NY Daily News Sports Columnist, Mike Lupica, Tears Apart the Ratner Proposal


A lot on his mind: NJ honcho takes aim at Nets, Jets and mayor over arena controversies
Michael O'Keefe July 11, 2004 The New York Daily News

Interview with George Zoffinger, president of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, who has led the state in resisting demands from team owners to subsidize arena contracts with taxpayer money: "Brooklyn is not a deal about the Nets. It's a real-estate transaction."


Arena foes smell a Ratner

"A huge real-estate deal, riding into Brooklyn behind a Jason Kidd-led fast break, right through neighborhoods we are supposed to hand over to a developer like Ratner."

Mike Lupica does his take on the economic analysis of Ratner's plan and warns tickets buyers that Ratner "didn't want the Nets because he loves basketball. What Ratner is trying to do is pull off one of the sweetheart real-estate deals in the history of this city. To do it, he needed a sports team. We have gone over this before. The Nets were handy."


The Price of Ratner's Hoopla: Brooklyn Stadium Would be a Money Loser for NYC

"The much-anticipated report on the financial feasibility of the proposed Atlantic Yards project was released on May 1, 2004, and the message was not only stark, but considering the fact that the study was commissioned by Ratner & Co., rather startling: THE PROPOSED BROOKLYN BASKETBALL STADIUM IS NOT A GOOD INVESTMENT FOR THE CITY AND STATE OF NEW YORK."

How is this possible? This article reviews some startling finds in Andrew Zimbalist's report.

"If the arena is a dog and the housing a winner, why not ditch the hoops and carpet the rail yards with apartment buildings?"

Neil de Mause, co-author of "Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Profit," examines the absurd details of the report released by Ratner's own "hand-picked economic consultant" and explains how the purchase of the Nets figures into Ratner's plan to bolster his "faltering retail empire."

After battling to have their voices heard in an official public forum, community members were left fuming this week when a City Council hearing on the Atlantic Yards arena proposal left them waiting nearly five hours to testify.

What usually happens is a couple of rich guys make a pile of money for themselves by selling naming rights to the arena to a corporation that leaves out the name of the city completely. They then sell the team, or raise ticket prices, or ask for more tax money. There are never more jobs, there's not much growth outside the stadium (really, who wants to live near a stadium parking lot?), and there are awful traffic jams. Just ask the people of Milwaukee, Cincinnati or Houston what a boon their new parks have been.

Pressed by Manhattan Councilwoman Christine Quinn at the May 5 hearing about how much public money would be needed to build Atlantic Yards, Forest City Ratner Vice President James Stuckey was evasive, first saying only that it would be less than $1 billion and more than $10 million.

New Yorkers are beginning to understand this concept of economic infertility - and no neighborhood wants it in their backyard. It's a new, beneficent form of NIMBY: "No economic infertility in my backyard."

And since, Mr. Ratner, it is clear that you are not very responsive to arguments about community values, I hope that this discussion about financial values has at least made you question whether you and your shareholders really want to invest here in Brooklyn.

This comes on the heels of another proposal recently floated to build a new arena in Brooklyn so the Nets could leave the Meadowlands as well. If these sports dreams become reality, is New York the economic and political winner, and New Jersey the loser? Hardly.

"By leveraging hype over the New Jersey Nets, Ratner wants to use millions in public funds in a clever, pay-us-later bid to execute an unprecedented land grab." The best article yet on the shady finances of this deal.

Should downtown Brooklyn get a 19,000 seat basketball arena designed by world famous architect Frank Gehry? Developer Bruce Ratner, who proposes to build the arena for the Nets, a team he hopes to own, seems to want everyone to believe this is the question Brooklynites and their elected officials have to answer. Ratner is a principal in Forest City Ratner, downtown Brooklyn's biggest office developer. Forest City built the Metrotech complex in the 1980s and most recently the Atlantic Center Mall.

The proposed site plan for Bruce Ratner's central Brooklyn development looks like a saber, with the Nets' basketball arena near the point, where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues intersect. The blade extends two blocks wide and half a mile long to the southwest, much of it made up of office and residential towers. But the sharp edge of the knife has a notch in it, a five-acre parcel that won't be touched.

The soulless utopia Bruce Ratner would impose won't please and won't generate a widening swath of prosperity. For evidence, consider Metrotech and its immediate environs; compare that massively subsidized dead zone in our midst to what has happened throughout such Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods as Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens, just slightly removed from that "urban campus".

The major problem with this half-baked rally is that the kids were used again and anyone that had anything to do with that rally MUST be ashamed of themselves. This is worse than the way the sneaker companies use the kids. Those who supported this rally and anyone who posted this rally on websites should send a written apology to each and every one of those kids and their parents, NOW!!

"This isn't about a basketball team replacing the Dodgers all this time later. This isn't about the Nets being some sort of link to playground basketball. Give me a break. This is about political cronyism, developer greed, and what we believe is unconstitutional action against taxpayers."

We're getting a basketball team we never asked for to replace a baseball team most of us don't remember - and that's supposed to restore an identity we already havet ask the people of Milwaukee, Cincinnati or Houston what a boon their new parks have been.

