The state and developers held a joint workshop on Monday night to explain the parameters of the new plan.
BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — For a moment, it sounded like developer Joseph McDonnell was making the case for why Atlantic Yards would be forever doomed.
Before the two current firms, Cirrus and LCOR, took over the megaproject from its previous holder — Greenland USA, a Chinese outfit that defaulted on its loans in 2023 — McDonnell recalled a person “very, very familiar with this project” pulling him aside.
“Why do you want to be involved in Atlantic Yards? This thing has been stuck for 10 years,” they told McDonnell, the CEO of Cirrus. “You have a lot of other things you could be doing. This is a project that in some ways sort of broke Bruce Ratner, right?”
But on Monday night, at the first public workshop since the state unveiled a $5 billion plan to finally complete the delay-plagued bid to build housing over a rail yard off Atlantic Avenue, McDonnell and his business partner Anthony Tortora of LCORR attempted to explain why they believed they would succeed where Ratner — once downtown’s undisputed real estate king — had failed.
“What we saw in Atlantic Yards was one of the few places left in New York City where you could develop housing at scale and try to focus on doing that across the income spectrum, on top of nine subway lines,” said McDonnell.
One reason for the housing crisis, McDonnell argued, was that all the easy sites had been developed. The property in question was one of the hard ones, as the developer was quick to note: “This isn’t a perfect plan,” he said, “because Atlantic Yards isn’t a perfect site.”
The most recent proposal involves 5,600 homes (encompassing roughly 1,200 rent-controlled units) along with 5.5 acres of green space. The common areas were expanded through a common mechanism: increasing the height of the apartment towers, some of which will now reach up to 800 feet.
Many residents are sick of the decades passing without progress, and would like the project to be finished at last. Others see the latest attempt as yet another quixotic mission that is bound to go the way of its predecessors.
At Monday’s workshop, the main critiques centered on whether the height was contextual with the neighborhood, if the housing was affordable enough, and what accountability measures were in place to ensure that the project would actually get built.
“It’s really not helpful to compare the heights to the Brooklyn Tower, which is sui generis, and the only thing that is 1000 feet tall on a very small site,” said state rep Jo Anne Simon, a founding member of the Atlantic Yards advocacy group BrooklynSpeaks. “That’s not really the context.”
“I still think that we are missing the boat on affordability,” she added. “I know there’s a term of ‘affordable’ for 80% [area median income], but Brooklynites are well below that. The need is so much more below 80% or even 60%.”
In a separate statement, BrooklynSpeaks itself raised concerns about the additional $700 million in subsidies that the state has committed to the new plan. That sum “amounts to a subsidy for market-rate and luxury housing,” the group said, and officials have “only committed $175 million of what [they acknowledge] is a $700 million requirement. The absence of a commitment for the remainder is a completion risk for the project’s housing and open space.”
Some comments were more neutral. During the Q&A section, Samantha Martin from the Council of Carpenters asked how Atlantic Yards compared to the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan (AAMUP), a nearby rezoning, in terms of height and density.
Tortora of LCOR replied that the developers involved in the AAMUP rezoning “weren’t solving for open space” — they didn’t need to worry about building parks, so they could cover their entire property with housing. As a result, the maximum height along Atlantic Avenue is just over 200 feet. By contrast, Tortora argued that his team needed taller apartment buildings to make up for the green space they were creating, justifying heights of more than 700 feet. “What we’re proposing is shrinking the footprints to 35-45% of the lot coverage,” he said, “but building taller.”
Candy Ofime, a human rights attorney who lives in the neighborhood, asked the million dollar question: are the developers’ current plans “set in stone”?
“There could be parts of the project that may be changed in a more meaningful way,” said Joel Kolkmann, the state’s lead liaison for the project. “There may not be. It’s too early to say right now. What we’re really looking for in the ongoing conversations that we’re having is to hear what folks’ concerns are and do our best to address them.”
The developers and the state body overseeing Atlantic Yards, Empire State Development (ESD), are tentatively aiming to begin the formal land-use process in late August of this year, followed by a public hearing at the end of September.
