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Bruce Ratner won ugly.

Whether you support Atlantic Yards or oppose it, all New Yorkers should be disgusted by the endgame of the public approval process for Ratner’s $4-billion mega-development.

Given the “three-men-in-a-room” culture of Albany, it was inevitable that so vital a project would come down to the OK of just one man, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Earlier in the week, Silver grumbled that he had not been given evidence that the project’s financing — which already includes a $200-million payout by the state and city, plus more than a billion dollars in future subsidies underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. New York Taxpayer — represented a good investment.

Lo and behold, at the 11th hour, state officials rushed to Silver’s office and supposedly gave him heretofore unseen documents that show that Atlantic Yards is indeed a great deal for taxpayers.

Wouldn’t you know!

But we have our doubts. First of all, those documents have never been seen by the public, so there is no way of knowing whether they reflect reality or just part of the elaborate fantasy that Bruce Ratner and his cronies in state government have been spinning for years.

If the report shows that taxpayers aren’t being bilked, why not share the document with the public that paid for it?

The answer is obvious to anyone who has watched this sham process from the moment it was unveiled three years ago.

At that time, only Frank Gehry’s design for the arena was fleshed out with his trademark undulating aluminum walls. The arena was flanked by more than a dozen faceless wood blocks — the guts of the project — but like a latter-day Wizard of Oz, Gehry told reporters to pay no attention to the unfinished details. They’d be brought to life in due time.

Eventually, Ratner’s mega-project did come to life, and the developer claimed it would create $6 billion in new tax revenues for the city and state. Last week, the state admitted that the figure is actually $944 million over 30 years — just $15 million annually for the state and city, whose budgets are in the tens of billions.

But what’s $5 billion dollars between such friends?

To grease his way — and cynically exploit class and race politics — Ratner signed a “benefits agreement” with eight “community” groups. Never mind that six of the eight groups (such as the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, the Downtown Brooklyn Educational Consortium and the First Atlantic Terminal Housing Committee) did not even exist before the agreement was signed. And never mind that the agreement paid off the leaders of those groups and forbade them from criticizing the project.

The “benefits agreement” allowed Ratner to claim he was protecting the interests of Brooklyn’s working class — the vast majority of whose members will see nothing from Atlantic Yards except traffic, pollution and basketball tickets they can’t afford.

Corrupt from the start

The centerpiece of the sweetheart deal was Ratner’s acquisition of the project’s development rights for just $100 million — nearly $120 million less than its appraised value, and at least $50 million less than another developer offered to pay. This sham state process — which overrules existing city zoning that bars the superblocks, high towers and demapped streets that Ratner demands — forms the basis of one of the two existing lawsuits against the project and will, no doubt, fuel others.

Ratner once claimed that the project would create 15,000 union construction jobs. He later had to admit that just 1,500 union men and women would be working on the project each year during the 10-year buildout. That’s a big difference that few seem to have noticed.

Another “public benefit” touted by Ratner was the promise of a public park on the roof of his basketball area. That amenity is no longer part of the design.

The shifting nature of Ratner’s promises on so-called affordable housing has been another shell-game, drawing adoring players among the “community” groups financed by the developer.

And then there is the extremely successful hiding of the true cost in public dollars and environmental impact of the entire enterprise.

No oversight from pols

All of this is known to the elected officials who are supposed to protect the taxpayers from this kind of fleecing. Yet Atlantic Yards was pushed through in a public approval process that ignored the facts on the ground.

Even state planners who back the project admit that it would cause traffic along Atlantic and Flatbush avenues that simply cannot be mitigated. The project’s shadows would stretch to Fulton Street. The eight acres of “open space” are locked within the project, like a latter day Stuyvesant Town — an urban planning model that went out with the 1960s and is revived for this plan.

This week, Mayor Bloomberg called the project “vital to the resurgence of Downtown Brooklyn,” yet the reality is that the area is booming without it.

To allow the condemnation of property through eminent domain, state officials must deem the area “blighted.” This, while brownstones in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, which abut the Atlantic Yards site, routinely sell for $1.5 million. How is that blight?

Closing the divide represented by the rail yards is a noble goal, but creating a wall of buildings between Prospect Heights and Fort Greene won’t accomplish that.

No less depressing for us as journalists is the manner in which the story has been covered by New York’s supposedly ravenous press corps.

To the Daily News, itself owned by a real-estate developer, Atlantic Yards is “nothing but Nets,” as its front-page headline screamed this week. But the Nets arena is, in fact, just a small component of this mega-development.

The real money — the hundred of millions of profits, propped up by taxpayer subsidies and low-cost loans — is in the thousands of units of luxury housing and unneeded Class A office space that comprise the bulk (and bulkiest) part of the project.

And the New York Times, which is building its new headquarters with Ratner, took a pass throughout years of debate, allowing Ratner press releases to run unchallenged on the front page.

All New Yorkers should be disgusted by the process.

©2006 The Brooklyn Paper

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