If, like me, you are a Brooklynite wrestling with the pros and cons of the Atlantic Yards project, you might want to take a look at this lengthy but persuasive article in New York Magazine that comes down hard in favor of the anti-development side. Interestingly, the article highlights just how much class and race are being used as a justification for the project by the pro-development camp. I’ve tried my best to whittle it down here but I recommend reading the article in full:

[...]I have tried to avoid this story. Some, including my employer, might consider that irresponsible. I cover politics for the magazine, and Atlantic Yards is an epic New York tale of money, influence, social policy, race relations, and real estate. But mostly, my avoidance came from trying to be extra-responsible. Living in Fort Greene, two and a half blocks from the site, meant that anything I wrote needed to be dispassionate and purely fact-based; I might decide I didn’t like Atlantic Yards, but I wasn’t going to write any nimby screed. So for months, I tried to resist any personal reaction to the project by focusing on a professional take: In his push to make Atlantic Yards a reality, Bruce Ratner has crafted the most sophisticated political campaign the city has seen in a very long time, better than any professional politician has mounted to win elective office, complete with gag orders and aggressive polling. And even if Atlantic Yards was wildly disproportionate to the surrounding neighborhoods, its pillars seemed laudable (the subsidized housing) and potentially cool (Gehry; having the NBA’s Nets nearby). The developer, Ratner, seemed downright enlightened: a commissioner of consumer affairs under Ed Koch who’d gone out of his way to hire women and minorities to build his other projects.

[...] [State Assemblyman Roger] Green isn’t quite so blunt, but he sees the divide over Atlantic Yards almost as starkly. “Here’s the question: If we were building an 18,000-seat opera house, would we get as much resistance? I don’t think so,” he says. “Basketball is like a secular religion for most Brooklynites. The opposition to the arena is actually coming from people who are new to Brooklyn, who lived in Manhattan, mostly. And who have a culture of opposing projects of this nature. People who opposed the West Side Highway project; people who opposed the Jets stadium; people who opposed a host of other things. Some of those families now live in Brooklyn. That’s the reality. There’s a class of people who are going to the opera. And there’s another class of folks who will go to a basketball game and get a cup of beer.”

[...]While he wasn’t able to win over Millman—or Tish James, who represents the City Council district where Atlantic Yards would be built—Ratner has still been deft at portraying the “real” community as being on his side. He’s flipped the debate upside down, depicting the old-timers as open to progress and casting as the enemy the white, gentrifying, brownstone-owning, white-collar, semi-recent arrivals to the neighborhood. In other words, me.

My wife and I are a cliché. We lived in a Manhattan one-bedroom in the early nineties, had a child, wanted more space, moved to Brooklyn, bought a brownstone. It’s a pretty house on an unlovely street. There’s a big shady magnolia in the backyard, but two lanes of constant traffic out front.

To us, the house was plenty expensive, and we borrowed every dime we could. The place is now worth triple what we paid, at least in theory. Appreciation is nice, but it’s just dumb luck; we bought the house to make a home. And the neighborhood seemed ideal for that: Fort Greene was a bold mix of young and old, black, white, and Latino, fairly well off and just getting by, with quirky small stores and a convenient public park. Things have certainly changed in nine years—beloved, useful spots like Octagon Hardware couldn’t handle the rising rents; a cluster of French bistros suddenly appeared. But the essential feel of the neighborhood is the same. The residents remain a mix of tie-wearing Bishop Loughlin high schoolers and too-cool Pratt students, buppies, yuppies, ankle-tattooed hipsters and floral-hatted church ladies. People chat over the backyard fence.

