A Yards Bargain

When The Battle for Brooklyn, a documentary about bottom-up efforts to block the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment, was released in 2011, the events it depicts were still fresh. To viewers in 2025, the titular conflict is ancient history. “Twenty years ago, there were no Starbucks. Twenty years ago, the tallest building in Brooklyn was the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, and our saying was ‘Don’t block the clock,’” recalled New York Attorney General Letitia James at a screening of the film hosted at Pioneer Works. Turnout was high, partially because the event doubled as a reunion for the numerous activists involved in the protracted fight. (Drinks at Sunny’s Bar afterward were on the docket.) The presence of Red Hook residents and various assembly members could be explained by the parallels between Atlantic Yards and the redevelopment of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT), a sweeping waterfront renovation that would begin a few blocks away from Pioneer Works at Pier 12 and extend north to Pier 7 at Atlantic Avenue. (Announced in May 2024, it promises “good jobs” and “housing at multiple affordability levels” in addition to an “activated waterfront.”) Attendees also seemed eager to learn about opportunities for community organizing at a time when national politics feel out of control—a connection highlighted by several speakers at the event. “I almost missed this because I was screaming at the TV,” said professor and city planner Ron Shiffman in a discussion after the film.

The Battle for Brooklyn begins in 2003, when developer Bruce Ratner publicizes his plans to build sixteen towers and an arena in Prospect Heights for the erstwhile New Jersey Nets. Despite fierce opposition from residents living in the project’s footprint, the state declares the area blighted and uses eminent domain to oust recalcitrant homeowners. Directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley focus the film on Daniel Goldstein, who becomes the last man standing as his neighborhood is literally dismantled brick by brick around him. It is immensely satisfying to see Goldstein, a real 2000s everyman—a disheveled graphic designer who smokes cigarettes at his desktop computer while wearing an anthropological array of graphic tees and lumpy beanies—take on and, for several years, successfully frustrate oleaginous power brokers like Ratner and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The city and state offer enormous subsidies to Forest City Ratner Companies in exchange for guarantees that jobs and affordable housing will be included in the plan.

The documentary captures the media circus used to sell the arena, from the abrupt, hucksterish passion of politicians for an essentially unknown basketball team (Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz spares no hyperbole for the Nets: “This puts the strawberries on top of Junior’s Cheesecake. This puts the Russian dressing on a great pastrami sandwich at Mill Basin Deli”) to the various stars tacked on to the project (Jay Z! Frank Gehry!). Tish James, then the area’s council member, sides with Goldstein and the pressure group he cofounds, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, in arguing that the city should redirect funding away from the arena to schools and housing. The activists hold community meetings, lawyer up, and find architects to design alternate plans for the stadium that would avoid seizing any property. Goldstein breaks up with his fiancée under the strain of the fight, which begins to take over his life. (He eventually marries another Develop Don’t Destroy member and becomes permanently kitted out in the group’s apparel.)

But a rival group with its own merch pushes a different vision: “Jobs, Housing & Hoops.” That coalition, Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), wants to take Ratner up on his word. Some of its members, most of whom are Black, are suspicious of the predominantly white Develop Don’t Destroy, whose members they see as gentrifiers. One man asks where all the media attention was when the New York City Housing Authority displaced fifteen hundred families from two of its properties for renovations, which dragged on for years. Still, the conflict doesn’t neatly fall along racial lines. When word gets out that BUILD has accepted $5 million from Forest City Ratner, the Reverend Mark Taylor condemns the developer’s astroturfing, which he says threatens to split the Black community.

It’s a bedeviling fact that community groups have significant power to block or delay developments through lawsuits or by pressuring city council members but rarely any ability to spur construction of the kind of projects they want. All too often, they are left trying to wrest concessions from whatever megadeveloper comes to town. Local input was particularly important in the case of Atlantic Yards, which went through with the signing of the very first “community benefits agreement” in New York City. The terms of that agreement—2,250 affordable rental units, plus a percentage of the construction jobs for minorities—were at least tangible promises. Goldstein and other members of Develop Don’t Destroy fail to persuade local residents not in direct danger of losing their buildings that they have anything to gain from joining the “no” camp. There’s more talk of the injustice of “eminent domain abuse” for property owners than of the project’s potential impact on rents or affordability. (In the end, Goldstein accepts a $3 million buyout, but one can hardly say that he went down easy after six years of nearly full-time toil.)

The Atlantic Yards community benefits agreement mostly fell apart. The arena was built first and opened in 2012, leaving the developers with little incentive to fulfill the housing obligations; today, six of the planned residential towers still haven’t broken ground. Nearly 900 proposed affordable units have yet to materialize, and the affordable housing that is there skews toward middle-income tenants. In 2014, the Shanghainese real estate company Greenland bought a 70 percent stake in Atlantic Yards (renamed Pacific Park), which it subsequently increased to 90 percent. In accordance with the one aspect of the CBA that had any teeth, for every month that the negotiated housing went unbuilt past a May 2025 deadline, the developer would be slapped with $1.75 million in fines. Greenland—which had already defaulted on $350 million in loans in 2023—was due to pay up in May 2025, but, like the project itself, the penalties have been indefinitely deferred.

As the postscreening Q&A with Goldstein and activists unfolded, the discussion quickly turned to the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. Karen Blondel, a community leader at NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses, emphasized the differences between Atlantic Yards and the BMT—namely, that no one would be displaced. She talked about the long history of disinvestment in Red Hook, particularly the lack of transportation, and said that the BMT could bring jobs, just as Red Hook’s Amazon warehouse had. The audience responded in uproar; one Develop Don’t Destroy member warned her not to “believe a thing anybody says” about what the development will do for the community; others said that those in favor of Atlantic Yards had been “duped” and “drank the Kool-Aid.” Blondel had enough. “You don’t speak for us,” she said. “We get nothing at the end of the day—y’all walk away, and we’re still in the same condition twenty years later.”

She talked about an existential need for well-paid jobs, given the high rates of unemployment in public housing. “We have to give people what they want, so they want what we have to give,” she said in response to the suggestion that members of her community needed to take a more active role in shaping development projects. “They can’t learn this stuff if they’re still worried about food, shelter, and love.” Rather than a battle for the future of Brooklyn, the conflict over Atlantic Yards devolved into a tug-of-war between competing short-term interests. Organizers will have to listen seriously to the whole neighborhood’s needs if there is to be any hope for genuine political transformation, in Red Hook or elsewhere.