Silver: That’s Oversight For MSG, Not For Kings

Sheldon Silver is eager to show that he doesn’t just block any major project:

A state oversight board voted yesterday to approve the Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn, removing the last regulatory hurdle for one of the biggest real estate projects in the city’s history.

The vote by the Public Authorities Control Board capped three years of battles between opponents and supporters of the $4 billion project. The version approved yesterday — eight million square feet over 22 acres along Atlantic Avenue — includes a huge residential housing complex with about 6,400 market-rate and subsidized apartments, a basketball arena for the Nets, and a smattering of office space, with a design punctuated by elaborate towers that dwarf nearby residential neighborhoods.

The approval of Atlantic Yards, which would be built by Forest City Ratner Companies, came after several other ambitious development projects in New York City — like a West Side football stadium and the Moynihan Station, both in Manhattan — were rejected or stalled by community opposition and political rivalry. Atlantic Yards still faces two lawsuits, with more probably on the way, but Forest City officials say they are confident that they will prevail in court.

. . .

A once-sizable chunk of office space was given over to yet more apartments, to woo Brooklynites eager for housing, and to allay potential concerns by Mr. Silver that the project would compete with commercial properties in the speaker’s Lower Manhattan district.

On paper, the project grew to a peak of more than nine million square feet, before shrinking back to the roughly eight million square feet originally planned — a decrease that did little to mollify those residents and officials who said that the project had been far too big and dense from the beginning.

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Opponents of the project strongly criticized yesterday’s decision.

“From the beginning, the project has been a public-private partnership in which the public has not been represented,” said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, part of a coalition of civic groups known as Brooklyn Speaks that had urged Mr. Silver to delay the project. “The vote today reflected a process that simply did not allow New Yorkers to shape the project, and the result is a plan that will not work for Brooklyn.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.