With March comes many traditions -- St. Patrick's Day, the Eides of March, the first timid buds of the season, early signs of ignominy wafting up from Mets and Yankees spring training camps.

As Brooklynites start preparing for spring cleaning, we thought we'd do a little of our own here at FFFP.

It's time to dust of the MythBusters 2003, a device we hereby activate with civic pride. Still works as good as when it was introduced in four-and-a-half years ago.

MYTH NUMBER ONE
The Atlantic Yards project is moving forward!

Er...not so much. AY hasn't the land, funding and legal permission it needs to begin building in earnest, and may never.

The construction thus far is all window-dressing. Ratner's tossed people from their homes and jobs to tear down buildings just to make it look like he's moving forward. All to aid and abet two nefarious strategies: 1) cow people into ending their opposition to the project, and 2) make the area look "blighted" as the legal cases wend their way through the courts.



In the Vanderbilt Rail Yards, Forest City Ratner's moving some dirt around and has gotten the city to close the Carlton Avenue Bridge. All this for a project the MTA never needed or asked for.

In both cases, Ratner is spending vaults of cash on a project that might never come to fruition.

MYTH NUMBER TWO

Forest City Ratner has all the land it needs to get started

Well, except for all the crucial plots he doesn't. There are a dozen or so properties still tied up in court proceedings. Included are those needed for the proposed sports arena, some key luxury condo towers, the "stage two" affordable housing component (a decade or more away, if ever), and various other components. These properties are positioned all throughout AY's footprint.

Worse for Ratner, he doesn't control the MTA's rail yards. Incredibly, the MTA is letting Ratner push dirt around down there, even though no contract's been signed and Ratner hasn't paid the MTA a single cent for the property.



MYTH NUMBER THREE

Ratner has funding for the Atlantic Yards

Not nearly enough, and with a recession upon us, his cash cows are dropping like flies.

No major lending instution has stepped forward to fund the project. A good chunk of money Ratner's already arranged for has come in the form of bridge loans, meant to get him from the December 2003 announcement to when his profits might start coming in.

Ratner's city and state funding -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- could dry up, as City Hall and Albany take stock of the economy's precipitous downturn.

Finally, housing subsidies that Ratner desperately needs for his suspect "affordable-housing" component are already gone. More on that below.



MYTH NUMBER FOUR

FCR is impervious to the recession and will built AY come what may

Big banks are struggling through the sub-prime crisis. In 2007 the U.S. banking industry lost $100 billion due to bad loans. Maybe it's history's largest tax-write off. One thing's certain -- banks are far more cautious about extending credit...the days of the golden trough are over.

Maybe banks are smarter than Bloomberg, Pataki and Spitzer, and see Atlantic Yards for the fiscal houst-of-cards that it is. Well, banks not called Barclays, anyway.

Make no mistake...FCR's parent company, Cleveland's Forest City Enterprises, is currently doing on fiscal terra firma. But recessions hurt certain industries harder than others, and real estate developers have a lot to fear from a recession. Ratner HQ in Cleveland doesn't have the emotional attachment to AY that their boy Bruce does here in Brooklyn.

Cleveland doesn't like that Atlantic Yards has become a nationwide poster-child for bad-idea controversial mega-developments. They might tighten the purse-strings on Bruce and his brother Michael (the AY-enabling civil liberties attorney who's turned a blind eye to his brother's unethical behavior), drastically downsizing or halting the project altogether.

The latter's not likely, but a downsizing would be the worst eventuality -- holes in the ground, a few towers with little-or-no affordable housing, and a white-elephant basketball arena -- all the disruptions without a shred of benefits Ratner and his cronies have promised Brooklyn for four-and-a-half years.

MYTH NUMBER FIVE

The court cases are over

Both the federal case (property owners and residents throughout the footprint fighting eminent domain abuse) and the state case (concerning the state's faulty environmental impact statement) have not -- repeat, not -- been tossed out. They're in the appeals process.


The federal case involves jurisdiction as much as the facts. The current battle is whether the case can be argued in federal or state court (stick with us here). If federal, opponents will have the chance to access more of Ratner's secretly-held information -- data that the public should get to see, given Ratner's endless claims that the project is a "public good" and the $2 billion taxpayers would be forced to hand over to Ratner. FCR wants the case in state court, where it can better hide from public scrutiny -- just like the rest of the AY process.

If the Supreme Court rules against AY opponents, the case would likely start at the beginning in state court.

That could take a while.

Meanwhile, the state case is on appeal.

We're looking at another year or two.

