More than 2,000 New Yorkers lined up this week hoping for a shot at a cheap rental within Bruce Ratner’s proposed $3.5-billion Atlantic Yards development — but many left the developer’s affordable housing presentation disappointed by the harsher reality.
“I’m not sure what kind of chance I have to get one of their nice apartments,” said Canarsie resident Jennifer Haynes, a retiree who left Tuesday night’s presentation at the Brooklyn Marriott before it ended.
Ratner billed the event as an “affordable housing information meeting,” promoting it with full-page newspaper ads and targeted postcard mailings in neighborhoods far removed from the site of the 22-acre, 6,860-apartment, basketball arena and office space development, which the developer says would include 2,250 units of low, moderate and middle-income rentals.
Attendees shared a common frustration over the lack of affordable options in the city. Those frustrations were not resolved on Tuesday.
Some complained, for example, that they received a survey rather than an application for an apartment. Others wondered if they would qualify for the housing if their earnings didn’t fit into any of the development’s income-dependent programs.
Even one of the project’s biggest boosters — Bertha Lewis, executive director of New York ACORN — didn’t paint a pretty picture.
“We’re not going to blow smoke in your faces,” explained Lewis, whose group endorsed the project last year in exchange for the promise from Ratner that half the housing in the project would be affordable — a promise that has already been broken.
“It’s too early for an application and all that, but we want to hear about your needs,” she said.
The standing-room-only crowd offered up an earful, including concerns about the ACORN-run lottery that would choose who gets one of the affordable units, and the cost of rent.
“They are offering what is already out there,” said Queens resident Rachel Giordiani. “They aren’t talking about anything new to create economic empowerment.”
Forest City Ratner officials said 225 apartments will be reserved for families of four that earn between $21,270 and $28,360. Most of units will go to families that earn above $42,540.
FCR Vice President Jim Stuckey conceded that the audience was less-than-enthusiastic about the salary figures, but said afterwards that the numbers wouldn’t change.
“We can’t revise based on a few question,” he told The Brooklyn Papers. “Maybe I will explain the answers to their questions better next time.”
The numbers are based on federal housing guidelines, an FCR spokesman said later.
The tremendous turnout Tuesday demonstrated not only the strength of Ratner’s public relations effort, but also the dire need for affordable housing in New York City.
“People don’t leave Brooklyn for a better life, they leave because they can’t afford it,” Borough President Markowitz said at the event.
But many in the predominantly black crowd came from outside of Brooklyn and saw the development from beyond the prism of local controversy that has pitted residents of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene — who believe it will destroy the neighborhoods’ character — against Ratner boosters like Markowitz, who cheer the affordable housing and jobs the project may create.
For those on the sidelines of that shouting match, Tuesday’s presentation was a chance to hear about a way to move to an area from which they had priced out over the past decade.
“We just want to go back to Brooklyn,” said Luis Ramos, who grew up in Park Slope and now lives in East Harlem.
