Doctoroff posits justification for Atlantic Yards: Downtown Brooklyn “needed more of a center” (but there was no plan until FCR stepped forward)

Former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff has to be feeling pretty good. He didn't bring the Olympics to New York, and that smarts, and he couldn't get the West Side Stadium passed.

But he got most of the Bloomberg administration's ambitious land use agenda passed during his six-year tenure, which ended in 2007.

Now, in his genial, confident way, Doctoroff can look back and contend, as he has before, that he managed to thread the needle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, to get projects passed with sufficient public input and without much displacement, to make omelets (in Moses's famous formulation) but without breaking eggs.

And if he's not challenged--as he was back in 2007 by Majora Carter, then of Sustainable South Bronx--he just might get away with it. Doctoroff had said, as he's said since, that he and the administration had gotten better at listening.

Carter said they hadn't done enough, that they had to "really, really listen." She added, "The interesting thing about listening is you have to do it openly and not have a predetermined idea set.”

And Doctoroff might get away with claiming, as he did last week, that Atlantic Yards was primarily a product of city guidance, rather than a project presented by a developer with good connections.

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“There are some places where things are big,” so as a result the weight of the project falls on a community, he said in response to his interlocutor.

“Would you say Atlantic Yards is such case?” Goldberger asked, diplomatically leading the discussion.

Doctoroff paused to get his bearings. (The video should be available on Urban Omnibus next week.)

“We had a view about Downtown Brooklyn, which was we needed to have an alternative to New Jersey,” Doctoroff replied, evading the question a bit. “If you look at what happened in the 1990s, and look at office space New York lost to New Jersey… in part because we did not have a modestly priced office market. The obvious alternative was Downtown Brooklyn…”

That’s true, and that’s why the city rezoned Downtown Brooklyn. That rezoning that did not include Atlantic Yards and it turned out to have missed the market, given that it became far more lucrative for developers to build condos (and without any reciprocal obligation to build affordable housing).

“But it lacked a series of amenities,” Doctoroff continued. “It lacked parkland.. Brooklyn Bridge Park. It lacked housing… It lacked retail, it lacked hotel, it lacked zoned office space… We thought it also actually needed more of a center, more of a draw, to make it more appealing, and that was the reason for Atlantic Yards… and therefore Atlantic Yards and Downtown Brooklyn had a purpose for the city, from a strategic perspective, that was much bigger than immediate community.. I said publicly in retrospect, rather than going through state process [for Atlantic Yards], we probably should have gone through ULURP.. I think at end of day things wouldn’t have been different, but plans might have been modestly different.”

He’s right that the city would’ve rolled over Council Member Letitia James, but she and the local Community Boards would’ve been heard.

But let's check some facts. Atlantic Yards wasn’t designed as a draw to make Downtown Brooklyn more appealing, since Atlantic Yards doesn’t even fit on the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s map–it’s off to the southeast, with the site in Prospect Heights.

Rather than act proactively, the city acceded to Forest City Ratner’s plan.

“We didn’t decide to take a look at the yards,” said Winston Von Engel, Deputy Director of the Brooklyn office of the Department of City Planning, in March 2006. “They belong to the Long Island Rail Road. They use them heavily. They’re critical to their operations. You do things in a step-by-step process. We concentrated on the Downtown Brooklyn development plan for Downtown Brooklyn. Forest City Ratner owns property across the way. And they saw the yards, and looked at those. We had not been considering the yards directly.”

Or consider that the proactive posture that characterized Doctoroff’s work doesn't apply to AY. Andrew Alper, then president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, testified at the 5/4/04 City Council hearing that “they came to us, we did not come to them. And it is not really up to us then to go out and try to find a better deal.”

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