The Atlantic Yards project is STALLED. Here’s the blog news, the blog analysis, the deep dish on it all; more to come in as more comes in over the blogwire.
Read Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report
Read the skinny on the stalled Atlantic Yards project (Develop Don’t Destroy)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s about the money. Making money. Ratner’s first priority was to build a stadium (since he bought the Nets), and the money was never going to come from his pocket, so the scope broadened to include an office building and condos that had to have ‘affordable housing’ in order to get city, state and federal funds. Ratner would never build this unless he had the taxpayers money covering all the expenses. Yes, the job got stalled and now he’s only building his first and only priority (maybe). But if he actually started last year, he still would not have gotten the full financing approved . This was never a done deal.
If this comes true it will be a fact that AYR and DDDB have had a strong hand in bringing the worst nightmare to the Atlantic Yards.
By delaying the process Ratners options may be to sell off pieces of the puzzle. No one knows what will get built and how or if it will work together. A cohesive design may be in jeopardy because of the irresponsible actions of AYR namely the egomaniacal Norman Oder and the blood sucking lawyers hired by DDDB.
As Nicolai Ouroussoff writes in the Times;
So if the decision to proceed with an 18,000-seat basketball arena but to defer or eliminate the four surrounding towers is defensible from a business perspective, it also feels like a betrayal of the public trust.
Mr. Gehry conceived of this bold ensemble of buildings as a self-contained composition — an urban Gesamtkunstwerk — not as a collection of independent structures. Postpone the towers and expose the stadium, and it becomes a piece of urban blight — a black hole at a crucial crossroads of the city’s physical history.
Norman Odor, AYR and DDDB are as responsible for this as Ratner and the subprime debacle.