[...]What’s galvanizing the protesters is an issue that reaches far beyond Brooklyn: Every vacant lot in the city suddenly seems to have become a construction site, with developers in a frenzy to erect out-of-scale apartment towers and office buildings before the economy tanks or the zoning tightens. Atlantic Yards is becoming the magnet for the growing rage against overdevelopment, and the emotion is likely to peak at the August 23 public hearing on the project’s ­environmental-impact statement. It’s hard to imagine, though, that one night of yelling and guerrilla theater can compete with four years of Ratner’s savvy, spare-no-expense political spadework. Just the opposite is more likely, proving the perverse genius of the campaign to build Atlantic Yards: The New York ritual of howling locals, especially if they’re white, will only help Ratner’s spin that he’s the real populist.

[...]The opposition’s greatest resource hasn’t been [Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn spokesman Dan] Goldstein or the Hollywood stars but one unknown man working late at night in his Park Slope apartment. Norman Oder, 45, has a full-time day job as an editor for Library Journal, but for most of the past year, he has spent at least 25 hours a week dissecting the details of the Atlantic Yards plans and posting his analysis at atlanticyards report.blogspot.com. Oder is a skeptic in the tradition of I. F. Stone, proving how much can be accomplished with a URL and an obsession.

Struck by what he considered the weakness of the Atlantic Yards coverage in the Times (which is partnering with Forest City Ratner to build its new headquarters in midtown Manhattan), Oder set out to write one piece of media criticism. But as that essay grew into 160 pages, Oder kept finding more Atlantic Yards issues that sparked his curiosity.

His blog breaks down every arcane detail related to Atlantic Yards and specializes in untangling eye-catching Ratner claims: for instance, that the promise of 15,000 Atlantic Yards construction jobs comes from counting 1,500 people working for ten years. Or how the developer’s recent much-hyped 5 percent “scale back” of the project was really a bait and switch. The Atlantic Yards plan started with 4,500 units of housing in 2003, grew to 7,300 units in 2005, and then “scaled back” to 6,860 units this year. But Oder’s biggest contribution has been shining a light on two crucial aspects of the project: its affordable housing and its astounding residential density.

The project is planned to have 2,250 affordable apartments—50 percent of the rental units. Affordable is one of the great weasel words of modern marketing, however, and the eligibility tiers that Ratner drew up with ACORN, the low-income-housing activist group, leave just 900 units for a family of four with an annual income of $35,000 or less. Although 900 below-­market apartments are far better than nothing, just as many spaces are reserved for families earning $70,000 to $113,000.

And Atlantic Yards’ inhabitants, renters and owners alike, could be occupying the densest residential space in the United States. Working with an average of 2.5 people per apartment, Oder points out that Atlantic Yards will have a population density of nearly 500,000 people per square mile. For comparison, the current population-­density champ, a census tract in West Harlem, contains 230,000 people per square mile. Manhattan, which popular imagination ranks as the densest place in the city, averages 67,000 people per square mile. It will mean bulky buildings for the project’s residents and also a major strain on the area’s streets, sidewalks, and the already crowded Atlantic Avenue subway hub.

During nine years of living in Brooklyn I’ve gone out of my way to stay out of the Atlantic Avenue station, especially at rush hour. Ten subway lines, plus the LIRR, converge there, and the stairways are a claustrophobic multi­level tangle, congested at any hour, as are the trains that stop there. But here’s what the state environmental-impact report on the expected effects of Atlantic Yards says: “All subway routes through Downtown Brooklyn are expected to operate below their practical capacity in the peak direction in the 8–9 A.M. and 5–6 P.M. commuter peak periods … at completion of the proposed project in 2016.”

Perhaps I’ve been unlucky; certainly my experience with the station has been unscientific. So on a sweaty Thursday morning I went to check it out and found myself standing on the platform, wedged between a pole and six other passengers, waiting for a Manhattan-bound 4. It’s not clear how the state study defines “practical capacity.” But it apparently doesn’t include me boarding the overloaded train that finally arrived. Waiting for another 4, I tried to picture what the station will look like when 15,000 more people live directly overhead.

