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]

From left: The entrance to Eurohyop’s NYC offices and 9 MetroTech Center (building credit: PropertyShark)As European banks mitigate risk amid the debt crisis that’s consumed the continent, many have stopped lending for commercial real estate projects in the U.S., Reuters reported. The total amount of money European banks loaned to the sector has fallen by 31 percent in the last two years, according to Trepp, and more banks have announced they would reduce U.S. property loans.

While European real estate lending is not widespread in much of the United States, it is crucial in big cities like New York. Forest City Ratner was directly affected by this trend in October, when German bank Eurohypo suddenly dropped out of serious negotiations to provide a $65 million loan for 9 MetroTech in Brooklyn. [more]

From left: A U.S. visa, the International Gem Tower and a rendering of the Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards

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]

From left: Atlantic Yards, Forest City CEO Bruce Ratner and Stephen Witt

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]

From left: Ellaina Dreifach, former director of retail for Massey Knakal, Benjamin Fox, executive vice president of retail leasing, and Paul Massey, CEO of Massey Knakal

Ellaina Dreifach, who was nabbed by Massey Knakal Realty Services from Eretz Realty earlier this year to run day-to-day operations for its new retail division, has left the firm after only nine months, she told The Real Deal today, citing an unfair commission split and uncomfortable working conditions at the New York City investment sales firm.

Benjamin Fox, executive vice president of retail leasing at Massey Knakal, brought Dreifach over to the firm in January in his effort to staff up what was then the firm’s new retail leasing division, which he heads.

Dreifach was promoted to first vice president of retail leasing from director of retail leasing at Massey Knakal in October, focusing on the Tribeca and the Financial District neighborhoods. [more]

Seven construction workers will sue developer Bruce Ratner today, the New York Daily News reported, claiming he failed to deliver on jobs he promised them at Atlantic Yards in an effort to gain community approval for the controversial project.

The workers say they enrolled in Ratner’s training program for construction workers on the project, weren’t fully compensated for the work they performed during the training and afterwards were offered jobs in maintenance, a nearby health club and a McDonald’s.

James Caldwell, the head of one of the training programs bankrolled by Ratner and a defendant in the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, said the trainees were never guaranteed construction work [more]