Atlantic Yards Public Opinion - The Community Benefits Agreement

The Community Benefits Agreement

The October 22, 2005 edition of The Brooklyn Paper revealed that the Forest City Ratner (FCR) company had paid large sums of money to organizations, offering what they've presented as grassroots neighborhood support for the proposed Atlantic Yards development. Back on December 20, 2004, six months before the so-called "community benefits agreement" (CBA) was drafted, a non-governmental pact between the developer and community groups, the 501(c)(3) filings of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD) stated it would receive $5 million from Bruce Ratner's company in exchange for support. BUILD president James Caldwell is being paid $125,000 a year, and two other BUILD executives— Mary Louis and Shalawn Langhorne— are receiving $100,000 a year, according to the IRS document. Additionally, the development company has also paid $50,000 to Reverend Herbert Daughtry, another CBA endorser. His organization, Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, is commissioned to help create an inter-generational center as part of the Ratner plan to "retain staff to begin to develop a program to create these facilities." The political arm of BUILD, Community Leadership for Accountable Politics (CLAP), is apparently folding.

A Community Benefit Agreement, that claimed to be modeled on the first of its kind for the Staples Center in Los Angeles, was signed on June 27, 2005 between Forest City Ratner and a consortium of community groups to provide a range of benefits for the community. Many of these community groups are led by long standing and prominent leaders including Bertha Lewis, Executive Director of ACORN, James Caldwell, ED for Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development and Rev. Herbert Daughtry, pastor of House of the Lord Church. One of the controversies surrounding the CBA is the definition of "community," and many local groups contend that they will not be included. Among the benefits accruing to the community as defined under this legally binding agreement are:

• Affordable housing (for households earning up to $109,000 a year – 50% set aside with various degrees of affordability as set out in the agreement),
• 35% minority, and 10% women contractors hired during construction
• Senior housing (10% set aside of all rental units)
• Health care center within the project
• Six acres of open space for use by the public free of charge on the project site

6 acres (24,000 m2) of open space for a project this size is considered woefully inadequate by city standards. Also, it is important to note that this is not the same as public space, rather it is private space open to the public at the owner's discretion. The developer will get this space after current publicly owned streetscapes will be privatized.

Signatories to this agreement are All-Faith Council of Brooklyn, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD, Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance (DBNA), Downtown Brooklyn Educational Consortium (DBEC), First Atlantic Terminal Housing Committee (FATHC), New York State ASssociaiton of Minority Contractors (NYSAMC), Public Housing Communities (PHC). Copies of the full CBA are available at the offices of each of these organizations.

While the Staples Center CBA included hundreds of community groups—many who did not originally support the project—the Atlantic Yards CBA signatories all supported the project before signing on. One group, BUILD, has been shown to have repeatedly lied about the funding it received from the developer. A quick review of the CBA will show that it holds almost no meaningful sanctions against the developer, yet it requires that ACORN publicly promote the project. These and other reasons have thrown considerable doubt on the document.

The known amount of total payments to CBA signatories from the developer is $538,000.