Development - NY Times - Blight, like beauty, in in eye of beholder

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Published in the New York Times, Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Blight, Like Beauty, Can Be in the Eye of the Beholder

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Of all the real estate jargon, bureaucratic buzzwords and plain old insults exchanged over the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, no term has evoked quite such unruly passion as “blighted.”

During the last two years, the word has hung like a scythe over the 22-acre site, most of it on the northern edge of the Prospect Heights neighborhood, where the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, hopes to build its $4.2 billion project.

For the developer, it is a fitting description of the abandoned auto-repair shops, collapsing brownstones and gloomy vacant lots that blemish the area, and of the eight-acre railyards that slice through the neighborhood just south of Atlantic Avenue. For many of the several hundred people who still live there, “blighted” is a term of abuse, one that ignores the sleek, recently renovated buildings on Pacific and Dean Streets, the bustling neighborhood bar, and other signs of revival. Even some supporters of the project, like Assemblyman Roger L. Green, disagree with the description.

“That neighborhood is not blighted,” Mr. Green, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said at a hearing last year. “I repeat, for the record, that neighborhood is not blighted.”

The long-running blight debate took a major turn in favor of Forest City Ratner last week, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s lead economic agency, formally declared the project site blighted. It was the first step in a process that could eventually allow Forest City to acquire, through eminent domain, the few remaining parcels that the company has not been able to acquire privately over the last few years.

But for all the freight the word carries around Prospect Heights these days, “blighted” is a word with no fixed definition, legal or colloquial.

It is not unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography — “I know it when I see it” — said Joseph M. Ryan, a land-use lawyer who has consulted for the development corporation before but has no involvement with the Atlantic Yards project. “Usually it’s a high crime rate, debilitated buildings. Often you’ll have pollution, or inadequate usage of land.”

Under past court rulings, for example, an area can be declared blighted even if particular parcels within it are not. Similarly, a given plot of land can be declared “underutilized” if what is built there is smaller or shorter than zoning laws would otherwise allow, even if the building in question is not dilapidated. Moreover, it is largely up to government officials to decide how prevalent a condition must be — how much crime, for instance — in order to label an area as blighted.

“There are no hard and fast rules regarding blight,” said Jessica Copen, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. “There’s a large area of subjectivity in evaluating the indicia of blight.”

Such rules as there are have been carved out by state and federal courts over the years. But because condemnation itself is essentially a legislative power rather than a judicial one, courts have tended to grant government officials wide latitude to make findings of blight.

“Reasonable people could differ as to whether something is overcrowded or has too much crime or too many sanitary problems or is losing jobs,” Mr. Ryan said. “But the courts will defer to the agency if they have a reasonable and rational basis for condemnation.”

Hence the 381-page blight study issued by the development corporation last week. Conducted by AKRF Inc., a consulting firm with long experience in land use and environmental engineering, the study amounts to a painstakingly detailed walking tour of the Atlantic Yards’ potential home. Hardly a crack in the sidewalk escapes notice in the study, which declared the project site replete with “structurally unsound buildings, debris-filled vacant lots, environmental concerns, high crime rates and underutilization.”

Fifty-one out of 73 parcels on the 22-acre site “exhibit one or more blight characteristics,” the study found, including buildings that are at least 50 percent vacant or are built to 60 percent or less of their allowable density. The study also noted that, before Forest City came along, 76 parties controlled the land making up the site. Such fragmented ownership, real estate developers say, is what makes large-scale private urban development difficult without government intervention.

The study also dwells in some detail on the eight-acre railyards that make up about one-third of the site, and which also fall within an urban renewal zone the city established along Atlantic Avenue in the late 1960’s. The railyards hindered hoped-for development in the renewal zone for decades, the study notes, and continue to do so on those blocks to the south and west of the yards where the project would be.

Critics have long accused the development corporation of favoring developers. Opponents of Atlantic Yards, say that in that project, the corporation is essentially using the railyards, which constitute blight almost by definition, as a cudgel to obtain additional land through eminent domain or the threat of it.

“No one is arguing that the railyards should not be developed. That’s a pretty commonly agreed-upon point,” said Marshall Brown, an architect who helped draft the beginnings of an alternative plan for the railyards that would not have required eminent domain. “It just doesn’t make sense that the railyards themselves cannot be developed alone.”

The study also included a look at crime in the area. Because the Police Department does not collect crime statistics block by block, the study could measure only indirectly whether the site has more crime than the area surrounding it. AKRF examined three police “sectors” in Brooklyn, each of which overlaps parts of the site but extend well beyond it. The study compared the combined crime rates in those three sectors with the combined crime rates for their respective police precincts. Finding the precinct numbers lower, the study declares that “residents and businesses on the project site are more susceptible to crime” than those in surrounding neighborhoods.

Overall crime in the three precincts, however, decreased slightly between 2004 and 2005.

“They make the footprint sound like it’s a Lower East Side slum,” said Daniel Goldstein, the spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, an umbrella organization for groups opposed to the project.

The building that Mr. Goldstein lives in on Pacific Street is now owned by Forest City and is one of two within the footprint of the project that were redeveloped into luxury condos during the past several years. (Mr. Goldstein moved into his apartment shortly before the project was announced in 2003.)

Another building within the project footprint, an old bakery, was widely considered ripe for conversion by its owner, the real estate developer Shaya Boymelgreen. He has since sold it to Forest City, which now owns almost all the property it needs for the project. Company officials say they have paid high premiums on that land to minimize the need for eminent domain.

The blight study began last summer, after Forest City, the development partner of The New York Times Company in building its new headquarters on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, had already bought up large parcels of land for the project. Some critics have questioned whether Forest City’s acquisitions — and the implicit threat of eminent domain since the project was announced in late 2003 — deterred development.

“How much of the blighted conditions were the result of the cloud of eminent domain hanging over that property, and of Ratner’s successful efforts to purchase property there?” asked Tom Angotti, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, who studied the site with his graduate students this year. “We call it ‘planner’s blight.’ You create the cloud of eminent domain, you force people to sell, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Residents also point to several Dean Street buildings just outside the project site, and Prospect Heights’ generally strong residential real estate market, to argue that much of the site might have developed on its own.

Deborah Wetzel, a spokeswoman for the state development corporation, stood by the study’s findings. “Irrespective of the recent property acquisitions by Forest City,” Ms. Wetzel said, “we believe it highly unlikely that the blighted conditions currently present will be removed without action by the public sector.”

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