Forest City Delays Pacific Park Brooklyn Over Real Estate Market Woes

Forest City Realty Trust suffered a net loss of $430.9 million for the three months ended September 30, 2016, mainly because of the Pacific Park mega-project.

The loss includes "an impairment of non-depreciable real estate of $307.6 million, primarily related to Pacific Park Brooklyn," FCR reports. (This is the Atlantic Yards project near Atlantic Terminal Mall.)

The company decided to revise the overall project schedule to "delay future vertical development."

Forest City blamed negative market conditions and timing. These include "the impact of increased apartment supply, uncertainty surrounding 421A tax abatement and continued escalation in construction and trade costs," the company said.

Three properties at Pacific Park Brooklyn that are part of the company's partnership with Greenland USA are still under construction:

• 535 Carlton, a 298-unit, all-affordable apartment community, is expected to begin phased opening in the fourth quarter of 2016.
  
• 550 Vanderbilt, a 278-unit condominium property, is expected to begin phased opening in the first quarter of 2017.
  
• 38 Sixth Avenue, a 303-unit, all-affordable apartment community with 6,000 feet of street-level retail, is expected to begin phased opening in the second quarter of 2017

Additional insight at Atlantic Yards /Pacific Park Report.

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Ratner's 'Site 5' To Be Brooklyn's Time Warner Center?

Courtesy Pacific Park

According to Bisnow, Forest City Ratner's EVP Kathryn Welch says FCR is getting ready to break ground on its "Site 5" project in Downtown Brooklyn. Site 5 is currently the home of Modell's and P.C. Richard.

The plans call for 1.6M square feet of office and retail space.

Welch said the goal will be "to bring in high-end retail like Brooklyn's never seen—something like the Time Warner Center."

Atlantic Yards Report speculates:
"If that report is correct--and we don't know that it is--that would shift the entire square footage once planned for B1 to Site 5, making an enormous--and to my eyeball, unrealistic--building. (The City Point project in Downtown Brooklyn near Junior's is 1.9 million square feet.)"

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Why Brooklyn's Pacific Park Won't Actually Be a Park

Pacific Park, Brooklyn

Atlantic Yards Report had created an excellent in-depth analysis of why ballyhooed Pacific Park, the privately managed open space being planned for Atlantic Yards' Pacific Heights 14-tower mega-development, won't actually be a "park," despite the rhetoric of developer Greenland Forest City Partners.

The whole article is worth reading through, but here are a few points:

* The promised central promenade won't appear for years, and the open space won't be done until 2025

* Strip away the buildings, and the space resembles a spine with some squiggly vertebrae

* The green will abut construction sites for the next decade

* The "main lawn" is tiny, little more than one-third an acre

* The amount of open space is well below the city average for the population around it.

* The street trees pictured do not resemble the actual plan. Many won't actually be there at all.

Read more at:
"Just like a normal accessible park"? Misleading rhetoric and incomplete information behind the (inadequate) Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park open space [Atlantic Yards Report]


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