Joe Chan

Location: About six months ago you released an Ian McKellen-narrated video of what downtown Brooklyn would look like in five years. Given the current economic turmoil, would you release the same video today?

Mr. Chan: Absolutely.

The video cited $9.5 billion in private investment—that included Atlantic Yards?

That includes Atlantic Yards.

So you still think Atlantic Yards will happen?

Yeah, I think it is in the process of happening.

All 16 towers and arena?

The Atlantic Yards was always a project that was conceived as taking a few economic cycles to fully realize itself.

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Joe Chan, the head of the public-private Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, is scaling back expectations that downtown Brooklyn will ever achieve the dizzying heights of central business district-dom once imagined way back in 2004.

“You are not seeing historically what has happened in downtown Brooklyn, which is exclusively commercial office towers being built,” Mr. Chan told a gathering of reporters this morning in one of those exclusively commercial office towers at MetroTech. “I think you are going to see smaller increments of office space being built within what we call hybrid buildings, like the City Point building, a mixture of residential, retail, in some cases hotel, and office.”

Mr. Chan has sounded this note before, though never so definitively. The partnership now says that it expects just 1.6 million square feet of office space to be built in the next five years, compared to 4.5 million square feet that the city Economic Development Corporation estimated would be built when it proposed a massive downtown Brooklyn rezoning three years ago.  read more »

Brooklyn coulda been a contender

Downtown Brooklyn's lament has been the inability to attract mega-tenants to four different sites that were painstakingly drawn and measured in a city-led massive rezoning two years ago.  read more »

Joe Chan, the president of the new Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, indicated in an interview last week that he was headed in a different direction: go for singles rather than home runs. Small parcels here and there might work better for the "creative industries" that he says could make Brooklyn home.

The Duffield Street Houses.

• Mayor Bloomberg is set to appoint a new development czar for downtown Brooklyn--sources say it's Joe Chan, a chief advisor to Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.


• City Council member David Yassky is demanding a 90-day stay in the demoliton of the Duffield Street houses, which were believed to have served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Developers want to turn the property into a parking lot; haven't they heard of campaign contributions?


• There is no crime wave in Prospect Park. Let the cruising continue!


• Brooklyn Borough President Markowitz mugs for the camera ... again. Oh yeah, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation got the title to a mile of waterfront, too.


• Bruce Ratner gets to tear down buildings that he's alrady torn down!


• Pedestrian- and bicycle-advocacy stalwarts Transportation Alternatives is trying to find ... well, alternatives to Grand Army Plaza's traffic circle of death.