Atlantic Yards — a plan to build housing over the Vanderbilt Railyard, a LIRR storage space behind the Barclays Center — has new developers, as of last year, and the state has held several public forums in recent months as it pushes to realize the project.(Photo: Google Earth)
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
DOWNTOWN — If the new developers for Atlantic Yards get their way, the long-stalled effort to build housing behind the Barclays Center will be taller, and denser, than previously expected.
But as the latest round of public engagement winds down, major questions still hang in the air: What subsidies will the latest team, Cirrus and LCOR, need to realize this plan? Just how high are they seeking to build? And perhaps most importantly, for many residents, how will the vague but sweeping promises of affordable housing be enforced given the collapse of past accountability mechanisms?
After months of tiptoeing around this last issue, on Thursday, January 22, Empire State Development (ESD) — the state authority charged with overseeing Atlantic Yards — gave its most direct answer yet at the third of four planned public workshops, held on Zoom.
Under a deal brokered in 2014, the project’s previous developer agreed to pay $2,000 in monthly fines for each affordable housing unit that it had failed to deliver by May 2025. When that deadline arrived, however, only 1,374 of the promised 2,250 affordable units had been built — the same number as when the China-based firm, Greenland USA, had first assumed control.
Instead of levying the fine, which pencils out to nearly $2 million per month, ESD announced last fall that the new team would pay a one-time fee of $12 million, money that would go towards a fund supporting affordable housing in the surrounding community board districts.
At a meeting in October, community leaders criticized that amount as too meager. Michelle de la Uz, a founding member of the local group BrooklynSpeaks who now heads the Fifth Avenue Committee, noted that “we all share the goal of a project that is feasible and that addresses current and future public needs,” which for her included halting the displacement of Black residents. Yet she called the $12 million “insufficient,” echoing other BrooklynSpeaks founders who have characterized the sum as a betrayal of the original agreement.
The state reps see it differently. “That, to us, is part of a win here,” said Joel Kolkmann, a senior vice president at ESD, during Thursday’s Q&A session. “We want to be mindful that there are a lot of costs with this project, and a lot of challenges. There’s the infrastructure and platform costs, the rising costs of construction and uncertainty with tariffs. There’s a more challenging financing market in general.”
“We’re eager to get this moving.” — Joel Kolkmann, ESD
“We know that public resources are going to be needed for this project,” added Kolkmann. “We don’t know how much, currently, but what we do know is that we want to keep this project moving. We’re doing our best to minimize costs that are added to this project so we can make sure that this is a successful, impactful project with a large amount of housing, and affordable housing, which we know is sorely needed here.”
Atlantic Yards faces a unique hurdle, compared to other housing projects of a similar scale: most of the site is a railyard used by the MTA to store LIRR trains, and building over it would require expensive platforms that can bear a skyscraper’s weight.
One significant cost-cutting measure, in Cirrus and LCOR’s framing, is their proposal to build on top of the thin, crescent-like platforms that Greenland installed before it bowed out. That would allow for the creation of more open space, the developers say, and could accelerate the timeline given that the platforms are already in place — but it would mean adding more floors to maintain the quantity of units, which many residents have expressed uneasiness about.
The Cirrus/LCOR plan would be a supercharged version of its predecessors, pushing for 9,000 total units (up from 6,400), a maximum height of 775 feet (up from 620), and shifting from a mix of housing for both lower and upper income brackets to “a focus on middle incomes,” with rents up to 130% of the area median income (AMI).
Empire State Development Corporation’s Joel Kolkmann, left, and Cirrus Partners’ Joseph McDonnell.
What other large real estate projects in New York City have a density comparable to what’s being proposed here, a resident asked, namely 409 apartments per acre? LCOR’s Anthony Tortora replied that his team aims to “ensure our proposed plan is contextual to the surrounding area,” before rattling off a few points of reference: Hunters Point, Jamaica, and Long Island City.
At the second public event, held in the bowels of the Barclays Center back in December, some residents expressed cautious excitement that the project was gaining momentum again. Yet as watchdog reporter Norman Oder has noted, the engagement process has been “carefully managed,” a fact that several veteran community advocates called out at last week’s meeting.
“I would like to encourage more in-person engagement on this,” said state Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon, also a founding member of BrooklynSpeaker. “I know last time when we all met in different groups, there wasn’t a reporting back function, so we don’t know what the other tables discussed. I think that kind of feedback is helpful to people, because they learn from other people’s ideas. I want to encourage us to do more of that going forward.”
Later, a participant argued that the only constant on the project for the past 20 years had been ESD, the state monitor. What would be different this time around?
“Like you, we’re eager to get this moving,” said Kolkmann. “We want to keep on having conversations with you all. We want to keep on hearing what you think should be here, and we want to also keep on discussing how we can prioritize accountability and transparency along the way.”
The next and final workshop will be in February, date and time forthcoming. You can watch the full recording of the latest event at this link.
