With condominium apartments to spare, developer Bruce Ratner — who
has bought out most of the loft owners within the footprint of his Atlantic
Yards mega-development in Prospect Heights — may be seeking to use
the empty dwellings to temporarily provide shelter for victims of Hurricane
Katrina.
In two buildings, the last three apartment owners who have not sold out
to Ratner say they received notices calling for an “emergency meeting
of unit owners” to discuss plans to bring “victims of Hurricane
Katrina for a period of one year.”
Over the past two years, Ratner has negotiated the purchase of all but
three units in the residential loft buildings at 24 Sixth Ave. and 636
Pacific St.
“Given the national emergency created by the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina and the desperate temporary housing needs of its victims, the
Board intends to issue the waiver,” read an announcement sent to
one of the condo owners. The waiver refers to an agreement that calls
for the owners to vote on whether units can be rented out.
While none of the remaining condo owners object to the idea — they
uniformly praised the plan, even though it was put forth by Ratner —
the point that people who lost their homes were replacing their former
neighbors was not lost on them, either.
“It’s extraordinarily ironic that these people who have been
driven from their homes by natural disaster would be moving into homes
that have been vacated by people who have been driven form their homes
by threat of eminent domain,” Vince Bruns said with a laugh.
Bruns, who lives at 24 Sixth Ave., a 21-unit condominium building of which
19 units are owned by Ratner, said he and his last remaining neighbors
learned though a voicemail message of the plans to relocate victims in
his building.
“We got a phone call Wednesday night at 9 pm, advising us there was
a meeting the next day at 5 pm for the board of our building — and
Ratner is the board of our building — where they were going to be
voting to make use of all the vacant units here for housing for people
from Louisiana,” said Bruns.
“They were going to do that vote, and answer any questions that interested
people might have. The interested people being the two of us who own units.”
Bruns said that at 3 pm on Thursday, “[Forest City Ratner officials]
called back to say, ‘Oh, never mind.’”
What he’d heard through another owner in the Atlantic Yards footprint,
Bruns said, was that Forest City Ratner had been encouraged “by federal
people” to first work through the proper hurricane relief channels.
Forest City Ratner officials did not return calls for comment.
His building, he said, was still in great condition, and units would be
ready to move into, if people wanted them.
Bruns, who works at the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan, said he never
sold to Ratner, even though he’d been subjected to the same pressures
and threat of condemnation by use of eminent domain.
“I met with [Ratner’s lawyer] at my apartment,” said Bruns.
“They said they were interested in discussing it, and I said, ‘Look
at this spot, I have a beautiful loft here, I love living here.’”
He said that at the time of the meeting, about a year ago, there was no
sense of urgency, but the Ratner lawyer, Bruns said, cautioned, “‘You
don’t want to wait until you are going to be condemned.’”
He thinks he offer is a good move.
“It’s a great idea, they’re people in need; we’ve
got space going unused,” Bruns said.
Workers in front of 636 Pacific St., the other condo building mostly owned
by Ratner in the arena footprint, whose last non-Ratner apartment owner,
Daniel Goldstein, leads the anti-arena group develop-Don’t Destroy
Brooklyn, said they had been doing work inside the building over the past
two weeks.
And Goldstein said he, too, received notice of an “emergency meeting”
of his condominium owners association, which was to have happened last
Thursday.
“The meeting was cancelled but they are in my building working on
fixing up some of the units, so it seems like a real thing,” he said.
For the first time since plans for Atlantic Yards were announced in December
2003, Goldstein uttered kind words about Ratner, saying, “He’s
doing the right thing.”
“It’s a shame that so may of these units have been sitting here
for so long,” he added. “We hope if they come into this building
they’ll stay in this building a long, long, long time if they choose
to.”
