Empire State Development President Kenneth Adams and Atlantic Yards
Rather than attempt to work out environmental concerns at the Atlantic Yards with the surrounding community, Empire State Development is hoping a third round of litigation proves to be the charm. Crain’s reported that the state agency filed a request to appeal a pair of rulings that it illegally approved changes to Forest City Ratner’s plans for the site without a sufficient environmental review. [more]
A rendering of the residential tower and MaryAnne Gilmartin
Forest City Ratner believes modular construction will grow increasingly common in New York City high rise development and that’s one reason the firm has established a modular factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, GlobeSt.com reported. Speaking yesterday at a Real Estate Lenders Association conference, MaryAnne Gilmartin, an executive vice president at Forest City Ratner, said utilizing modular construction for the 34-story, 340,000-square-foot residential building set to rise in Atlantic Yards could cut the construction time of the project by one-third to just 12 months. Even as costs are reduced, the construction method won’t impact future tenants in the rental building, she said. [more]
Bergen Bagels
From the March issue: Workers from the under-construction Barclays Center are taking a bite out of the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood.
Every weekday around noon, the streets around the Prospect Heights site are awash with construction workers heading to their favorite nearby lunch spots. Take-out joints and bodegas, like Gino’s Pizzeria at 218 Flatbush Avenue and AR Coffee Shop on Fifth Avenue and Dean Street, are seeing a steady stream of construction workers come in. At Bergen Bagels, on the corner of Bergen Street and Flatbush Avenue, lines spill out the door each morning, as workers pick up bagels and coffee on their way to the rising arena, which is slated to open in September. [more]
From left: Bruce Ratner and a rendering of Atlantic Yards’ first residential towerFrom the January issue: The most remarkable thing — perhaps the only remarkable thing — about the recently released plans for a residential high-rise at Brooklyn’s much-debated Atlantic Yards site is not the design itself, but rather the manner in which the project will be built.
Conceived by SHoP Architects for Forest City Ratner, the building will be made up of prefabricated units constructed off-site and then assembled on the premises. The prefab component of construction should allow for considerable savings. [more]
Pratt Area Community Council Executive Director Deb Howard and construction at Atlantic Yards
Sick of the constant litigation surrounding Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn activists are appealing to a higher power: Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Patch reported the Pratt Area Community Council wants Cuomo to step in “and get this project to deliver on its promises” of bringing affordable housing and jobs to the neighborhood, quoting Deb Howard, the council’s executive director. [more]
From left: Bruce Ratner, Zehy Jereis and Carl Kruger
Though not charged with any crimes, Bruce Ratner has found himself a prominent role in recent corruption cases involving Yonkers and Brooklyn politicians, a New York Times columnist said, thanks largely to his maneuvering for approval for two massive developments.
Ratner has hired a mix of former politicians, political consultants and lobbyists to obtain approval and funding for his Atlantic Yards project and a less-publicized, 81-acre luxury residential and retail complex he’s trying to build in Yonkers called Ridge Hill. [more]
A rendering of the Barclays CenterThe Barclays Center — Forest City Ratner’s massive, controversial arena and residential project in Brooklyn — has inspired many feelings, but they have generally been colorful. No more, the Wall Street Journal reported — the architecture for the residential portion of the project, unveiled last month, ends up doing something the project as a whole has never done: bore people.
Forest City hopes to work with engineering firm Arup and manufacturer XSite Modular to build the modular units they have decided on at a factory space in somewhere New York City — Forest City is looking at sites in Brooklyn, the Journal said. The units would then be shipped to the site. [more]
With financing conditions extremely tight, New York City developers have increasingly turned to the EB-5 program, which gives foreign investors visas in exchange for investment in job-creating projects, to land funding for their projects. But according to the New York Times, developers are bending the rules to make their projects more attractive for those foreign funds, and taking money away from other projects that need the funding.
The minimum investment to qualify for a visa under the program has always been $1 million — but the threshold is reduced to $500,000 if the project is in a rural area or a community where unemployment is 50 percent greater than the national average. [more]
Journalist Stephen Witt, who covered the Atlantic Yards project for local Brooklyn papers such as Our Time Press for years, has now penned a novel inspired by the massive project, which he is shopping to publishers, the New York Daily News reported.
Witt calls his account “a gonzo telling,” of the project by a character named Thaddeus Hoover, a thinly-veiled Bruce Ratner, chairman and CEO at Forest City Ratner. He said he thought the years of discussion and negotiations leading up to the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project being greenlit lent itself to fiction, rather than a scholarly book. [more]
Developer Bruce Ratner and a rendering of the Atlantic Yards building (credit: Shop Architects)Now that Bruce Ratner has decided to go the less labor-intensive, prefabricated route with the majority of his Atlantic Yards development site, union laborers are scrambling to save whatever jobs they can. According to the Brooklyn Paper, they have agreed to take massive pay cuts in order to guarantee union jobs for the massive construction complex.
While it could not determine the exact amount of money lost to laborers, the Brooklyn Paper noted that carpenters, who make as much as $90 an hour in wages and benefits at traditional construction sites, typically rake in just $30 per hour when working inside prefabricated production factories. [more]
