Bill: State should pay Bruce to build less at Atlantic Yards site

Bruce Ratner would get hundreds
of millions of dollars in state funds if he builds less at Atlantic Yards,
under a new state Assembly bill.

Assemblyman Jim Brennan (D-Park
Slope) has proposed capping the total size of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards
mega-development at 5.85 million square feet — down from the 8.7
million square feet in the current project, which features 17 skyscrapers,
6,900 units of housing, retail and office space, a hotel and a 19,000-seat
arena for the relocated New Jersey Nets.

To compensate Ratner for the
smaller project, Brennan’s bill would give the developer the Atlantic
Yards site for free, rather than charging him $100 million for it. The
MTA had appraised the site at $214 million.

In addition, Brennan’s
bill would relieve Ratner of his obligation to renovate the Long Island
Rail Road yard, saving him another $200 million, the assemblyman said.

Brennan’s bill would
also require the state — rather than Ratner himself — to subsidize
the 50-percent of the project that Ratner agreed to set aside as affordable
housing.

“This bill is like negotiating
with a hijacker,” said Daniel Goldstein, spokesman for the anti-Atlantic
Yards group, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

“Brennan is saying, ‘OK,
OK, here’s some money. Just don’t build it so big!’ He’s
throwing money at a developer to not build something he hasn’t even
gotten the right to build yet.”

Brennan’s spokesman John
O’Keefe disagreed, saying the bill was merely an effort to make the
project smaller, but still keep it viable for the developer.

“The site costs and [Ratner’s]
affordable-housing commitment are making the project bulkier,” O’Keefe
said. “It’s making him add millions of square feet.”

It’s unclear whether
the bill has any chance of becoming law. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver
(D-Manhattan) is a supporter of the project.

“That pretty much makes
a bill like this impossible,” said a source close to the project.

A spokesman for Silver declined to comment.

Officially, Ratner’s
people were playing it close to the vest.

“We’re studying
it,” Jim Stuckey, a Forest City Ratner vice-president, said this
week.

But Stuckey added that shrinking
the super-sized project is not financially feasible for the developer.

“To develop this site,
we have to spend $600 million on infrastructure before we put a shovel
in the ground,” Stuckey said on WNYC radio.

“On top of that, we’ve
committed that half of our 4,500 rental apartments are going to be affordable-
and middle-income rental apartments, where no one pays more than 30 percent
of their annual household income to live.

“That’s a very,
very significant commitment. And the problem, when you want to build that
type of commitment … it demands that there be a certain amount of
density,” he said.

But Goldstein disputed that,
too.

“It is impossible to
judge the financials without the financials,” he said. “Ratner
has not shown anyone his numbers, so we don’t know how much density
he ‘needs.’”