Ron Shiffman
Butts on Columbia Expansion: Politicians 'Polluted' Negotiations on Community Benefits
At a panel discussion last night on development in the city, multiple community organizers and the Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, criticized the process of forming community benefits agreements (CBAs) in order to bolster public and governmental support for large development projects.
The tool seems to be a technique increasingly favored by developers of controversial projects, who negotiate with members of the community, agreeing to include in the CBAs provisions for things such as affordable housing and local jobs. read more »
Ratner Will Bring Us Closer Together
What we said was that Atlantic Yards would be twice as dense as the densest census tract in the country, but nothing about it being its own census tract. The 22-acre project spans four census tracts, as you can see from the map above, which we have borrowed from NoLandGrab, an opposition blog. The red parts are where Frank Gehry's skyscrapers and arena will go. read more »
Because all of this confusion made us curious, we went ahead and calculated what effect the new population would have on the densities of those four census tracts. No, none of those tracts will become the densest in the nation, but one of them, 129.02, which will host the basketball arena and three skyscrapers, would apparently leap into the ranks of the 100 densest tracts.
