Welcome, and on behalf of the rally sponsors, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods and BrooklynSpeaks, thank you all for joining us for today’s rally to call Time Out on Atlantic Yards.

Since the approval of Atlantic Yards in December 2006, we all expressed doubts that the development would ever be built as it was proposed. However, even the project’s strongest critics at the time did not imagine that little more than a year later, the developer, Forest City Ratner, would alter the Atlantic Yards plan so drastically as to call into question every justification under which the State had allowed the project to proceed. The Atlantic Yards review and approval process was unresponsive to the public’s concerns. But now, neither the public nor its elected representatives even know what is planned for the site. We’re here today to ask Governor Paterson to intervene and to call Time Out on Atlantic Yards.

According to the State’s own Environmental Impact Statement, Atlantic Yards was supposed to be a “transit-oriented development” that would provide “affordable and market-rate housing,” “first-class office space,” “seven acres of publicly accessible open space,” “local retail and community services,” and a hotel, in addition to an arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team. With a surface area of over 22 acres, 7.7 million square feet of commercial, retail and residential space, and an 18,000 seat arena, Atlantic Yards would be the biggest single-source development in New York City history. And its developer pointed proudly to a “Community Benefits Agreement” it had negotiated, under which the firm had agreed to provide 2,200 units of affordable housing, job-training programs, an intergenerational center, and a health care facility for the community. To make all of this possible, Atlantic Yards would require an estimated $2 billion of direct and indirect public subsidy.

We now understand from Forest City Ratner, that there was a catch to all the promises. Simply put, while the developer had used its political influence to acquire property and secure public subsidies for the arena, it didn’t yet have commitment on the financing necessary for the other components of Atlantic Yards. And the size of the project brought with it a huge exposure to the risks of changing market conditions. And now the market conditions have changed.

Forest City has now acknowledged it may not be able to finance the construction of the commercial and residential components of the Atlantic Yards project as originally proposed. That leaves only the arena left from the original plan. Without the commercial and residential components, Atlantic Yards won’t be able to meaningfully fulfill the promises it used to gain approval: affordable housing, local jobs, open space, community facilities. At best, some of the purported benefits may eventually be made available years or decades later than promised. Maybe. But there are no dates committed, at all.

Even though they can’t build, the Empire State Development Corporation and Forest City still unfortunately have the power to destroy, and they continue to use that power to demolish buildings on land on which there is now no committed plan to build. Local streets are being closed, and residents and businesses are being displaced, while the hammer of eminent domain still hangs in the air.

Where office and apartment buildings were supposed to stand, where affordable housing was supposed to have been built, where open space was to have been created, now cars will park. Atlantic Yards has changed from a project whose “overarching goal” was “to transform a blighted area into a vibrant mixed-use community” to the borough’s biggest parking lot. And the developer says it needs more subsidies.

Governor Paterson, we hope you will agree with thousands of New Yorkers that this is just wrong. This situation cannot be tolerated. Today, our community and its elected officials ask you to intervene on our behalf and call “Time Out” on a project that has become out of control, unrecognizable, and unaccountable to the public it was supposedly going to benefit.

Hear us, help us, while your action can still make a difference. You have the power to make things right; to mend our community. Stop the destruction of buildings, the forced displacement of our neighbors and the upheaval in our community until there is a new way forward for the people of Brooklyn to have a voice in the future of our borough. Governor Paterson, order a Time Out on Atlantic Yards, now!