Free Republic

De Blasio, Clinton cronies are carving up the city. Right, developer Bruce RatnerBy Micah Morrison In New York City, the controversy plagued Atlantic Yards development appears to be heading for trouble again. That could create problems for Mayor Bill de Blasio and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Allies of both Democrats have profited mightily from the project. For over a decade, Atlantic Yards has been at the center of heated disputes over power, profit and privilege in New York. Does the site serve the needs of the taxpayers who financed its development? Or is it primarily a giant boondoggle generating...

Earlier this week, seven Brooklyn residents filed a federal lawsuit against Bruce Ratner, the developer of the Atlantic Yards basketball arena, accusing him of committing a grave injustice. The plaintiffs, however, arenÂ’t opposed to injustice; in fact, they had hoped to benefit from it. For the wrongs that theyÂ’ve suffered, Bruce RatnerÂ’s latest useful idiots have no one to blame but themselves. Ratner has spent eight years using the power of New York City and New York State to injure people who donÂ’t have the arbitrary power of the government backing them. Starting in 2003, Ratner garnered the support of...

Prokhorov NBA Bid Gets Scrutiny; ACORN-Funder Ratner Needs Russian Billionaire to Build Brooklyn Arena Bruce Ratner is a New York real estate developer and owner of the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Association. For five years, he’s been trying to move the team to a new arena in Brooklyn that he hopes to build, relying on New York’s powers of eminent domain to move hundreds of homeowners and businessmen out of their quarters.The Brooklyn arena project, known as Atlantic Yards, is on life support. It is only being kept alive by an investment of Russia’s richest man, Mikhail...

A New Jersey congressman says he will demand a government inquiry into Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire poised to buy the New Jersey Nets, for his extensive business dealings in Zimbabwe -- a bombshell that could blow up the $200 million team deal and threaten the future of Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, The Post has learned. Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, wants to know if companies controlled by Prokhorov in Zimbabwe violate federal rules that forbid American citizens and companies, and subsidiaries set up in the United States, from doing business with...

New York’s eminent domain policies rob the vulnerable to reward the powerful.In November, New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld the use of eminent domain to take homes and small businesses to make way for wealthy developer Bruce Ratner’s so-called “Atlantic Yards” development: 16 mammoth skyscrapers centered around a basketball arena. The court accepted the Empire State Development Corporation’s contention that the area was “blighted”—based on a study that Ratner paid for himself and which wasn’t even initiated until years after the project was announced. The court didn’t go so far as to embrace the reasoning of...

BROOKLYN -- On Aug. 27, 1776, British forces routed George Washington's novice army in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought in fields and woods where today the battle of Prospect Heights is being fought. Americans' liberty is again under assault, but this time by overbearing American governments. The fight involves an especially egregious example of today's eminent domain racket. The issue is a form of government theft that the Supreme Court encouraged with its worst decision of the last decade -- one that probably will be radically revised in this one. The Atlantic Yards site, where 10 subway lines...

Eminent Domain: Four years after the Supreme Court told a Connecticut homeowner that no one's house is safe from developers, Brooklyn homeowners may lose their homes to a pro basketball team. On June 3, 2005, by a 5-4 margin, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively repealed the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, deciding that your constitutional right to be secure in your home didn't matter if your state or community decided your property could produce more revenue as a shopping mall or condominium development. Pfizer coveted Susette Kelo's working-class neighborhood for an office park and condominium complex. The city fathers...

Here's one genuinely welcome casualty of the Bush-Obama recession. Gothamist brings word that Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project is floundering: Starchitect Frank Gehry really stepped in it during a recent interview with industry journal The Architect's Newspaper, admitting he doesn't think developer Bruce Ratner's $4.2 billion plan to build a Nets basketball arena, office towers and thousands of apartments in Brooklyn will become a reality. In an interview on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Gehry dropped the bombshell when asked about unrealized commissions he most wishes had been built: "The Corcoran Gallery in DC, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn—I...

Supreme Court Denies Eminent Domain Petition From Owners & Tenants Facing Property Seizures for Atlantic Yards 11 Property Owners and Tenants Will Take Their Case to NY State Court To Challenge the Improper Use of Eminent Domain Under New York State Law BROOKLYN, NY--The United States Supreme Court denied the petition to grant a hearing (cert petition) to eleven property owners and tenants who asked the court to hear their appeal on the Second Circuit Court’s dismissal of their challenge to the use of eminent domain for Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development proposal in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The petition...

"The short program focuses on eminent domain in National City, California where a Community Youth Center diverting at-risk youth with its boxing program is threatened with removal by eminent domain abuse in order to install a luxury condominium development."

New gripe against Barclays By Gersh Kuntzman The Brooklyn Paper Barclays Bank’s partnership with Bruce Ratner is under fire again — but this time not because of the bank’s slavery- and apartheid-linked past. The New York Libertarian Party is now calling for a nationwide boycott of the British banking behemoth on the grounds that its participation in the Atlantic Yards project is a tacit endorsement of the state’s use of eminent domain to condemn private property and turn it over to a private developer, Ratner. “Barclays’ participation in eminent domain is an outrage as a private enterprise disrespecting property rights,”...

Libertarian Party of NY -- Press Release -- Barclays Bank Boycott To Protest Eminent Domain Abuse Barclays Bank Boycott To Protest Eminent Domain Abuse LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF NEW YORK http://www.ny.lp.org/ 516-767-4688 Contact: Richard Cooper, State Chair nylibertarian@hotmail.com Gary Popkin, Brooklyn-Queens Chair www.Hardfire.net BARCLAYS BANK BOYCOTT TO PROTEST EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE Brooklyn, NY 3/19/07 New York Libertarian Party leaders Richard Cooper and Gary Popkin call for a nationwide boycott of Barclays Bank due to its participation in the eminent domain abuse scheme of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards. Barclays, a British bank with branches in America, agreed to pay the developer Forest City...

A state oversight board voted yesterday to approve the Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn, removing the last regulatory hurdle for one of the biggest real estate projects in the city’s history. The vote by the Public Authorities Control Board capped three years of battles between opponents and supporters of the $4 billion project. The version approved yesterday — eight million square feet over 22 acres along Atlantic Avenue — includes a huge residential housing complex with about 6,400 market-rate and subsidized apartments, a basketball arena for the Nets, and a smattering of office space, with a design punctuated by...

Happy communities are all alike-- but every community threatened by eminent domain abuse (EDA) is different. Are political corruption and EDA joined at the hip in Jersey? Let's just say public use in Pay-2-Play Land is one mighty strange bird. Part 3 of a 4 part series focusing on eminent domain abuse in different locales .... Locations covered to date: Albany, New York, New London, Connecticut, Hoboken, New Jersey, Next up: the Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn, New York. A mammoth land grab launched by developer Forest City Ratner and the Empire State Development Corporation-- one of the most powerful...