The section on the Atlantic Avenue subway station merely strains credulity. What the report spells out, once you unpack the charts and the “v/c ratios,” is a tidal wave reshaping the daily life of the surrounding neighborhoods. In the winter, sunset will come to my street at 2:30 in the afternoon, thanks to the shadows stretching from the high-rises lined up like a gargantuan picket fence along the northern border of Atlantic Yards. But I get off relatively easy: The residents of the Atlantic Terminal public-housing complex, across the street from two 40-plus-story Gehry towers, will be in shadow virtually all day much of the year.

The environmental report’s section on traffic predicts that 68 of 93 intersections around Atlantic Yards would be “significantly adversely impacted,” many permanently. That sounds unpleasant enough. But what’s “significant adverse impact”? The study defines it a couple of ways: “saturated conditions with queuing” and delays “greater than 80 seconds per vehicle.” Stand alongside an already busy intersection anywhere in the city; count how long a random car stands still—ten, perhaps twenty seconds—and watch what results: drivers piling up behind the stationary car, blowing their horns, yelling, as the line gets longer. Now picture cars delayed for 80 seconds, for hours on end, in front of your building.

[...][New York chapter of ACORN head Bertha] Lewis is…ferocious in denouncing the Atlantic Yards opposition. “You want to talk to me about traffic, you want to talk to me about density, you go right ahead,” she says, implying she considers it all a pretext. “Talk to me about what your resolution is to the resegregation of Brooklyn. Black and brown folks have been driven out of central Brooklyn!” Lewis ladles on the “street” theatrics as she warms up, shimmying in her chair and dropping her g’s. “We’re looking at the gentrification—I don’t see a lot of black and brown folks in the wave runnin’ up in here! The overwhelming folks who are opposed are white people and wealthier people and more secure people and people who just arrived. Come on! This is about the power dynamic of who in fact is going to be living in Downtown and central Brooklyn and where the power ­really is going to be. And we’re down to get it on! We’re tired of being pushed out. If we can stop one iota of gentrification, we’re gonna do it!”

[...]Maybe, to Lewis, my neighbors [who are against the project] are the wrong kinds of black folks. Not that there will be a referendum on Atlantic Yards along racial or any other lines. Ratner has skirted normal city zoning approvals because the project is centered on state-owned land. But the thousands of people who made their own little choices to move to Brooklyn already voted, in a sense. In the mid-nineties, when crime was still high and the public schools a mess, we knew plenty of families who fled for New Jersey, Long Island, and the northern suburbs. We voted to stay. Call us gentrifiers if you want, but we’re part of a group connected by a belief in tumultuous, polyglot city life more than any bond of age or income or race.

[...]I care plenty about tomorrow, for myself and for the city. And no matter how I look at it, in the end I can only conclude that Atlantic Yards is a bad deal.

The financial projections are debatable; I’m not convinced Atlantic Yards will be an unambiguous economic boon. But I’ll never be able to prove my case on a purely statistical basis, and neither can Ratner; until the buildings are built, the numbers are all informed guesswork. And even if Ratner’s economic crystal ball turns out to be perfect, there’s a level at which the facts really don’t matter.

As a political reporter, I know that money and spin usually win. But in looking at Atlantic Yards up close, it’s outrageous to see the absolute absence of democratic process. There’s been no point in the past four years at which the public has been given a meaningful chance to decide whether something this big and transformative should be built on public property. Instead, race, basketball, and Frank Gehry have been tossed out as distractions to steer attention away from the real issue, money. Ratner’s team has mounted an elaborate road show before community boards and local groups, at which people have been allowed to ask questions and vent, and the developer has made a grand show of listening, then tinkering around the edges. But the fundamentals of the project—an arena plus massive residential and commercial buildings—has never been up for discussion. Ratner, with Gehry’s aid, has built a titanium-clad, irregularly angled tank and driven it relentlessly through a gauntlet of neighborhood slingshots. And Bloomberg and Pataki—our only elected representatives with the power to force a real debate about Atlantic Yards—instead jumped aboard early and fastened their seat belts. What at first seemed to me impressive on a clinical level—a developer’s savvy use of state-of-the-art political tactics—ends up being, on closer inspection, truly chilling.