general public or even the state’s limited watchdog groups.
Some contrasts
Some with long memories may remember when, in June 2007, a special tax provision for the original Atlantic Yards plan, known as a “carve-out,” prompted criticism from legislators and a blistering column, headlined Atlantic Yards gets a deal so sweet it’s sick, from New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez.
The estimated $270 million benefit was trimmed to $200 million, but developer Forest City Ratner couldn’t take full advantage because of changes in the state’s 421-a tax break.
(Don’t worry, the developers have gotten other benefits, such as saving condo buyers some $50 million in taxes, thus bolstering the prices of units at 550 Vanderbilt.)
But the political and journalistic dynamics were different then. Consider: Gothamist just reported on a different carve-out for the River Ring project in Williamsburg, which would save developer Two Trees “millions of dollars.”
Progressive Assemblymember Emily Gallagher told Gothamist that labor unions had told her Two Trees would pay above-average wages. “I decided to sign off on it because there was a lot of collaboration between labor and the developer,” she said.
Is that the best outcome? It’s hard to tell without a lot more transparency, starting with the expected savings. But labor unions are a more robust constituency than random advocates of good government.
Atlantic Yards reciprocity coming?
Today, Brooklyn Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, perhaps the best-informed state legislator on Atlantic Yards, told Gothamist she supports the $175 million state funding, as long as the developer delivers promised low-income affordable housing.
That’s hardly guaranteed. As I reported earlier this month, that request was raised in the Final Community Engagement Report issued by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority that oversees/shepherds the project.
From the Q&A:
Based upon the last (supposedly binding) agreement, this community is owed 185 units at 30%–40%, 461 units at 41%–60%, and 385 units at 61%–100% of AMI. Can ESD definitively say whether or not the community is ever going to get affordable units in the 30–40%, 41–60% and 61–100% AMI ranges?
There will be units delivered at a range of affordability levels, including at 40%–100% AMI. ESD is committed to seeing through the Atlantic Yards project, bringing badly needed housing to the area, and delivering affordable units.
That response was evasive.
The question, as I wrote, reflects advocacy by the coalition BrooklynSpeaks, which, though not a participant in the 2005 Atlantic Yards Affordable Housing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), has regularly pointed out where it falls short, as in the slide below.
“I want it to be more than just the money,” Simon, a BrooklynSpeaks leader, told Gothamist. “I think we need to lock in the affordability levels, accountability, and oversight.”
Maybe not just that. We should better understand “reconciling project cost, subsidy, and public benefit,” as BrooklynSpeaks puts it.
Also, as veteran academic and planner Ron Shiffman observed, “The question should never be simply: Can we fit more units on this site? The better question is: Can this place support the people who will live there?”
For now, though, we don’t even know the basic numbers.