So it seems, the activists were right all along and now developer Bruce Ratner is admitting the truth: the Atlantic Yards project will not be completed in ten years. There is just no way.

Now he’s saying that the 10-year-timeline that was bandied about was just a guess for environmental impact statements. Here Ratner is quoted on WNYC:

“That was really only an analysis as to what the most serious impacts [would be], if all the other planned development in downtown Brooklyn happened right away,” Ratner said. “It was never supposed to be the time we were supposed to build them in.”

That is so much balderdash:

Wasn’t it the economics of the 10-year-timeline that convinced the city and state that it was worth the mega milliions in direct subsidies the project got?

So the longer the construction takes, the longer it will take for the government to reap the so-called rewards in terms of income taxes from people who move in and property taxes.

Sounds like they were had.

Says Daniel Goldstein, an anti-AY activist, who had an apartment in the AY footprint, in press release: “What we have now is a site that was not blighted turning into a dormant site, nearly 20 acres of vacant lots and parking lots for 20, 25, 30, 40 50 years…What was not blighted has become blighted for a very long time.”