by Neil deMause
Ratner’s CBA was a somewhat different animal. According to Carponter, who headed the Develop Don’t Destroy legal team, Ratner’s agreement was, “as legal documents go, a completely non-binding agreement.” Unlike the Staples Center CBA, the Atlantic Yards agreement included no government signatories—meaning the only groups with the standing to enforce Ratner’s promises were the community groups that negotiated each specific provision.
As for those groups, many that cut deals with Ratner shared a singular distinction: They hadn’t existed beforehand. Existing neighborhood groups complained that they’d never even been allowed to approach the negotiating table. The project’s most prominent backer, meanwhile, was Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, or BUILD, a community-development group that was formed in early 2004 and immediately began turning up at public meetings to testify in favor of the project. (BUILD’s director, James Caldwell, declared on one occasion, “If this thing doesn’t come out in favor of Ratner, it would be a conspiracy against blacks,” and described the developer as “like an angel sent from God” for agreeing to negotiate with local black leaders.) Only after a neighborhood resident uncovered BUILD’s tax statement was it revealed that the organization’s sole funder was Forest City Ratner. Even BUILD’s office space came courtesy of the developer: a floor in a Ratner-owned building right next door to Goldstein’s apartment.
The real coup for Ratner, though, was securing the backing of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Known universally by its acronym ACORN, this was a national group founded in the 1970s to fight for affordable housing, against substandard wages, and on other issues affecting low-income families; its Brooklyn chapter had previously demonstrated outside Ratner’s malls, with director Bertha Lewis decrying “dead-end, low-wage, non-union, no-benefit jobs” and demanding that “if you are feeding at the public trough, then you must at least pay your workers a living wage.”
It was a bit of a surprise, then, when in May 2005, Lewis joined Ratner and Mayor Bloomberg at Brooklyn Borough Hall to announce what the mayor called a “50–50” affordable housing plan for Atlantic Yards: 50 percent of the new housing would be offered at below-market rent. “This agreement represents the first time that this concept of 50–50 has been implemented in a private agreement by a private developer in a project of this scale,” Lewis said—after which she planted wet kisses on the two men as news cameras flashed.
Critics later charged that the “50–50” claim was mere hype: It only applied to the forty-five hundred rental units, not the more than two thousand condos that Ratner planned to build; many of the “affordable” apartments would cost $2,000 a month or more; and even most of these would not appear until the promised Phase II of the project, years after the arena was completed. It was also noted that ACORN, which would be responsible for enforcing the guarantee of affordable apartments, was also to be in charge of running the housing program itself. “We’re concerned about traffic, hell, yeah,” Lewis subsequently explained, after critics charged her with selling out the concerns of other local residents. “We’re concerned about density, hell, yeah.… But we decided if we could make one nudge, one impact, what we could do, what we could kick ass on, it would be housing.”
None of this, though, assuaged the fears of residents that Ratner was using the CBA to divide and conquer neighborhood groups by offering carrots on specific issues rather than discussing the overall scope of the project. (Some also recalled Lewis’s previous foray into sports projects, a battle over a temporary minor-league stadium proposed for Brooklyn’s Parade Grounds, which had ended with ACORN holding a press conference to announce that it was cutting a deal to endorse the ballpark before its allies in the opposition had even learned about the offer.) The more than $200 million in city and state money going to the project, meanwhile, had no strings attached—as Carponter explained, “All this stuff is being given to Ratner on the basis of his promises that are contained in the CBA, but there’s absolutely nothing that can be done if he chooses not to follow the CBA.” Ratner nonetheless slapped a printed seal reading “Guaranteed by a Legally Binding Community Benefits Agreement” on his subsequent borough-wide mailings.
In any case, the public battle lines had been drawn: From then on, public meetings would be a battle of neighborhood residents who’d signed on to the Ratner plan in exchange for promises of jobs and housing, and those who opposed it as an oversized land grab. And because most of the leaders of the opposition, like Goldstein and Carponter, were white, and Lewis and Caldwell were African American, it was easy to cast the debate in a racial light—even though a poll of Brooklynites conducted by Crain’s New York Business found that a smaller percentage of African Americans than whites supported the project.
“I think race was used from Day 1 to window-dress the project,” Reverend Clinton Miller, pastor of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, told the New York Times in late 2006. The problem, suggested city council member Charles Barron, was that Brooklyn’s poor communities were in such dire straits that many leaders were willing to grab at any project that seemed to offer escape, no matter what the cost: “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.”
The race card, concluded Daily News sportswriter Michael O’Keeffe, made people “forget the most important mantra when it comes to sports, arenas and developer promises: Follow the money. This fight is more about green than black and white.”
When Elephants Fight
As the Brooklyn battle raged, the Jets stadium lurched fitfully ahead. In late 2003 the New York Times reported that the Jets were soon to announce a “nonbinding agreement” with both the city and the state of New York, with the team paying $800 million for the stadium, and the public spending about $600 million for the rail yards platform and a retractable roof; this would be on top of the $2 billion or so in PILOTs that would go to build the new subway line and other infrastructure, plus another $1.5 billion to expand the adjacent convention center. “This is an incredibly complicated jigsaw puzzle,” Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff explained when asked when a deal might be consummated. “We want to make sure that we have all the right pieces in all the right places.”