Bear in mind, this isn't a delay tactic. Those bringing these suits believe the cases are strong. FCR, Bloomberg, et al. love to scream about "delay tactics" and "selfish people standing in the way of progress." Only when they get a ruling in their favor do they support the sanctity of the legal system. Funny, that...

MYTH NUMBER SIX

Atlantic Yards would provide lots of housing for needy Brooklynites

Forest City Ratner's last published numbers say that 87% of AY's housing stock would be priced beyond the reach of low-income Brooklynites. That's less than the standard-issue 80-20 plans that most developers offer.

Certainly the vaunted 50% market/50% affordable plan announced by Ratner, Bloomberg and ACORN's Bertha "Kiss 'Em On The Lips" Lewis is a long-dead idea. Why isn't ACORN blasting Ratner for turning his back on their constituency? Because their contract with Ratner forbids them from doing so.



What's worse is that Ratner not only doesn't have any city, state or federal housing subsidies, he hasn't even applied for them. The feds have made $1.6 billion in subsidies available for every single housing program in the city. Ratner alone needs $1.4 billion. He's at the very back of the line...in fact, he hasn't even gotten in line yet. Dana Rubenstein's piece in the Brooklyn Paper spells it out.

Ratner's a smug rich guy with connections who knows he'll get World Series tickets. While regular, hardcore fans line up in freezing cold, hoping they'll score tickets when the box-office window opens, Ratner assumes he'll just pull up in his limo and get a police escort to a luxury box.

Maybe he's right. Marc Jahr, NYC's Housing Development Corporation president, said last week "Given the scale of the project … we’re not concerned that the money won’t be there." Just like that. Ratner, Jahr seems to be saying, would snap his fingers and the money bags would be rolled out on a jewel-bedecked cart -- past all the non-profit housing groups who were already in line for the subsidies.

Another annoucement this week concerned the downsizing of AY's biggest skyscraper, the Miss Brooklyn building -- a change that would see housing converted to office space. (First there was a great need for office space...then a couple of years later, there wasn't...now, there is again. Serious -- you want these people planning Brooklyn's future and doing it with your money?!)

Pouring salt in this one-of-many wounds, New York City Housing Authority just announced hundreds of layoffs. In other words, the city is giving Ratner nine-figures of public money to build luxury condo skyscrapers, but is laying off workers who assist low-income public-housing residents.

Another wound getting the salt treatment: Mayor Bloomberg just vetoed a City Council bill that would stop landlords from rejecting apartment applicants who wish to pay with housing vouchers. Bloomberg was aghast at the idea of requiring landlords "to participate in a public program even at a cost to their bottom lines."

In other words, the mayor enorses discrimination against poor people in order to increase landlords' profits.

That, sportsfans, is why enthusiasm for projects like Atlantic Yards pours like lava from City Hall.

MYTH NUMBER SEVEN

Atlantic Yards will provide lots of jobs for needy Brooklynites

When Ranter announced the project in December 2003, he promised 10,000 newly-created jobs.

Ten...frakkin'...thousand.

According to numbers crunched by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), that number has been obliterated to virutally nothingness. The total is now 375 newly-created jobs.

Sure, 375 jobs for people who need 'em is a plus. But Brooklyn was promised 10,000. Newly created. A grossly-exagerated lie that, somehow, keeps this project going in the minds of people up until this point were smart enough to know better.

The job-creation-cost figures for AY is two- to four-times the city's average. Both Ratner's and the taxpayers' money is are being wasted. AY jobs would cost too much to create and pay far too little, given Ratner's propensity for renting out to big box store chains.


As for construction, it's been long known that his other nice round figure, 15,000 union jobs, is actually 1,500 at any one time. The longer the project would take, the more that figure evaporates.



It's understandable that construction unions back projects that offer lots of jobs. Atlantic Yards, though, is actually standing in the way of projects that could bring more jobs both to the AY footprint and the city on the whole. The unions are generally smart, but they're backing the wrong horse here. Self-interest is bad enough, but when it hurts so many fellow working-class citizens, it becomes shameful.

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We'll stop at a lucky seven.

At the end of the day, two primers could be written about the Atlantic Yards process, one with good advice, the other about unsavory practices: How Not To Get Fooled Again, and How Ratner Fooled Brooklyn...Again.

* * * * * * * *

Next time, we'll investigate:

* How Miss Brooklyn -- the beauty pageant winner, not the Gehry skyscraper -- took several pages from Bruce Ratner's playbook;

* Richard Lipsky and the Neighborhood Retail Alliance's latest bid for the Biggest Hypocrite Ever Award;

* The Nets' latest bungle -- the mixed-up, careless web of inexactitude that led to Jason Kidd's removal as Face of the Franchise.