New York, NY —
The Prospect Heights of Brooklyn today will be nothing like the prospect heights of the next decade, if developers are successful. “Future Brooklyn” as they call it, will be a brand new neighborhood with 40 story high rises, a basketball arena, and office towers. But as developers try to make room for the new, some residents of the old neighborhood fear they’ll lose out. WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein reports.
REPORTER: On a quiet block of Dean Street just off Flatbush Avenue, there are a few three-story brownstones, a couple of small apartment houses, a low rise manufacturing building converted to artists studios. On the corner there’s a Mobil station. At the other end of the block, there’s a depression era speakeasy – now called Freddy’s Bar.
From the old wooden tables inside the residents of this small neighborhood have watched as developer Forest City Ratner has building by building bought the homes so it can make room for a proposed Nets arena. Lee, a seven-year resident sighs as she remembers the last two.
LEE: Since this project has started happening there has been a steady stream of moving vans on the block it’s really a shame.
REPORTER: Forest City Ratner now owns ninety percent of the homes here, and nearly two thirds of the rental buildings. The property owners aren’t discussing their deals publicly – they signed confidentiality agreements which require them not to protest the planned arena and high-rise complex. Privately, some have said Ratner has been generous.
But many of the tenants here are of moderate means, and they wonder where they will go when its their turn to leave. Last winter, at a packed forum at a college in Brooklyn, Forest City Ratner Executive Vice President Jim Stuckey said Ratner would pay for any rent increases for tenants who had to move for the project, so it would cost them nothing.
STUCKEY: Every resident who is displaced from the project will be brought back in or offered to come back in if they choose to a unit the same size, same number of bedrooms, same rent. They’ll follow minimum rent stabilization guidelines, so they can’t be increased. This is not something we’re trying to fool people.
REPORTER: But there are people who feel they HAVE been fooled. I spoke to two dozen tenants or their representatives in the “footprint” of the arena complex. None said they’d made the kind of deal Stuckey described. Instead, there were found people like Frank Yost.
YOST: My lease was up earlier this year and my landlord said we’re not going to renew your lease you have to be out by April 1st.
REPORTER: Yost, who wears his scraggly grey-black hair tied back in a loose ponytail, is the owner of Freddy’s Bar. He sips a glass of red wine at the end of a wooden bar, where a few patrons drink brews, nothing fancy. This bar will be ripped down if the Ratner project gets the green light. And so would the five apartments above it, one of which is occupied by Yost.
YOST: Well I have to find a place to live. To me, at my age I hate to move.
REPORTER: Yost says his lawyer was able to negotiate a few extra months for him, but says he got no monetary settlement from his landlord. The building he lives is not yet owned by Forest City Ratner.
YOST: I would love for them to come to me and say we’re sorry about you having to move, we realize the inconvenience we’re going to give you an apartment on the 31st floor facing west by southwest so you can see the sunset, a small little terrace so you’ll be able to charcoal your lamb chops out there.
REPORTER: Instead, Yost says, he’s moving to a small basement apartment nearby at the end of this month, where his rent will essentially double.
Over on Third Avenue in Brooklyn, sculptor Mick Raffle is giving a tour of his new apartment.
RAFFLE: Then you have this weird kind of connecting room and then we have two bedrooms.
REPORTER: The tour doesn’t take long.
RAFFLE: Yeah, its not impressive. The other space had much more space.
REPORTER: When Raffle lived on Pacific Street, he says, he had a huge apartment, where three artists lived and worked. Raffle says his new rent is about the same as his old rent, but he has no place to sculpt. He now works refurbishing apartments on the Upper West Side. Raffle says he was able to negotiate a substantial settlement in exchange for agreeing to terminate his lease – but he didn’t feel he had much choice.
RAFFLE: The lawyers said oh this is the best deal because eventually you know the stadium is going to be built and you will have to leave because they would exercise eminent domain.
REPORTER: That’s a common complaint among tenants – that the specter of eminent domain is itself enough to empty the neighborhood.
Like Mick Raffle, Heidi Kinney now lives outside the footprint. She moved about a mile away, almost to the border of Crown Heights.
KINNEY: In the other apartment we had this wonderful exposed brick which was fantastic and we don’t have that here which I really miss. But you know here you find the advantages there are pluses. The birds are chirping which is really nice so you’re just trying to find the positives of the new space.
REPORTER: Kinney had lived on Flatbush Avenue for nearly six years. Last fall, she began asking her landlord for a new lease. She never got one.
KINNEY: My landlord had told me they were in talks with Forest City Ratner. Basically once the building was bought by Forest City Ratner they would like us to leave and they wanted the building empty.
REPORTER: Like many of the other tenants I spoke with, Kinney told us she and her boyfriend decided not to fight. They reached a settlement. But Kinney would not give details. Other tenants, who struck deals with Forest City Ratner would only speak on condition of anonymity. The developer had insisted on confidentiality, these tenants said. None of them will be moving back to a new building on their old block, either. After a recent city council hearing, I asked Jim Stuckey, the Forest City Ratner VP, whether the developer had signed any relocation deals.
STUCKEY: I can’t answer that without violating confidentiality. Bernstein: How are you violating confidentiality? Stuckey: People have asked us not to talk about this. Bernstein: You didn’t ask any tenants not to disclose the terms of their agreement? You didn’t? Stuckey: No, not that I’m aware of. Not that I’m aware of.
REPORTER: In an eleventh floor office at Metrotech overlooking the brownstones of Boerum Hill and Park Slope, Stuckey sat down with me a few weeks later. He said its common practice for businesses to negotiate in private – but maintained there would be no repercussions if tenants disclosed the terms of their own deals.
STUCKEY: I’ll be happy to put it in writing we’re not looking to tell people they can’t speak. We’re very confident in what we’re doing.
REPORTER: As for tenants like Mick Raffle and Frank Yost – Stuckey insisted that with one exception, in a building where tenants are living without the proper residential permit, no landlord has been told to empty a building.
He said there were tenants that he didn’t know about, and who he couldn’t talk to before Forest City took title to the building. Even so, Stuckey said if people have struck deals with individual landlords, Forest City Ratner is still willing to stand by their pledge to offer new apartments in the arena complex.
BERNSTEIN: So even if somebody has moved out and agreed they’re not going to have any claims they could still come to you at this point and say I’d like to move back in and you would sit down with them ? STUCKEY: as long as they can demonstrate that they were a tenant on the site when this project began for a period of time the answer is yes.
REPORTER: As for Frank Yost, the owner of Freddy’s bar, he’s packing his boxes, getting ready to move next week. The day I asked Jim Stuckey about Yost, the bar owner says he got a call from Stuckey, offering to sit down and talk Earlier this week Yost, got a letter in the mail saying he would be offered the opportunity to rent an apartment in the new complex. As for the bar, Forest City wants to relocate that too. Yost says he’ll be discussing the offer next week – but he’s not holding his breath. For WNYC, I’m Andrea Bernstein.