Up to this point, one piece in the West Side jigsaw puzzle had been Cablevision, the multi-billion-dollar cable company that owned, among other things, the New York Knicks and Rangers, and their home building, Madison Square Garden. Early renderings of the Jets stadium included a diagram in which the structure could be reconfigured to host a basketball court, and at a June 2003 hearing on the Hudson Yards plan, a Cablevision exec had praised the plan for “providing needed flexibility to our efforts to plan for the future of Madison Square Garden.”
By early the next year, though, the cable company’s ardor for the project had begun to cool. First, the New York Times reported that the Jets were working on redesigning their stadium to not be usable for arena-sized events; Cablevision, apparently, was no longer interested in being a tenant and now feared that the Jets stadium would compete with Madison Square Garden for sporting events and concerts. If this redesign was meant to placate the Garden’s owners, it didn’t work. By the spring of 2004 Cablevision had officially joined with local residents and elected officials to form the New York Association for Better Choices, which would take the lead in fighting the stadium.
Thus began what was surely the most well-funded anti-stadium campaign in history. Slickly produced ads started appearing on local television, asking, “What could New York City do with $600 million?” and listing such items as schools and firehouses as better public investments than a football stadium. Mayor Bloomberg, who until this point had remained fairly quiet on the Jets plan, preferring to let his deputy Doctoroff take the lead, went ballistic: “There is an allegation that one company in order to protect their own commercial interest is trying to stop jobs coming to this city. That’s an outrage,” he declare
d at one news conference. “The biggest guys that are making a fuss here, are plain and simple, Cablevision—the Dolans,” he said on another occasion. “It is an outrage that you let your own personal economics, or economic interests, stop a major project in this city.” The mayor even suggested he might strip the Garden of its twenty-two-year-old property-tax exemption—a $12 million-a-year gratuity that city budget watchdogs had long criticized as a waste of public funds but which none of a series of mayors, including Bloomberg, had moved to cut off.
The public debate, which had previously centered around Doctoroff on one side and neighborhood figures like John Fisher on the other, soon became a battle of billionaires. The Jets hired two former aides to Republican governor George Pataki and one former Democratic deputy mayor to lobby for the stadium; Cablevision countered with a former aide to State Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver, and the son of State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. Public hearings on the plan became dueling rallies where Jets minions handed out caps proclaiming “Jobs!” in team colors, while opponents dressed in black “No West Side Stadium” T-shirts. In total, according to figures compiled by Common Cause New York, the two sides would rack up more than $50 million in lobbying fees alone, with Cablevision outspending the Jets by a three-to-one margin.
Doctoroff, meanwhile, personally pressured city business and good-government groups to back the stadium plan. “It didn’t change my mind,” one board member of the Regional Plan Association told the New York Times after receiving a phone call from the deputy mayor shortly before the group’s board voted to put off taking a position against the project. “But whenever somebody like that calls, you have to pay attention because there are serious potential consequences. He makes important business decisions for the city.” The New York Observer further noted that six of the seven corporations to get multi-million-dollar corporate-subsidy packages from Mayor Michael Bloomberg had donated to the city’s Olympic committee; one city lobbyist told the paper: “If a client came to me and said, ‘Look, I want to get in with this administration,’ I’d say, ‘Hey, give to the Olympics.’”
The End Run
There’s little sign that all this big spending had any significant effect on public opinion. From the start, polls had shown that while a sizable minority of New Yorkers wanted nothing to do with the Olympics—“I haven’t rooted this hard for England, France and Russia since World War II,” quipped one New York Post reader—a majority did support bringing the Summer Games to town. Just as consistently, though, residents opposed using public money to do the job. In numerous polls conducted over the years on the West Side plan, large majorities reiterated that they were opposed to spending money on a stadium unless it paid for itself. “The stadium argument comes down to tax dollars,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Institute director Maurice Carroll. “If the claim is correct that the stadium will generate enough income, New Yorkers say, ‘Build it!’ If taxpayers have to pick up the tab, ‘No way,’ they say.”
Under the plan that Doctoroff had crafted, though, the public—and its elected representatives—would have minimal input on the stadium decision. Under the new PILOT plan, the mayor would be able to single-handedly grant property-tax exemptions to developers; in return, they would pay fees to the newly created Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corporation, which would use them to pay off bonds for the new subway line, plus new streets and other infrastructure. As a result of this fancy footwork, the entire $2.8 billion project could be set in motion with no more than a single rezoning vote in the city council.
On January 18, 2005, the council voted 46–1 to approve the rezoning bill and, along with it, nearly $3 billion in city-backed bonds. Council speaker Gifford Miller, asked why he was voting for the rezoning even though he opposed the stadium, replied, “We’re not going to cut off our nose to spite our own face.”
