[NYguy]

If successful, the pair could erect a roughly 1.5 million-square-foot office tower across from Brooklyn's largest transit hub at Atlantic Avenue,
where nine subway lines and the Long Island Rail Road converge.

"Pacific Park was always meant to include modern office space," a spokeswoman for Greenland Forest City said in a statement. "We think the time
is right for the borough to have an iconic office building for the new Brooklyn economy and the thousands of jobs it will bring to the doorstep of
one of the city’s largest transit hubs."

The plan hinges on securing state approvals to transfer the development rights from the triangular plaza framed by Atlantic and Flatbush avenues
in front of Barclays Center to a site across Flatbush Avenue that is controlled by the developers and is now occupied by Modell's Sporting Goods
and PC Richards stores. Greenland Forest City currently has the right to build a smaller 440,000-square-foot office property on that site.

I love the idea. Plus it gives us the added bonus of keeping the plaza in front of Barclays Center. Do it.



http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/

Greenland Forest City seeks to shift arena office tower development rights to Site 5, for humongous 1.5M sf building
(despite what City Planning said)

The 2016 Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park surprise--which I partly predicted--has come early, and it's a doozy, with self-serving motives portrayed as civic ones.

The bottom line is: to save money on construction costs, and not have to build a 511-foot office tower with 1.1 million square feet over the arena plaza, Greenland Forest City Partners want
to move the entire development package across the street to Site 5.

That's currently home to P.C. Richard and Modell's, where already a 250-foot building with 439,050 square feet of development rights is planned.

The results: a humongous building, more than 1.5 million square feet (and of an unknown height), across the street from row houses. Forest City has characterized it as the Brooklyn
analogue to the Time Warner Center. It's almost a quadrupling of development rights.

This will require new approvals (and public comment), and may even generate outrage, since even the New York City Planning Commission in 2006 recommended that the building
at Site 5 be cut, and it was. (And it's right next to the Brooklyn Bear's Community Garden.)

But it is being pitched as a way to "save" the plaza so crucial for the arena (and appreciated by the public), as well as to deliver office jobs.

It's possible that this, like so much regarding this project, is a gambit, and they will "accept" a compromise in which 100,000 or more square feet are shaved off.

Or that some of the development rights might be moved to Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Center Mall, which already has the option to build about 1.1 million square feet
(1.586 million square feet minus the Site 5 development rights) in three towers over the mall.

Note: the current Site 5 occupants, Modell's and P.C. Richard, still face an eminent domain proceeding, and P.C. Richard is challenging it in court.

B1 development rights would be combined with smaller Site 5 (model approx. 2008, by Frank Gehry)