Money is the last thing developer Ratner likes to talk about. In public he's preferred to wax rhapsodic about future hoops glory, while claiming his arena would be "almost entirely privately financed."
Perhaps "almost" has a different meaning to real-estate moguls, though, because, according to published reports, Ratner's arena scheme for the junction of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues would be awash in taxpayer money: an estimated $150 million in city cash to relocate the existing LIRR tracks; the donation of air rights over the MTA's rail yards that might be worth as much as half a billion dollars (money that could otherwise go to holding down bus and subway fares); plus $435 million in tax increment financing to pay for the arena's construction.

And while I have not actually stepped foot in this neighborhood, I have had the honor of these eight people sharing a piece of their life with me, both in pictures and in words that invoke mental pictures.

A new analysis of Downtown Brooklyn's traffic shows the borough's major construction proposals - which include office complexes, warehouse-type stores, shopping centers, a hotel expansion, a movie studio and a new arena for the NBA Nets - would add more than 174,000 cars daily to already overcrowded streets.
"We already have gridlock, but the cumulative result of all these projects will be double- and triple-gridlock," said Brian Ketcham, an engineer with Community Consulting Services, which analyzes traffic and transit impacts.

Crowded intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic and Fourth Aves. will see 9,000 more cars and 40,000 more transit users per day if the Atlantic Yards project goes through.

Even if the project had been perfect, and improved the community in every way, Bruce Ratner and the politicians owed these residents the respect of consulting with them through the officials who represent them. Ratner would never dare to pull a stunt like this in the communities where Gifford Miller, or Mike Bloomberg have their homes. It just wouldn't happen, and it shouldn't be happening in downtown Brooklyn.

This Borough President wasn't elected because of substance. He was elected because he is a great entertainer.

There is a revolt today in this country against entrepreneurs sacking the public treasury for sports arenas and then eventually leaving them behind for a new aggression elsewhere.

"The politicians team up with wealthy businessmen on projects that are sold to the public as engines for economic development", said former Yankee pitcher and author Jim Bouton. Bouton was speaking in the back of Freddy's, a prohibition-era bar on Dean Street.... "But all economic studies have shown that this is not true and in fact, jobs are lost and replaced with jobs at a lower level. The real jobs go to the players and the owners. But the arena overall has a negative impact on the community.BROOKLYN DODGE

MAGICIANS know that the best way to fool an audi ence is to get them looking in one direction while you do your real business elsewhere. The same holds true for the conjuring trick that mega-developer Bruce Ratner is trying to play on New York City.

But last week critics and independent analysts questioned whether the city and state can afford to support such projects at a time when they are struggling to balance their books. The state is facing a $5.1-billion deficit, while the city's budget gap is $1.8 billion.
"It's not realistic at all," said E.J. McMann, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, a public policy think tank. "It's politicians spending other people's money to bask in the glow of sports team."

Bouton reminded those in the crowd - most of whom vehemently oppose real estate magnate Bruce Ratner's plans to build a Frank Gehry-designed Brooklyn arena for the New Jersey Nets - that $16 billion has been spent in the last 20 years on new sports facilities across America, mostly tax dollars that he says could have been put to to better use.

"It is fundamentally wrong, and contrary to the Constitution for the government to take property from one private owner, and hand it over to another private owner, just because the government thinks that person is going to make more productive use of the land," says Bullock.
"Everyone knows that property can be taken for a road. But nobody thinks that property can be taken to give it to their neighbor or the large business down the street for their economic benefit," adds Berliner. "People are shocked when they hear that this is going on around the country."

Can someone explain to me how buying the New Jersey Nets automatically gives Bruce Ratner purchase on the future of downtown Brooklyn? This is decidedly not what democracy looks like.


Time$cam: With government help, the New York Times moves in on Times Square businesses.

The U.S. and state constitutions allow officials to take private property for public purposes, provided the owners receive "just compensation." This traditionally meant that if private property obstructed a highway, military base or other government project, its owner could be bought out for the public's benefit. The Founding Fathers never envisioned government abusing this authority to transfer one owner's hard-earned land to the private portfolio of another.

Barron (D-East New York) who recently announced his candidacy for mayor, and an outspoken critic of the downtown arena plan, challenged developer and NBA Nets franchise team owner Bruce Ratner to consider East New York as a possible home for the arena during a public forum last week sponsored by opponents of the arena.

The article paints a rosy picture of Ratner-he didn't really want to own an NBA team, you see, he wanted to help the community. During his "I bought the Nets celebration," Ratner was quoted as saying "This is not only about basketball. It's about a vision, about housing, about jobs, and an urban landscape we can all be proud of." The article ended by dismissively noting the presence of a cluster of protesters who demanded Ratner "abandon his dream."


Get the DDDb Information Sheet

Read an Independent Economic Analysis of the Cost to Taxpayers of the Ratner Plan
Executive Summary: Spanish | Chinese

Read the Forest City Ratner commissioned Estimated Fiscal Impact of the Atlantic Yards Project on the New York City and New York State Treasuries written by Dr. Andrew Zimbalist.