And yet, several major hurdles still remained. Even with the PILOT gambit, the city and state still needed to come up with their planned $600 million share of the stadium itself. When the state legislature showed little enthusiasm for appropriating $300 million, Empire State Development Corporation chief Charles Gargano suggested that New York’s City Council could take on the entire nut, with Governor Pataki finding a way to compensate the city under the table, perhaps by having a state agency pick up a larger share of a joint city–state project. Legislators fumed—assembly member Richard Gottfried snapping, “Silly me, I thought the state constitution required legislative approval for the spending of the state’s money”—but several predicted such a scheme was all too possible. “The State of New York’s budget operates like a slush fund, because that’s how it’s been set out by Governor Pataki, and the legislature hasn’t stopped it,” admitted state senator Liz Krueger. “When Chairman Gargano seems to imply ‘$300 million there, $300 million there, I can find that in the petty cash drawer,’ it disturbs me immensely, but he may be right.”
On the city level, though, Doctoroff was having just as much difficulty finding a source of stadium funds. In late 2004 the deputy mayor had let slip that he was considering dipping into the tens of millions of dollars a year in PILOT payments made by developers to the city’s Industrial Development Agency, part of the net of quasi-governmental agencies and sub-agencies that control much of the city’s development spending; though this was money that normally ended up in the city treasury, Doctoroff suggested that the mayor could redirect it to the stadium without council approval. Miller immediately introduced a bill to block the PILOT slush-fund plan, declaring that “we’ll take every legislative and other remedy available to stop the mayor from making an end run around the city legislature.”
Meanwhile, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority was balking at Doctoroff’s proposal that it hand over valuable development rights to the rail yards for free to the city, which would then turn the land over to the Jets. (The deputy mayor had argued that the city would be building the MTA a $2 billion train line in exchange, overlooking the fact that the transportation agency didn’t particularly want a West Side extension.) As the two sides bickered, even bringing in former U.S. Senator George Mitchell to arbitrate the dispute, Cablevision leaped in with its own $350 million offer to buy the rail yards and build housing on them, spend $250 million to relieve the city of the cost of decking over the rail yards and, unlike the Jets, pay property taxes as well—a bid that Bloomberg promptly called “a joke,” while Doctoroff and fellow deputy mayor Marc Shaw called MTA chair Peter Kalikow and urged him to reject it as “an act of sabotage.” Other developers said privately that they would have bid on the rail yards land as well but were afraid to get on City Hall’s bad side. “There is a reign of terror in this town,” said Regional Plan Association director Robert Yaro, recalling his own group’s battles with the mayor’s office over its stadium stance. “The litmus test is ‘Do you support the Olympics?’ If so, then you can do business with the city.”
At this point, attention started to shift to an obscure state board that had been set up in the 1970s to oversee the growing debt load of state authorities. Because the MTA fell under its purview, the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) would need to give its unanimous approval before the Jets stadium deal could move forward.
New York’s state government had been criticized as “three men in a room,” for the process whereby the governor and the leaders of the state assembly and state senate would meet and hash out important decisions then present them to the rest of the legislature as a fait accompli. (In 2004 New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice awarded New York’s legislature the title of “most dysfunctional” in the nation.) The PACB was a creature of this world, with five members, only three of whom could vote: Governor Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Silver. Any one of the three could veto a measure by voting no, or simply by abstaining.
While Pataki was a backer of Hudson Yards—at least since it had been broadened to include expansion of the Javits Convention Center, a pet project
of his—and Bruno had indicated he wouldn’t stand in its way, Silver had consistently hedged on his stance, saying repeatedly that he was “not convinced” that a stadium was right for the property. Silver’s district included lower Manhattan, which, the speaker stressed, was having its own problems: “We are going to create 20 million square feet of commercial space in midtown Manhattan to compete with the business looking for space downtown. That’s the real question.” The New York Times’ Charles Bagli noted that Silver’s “;ambivalence [was] driving other politicians slightly batty.”
This ambivalence showed its first signs of turning to opposition in February 2005, when Silver declared that “the MTA is under a public and moral obligation to get as much money as possible for that site. If that land is worth $900 million by their own appraisal, it seems to me they should be under an obligation to get nine-hundred-some-odd million dollars.” A few days later, the PACB hearing that was supposed to rule on the Jets deal was abruptly canceled. This began what would be three months of delays and stall tactics; by May, Pataki was scheduling meetings every few days, and Silver and Bruno were canceling them just as fast.
Finally, after what one state legislator described as “a very bad meeting” among representatives of the governor, mayor, Jets, and legislative leaders, Silver and Bruno dropped the bomb: When the PACB finally met on June 6, both voted not to approve the Jets stadium deal, effectively killing it. The stadium, declared Silver, had been “used as a shield” to “shift the financial and business capital of the world” from his downtown Manhattan district to midtown. Mayor Bloomberg immediately charged Silver with having “let America down” by torpedoing the city’s Olympic bid, but the deed was done. When, following Silver’s prepared speech, a reporter asked if the stadium was dead at last, the speaker smiled and said: “It was never alive.”