| |
Posted Sep 24, 2012, 11:58 PM
|
|
BANNED
|
|
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Rosslyn, VA
Posts: 1,179
|
|
This is off the scales on the irony/hypocrite/contradiction scale. "NIMBY" unless it's actually "IMBY" 
For an Old Foe of Atlantic Yards, a Smaller-Scale Battle
New York Times
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
Published: September 24, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/nyregi...estate-battle-on-a-smaller-scale.html?hp
Quote:
The Barclays Center will open its doors this week, buoyed by world-famous performers; slick new uniforms for its basketball team, the Brooklyn Nets; and a formidable advertising campaign.
“Hello Brooklyn,” a multitude of friendly black posters read.
But the road to this affable and tightly scripted opening was rutted with protracted legal fights and virulent opposition, one of the hardest-fought real estate battles in recent memory. At its center was a local resident named Daniel Goldstein, founder of the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, who spent years throwing his body in front of the Atlantic Yards development project, which has the arena as its core.
Since last year, however, Mr. Goldstein has been at the nexus of some far more localized real estate tension. He has been building an extension on the back of his new home in South Park Slope, and from the very start, relations with both of his next-door neighbors have been bumpy.
“I don’t know why he bought that house,” said Johanna Frost, 64, who lived in the house directly to the east of Mr. Goldstein’s new home for most of her life. “I think it’s going to look hideous and totally out of sync with the neighborhood.”
Ms. Frost, who sold earlier this year, said she was especially perplexed by Mr. Goldstein’s construction project since he had spent so many years agitating on behalf of his neighbors and their property rights as the Atlantic Yards developer, Forest City Ratner, muscled in. (Forest City Ratner also was the development partner for the headquarters of The New York Times Company.)
Mr. Goldstein called the comparison “laughable and offensive.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said by e-mail when first asked to comment on his neighbors’ displeasure.
In his calmer moments, Mr. Goldstein said that his addition was within existing zoning regulations, and that despite more than half a dozen complaints made to the Buildings Department, not a single fine or penalty had been issued. Similar renovations, he said, are happening every day throughout the neighborhood.
The trouble here began in the backyard, when one neighbor, Kathryn Roake, saw Mr. Goldstein’s architect through the fence and was told the plans. According to Mr. Goldstein, the conversation concluded with Ms. Roake’s saying she hoped that his house burned down.
Ms. Roake remembers the encounter a differently — but only a little. She said she was referring not to Mr. Goldstein’s house, but to the architect’s home.
“He didn’t saying anything after that,” she said.
A petition was circulated asking Mr. Goldstein and his wife not to extend the house at all, complaints were made to the Buildings Department, and as of last week, both of his original neighbors have sold their homes. There has been plenty of, as Mr. Goldstein put it, “garden-variety lunacy,” and neither side seemed to feel the other was open to discussion.
“We went to that neighbor,” Mr. Goldstein said of his neighbor on the opposite side. “We brought cookies!”
Mr. Goldstein became a man in the news in the mid-2000s while organizing against the Atlantic Yards development. He objected to the use of eminent domain to seize the private land for the development, and to the way the approval process was routed through the state, cutting local officials out of the picture, among many other things. He was the last homeowner still living in the footprint of the development when his, which he had bought for $590,000 in 2003, was seized by the state in 2010. In April 2010, he agreed to leave within a couple of weeks for $3 million, letting the project move forward.
As bulldozers rumbled into the neighborhood to begin construction on the stadium, Mr. Goldstein, along with his wife, Shabnam Merchant, and their daughter, moved on, buying a modest wood-frame house that is the color of worn bluejeans for $812,000 in May 2011. Soon after, they began drawing up plans to enlarge and improve it. Plans filed with the Buildings Department describe a deck, a hot tub and a horizontal extension, which is being built on the back of the house. The family has not yet moved in.
Ms. Roake, who owned the house immediately to the west of Mr. Goldstein’s, said the bulky frame of his extension, still under construction, had crept in front of her morning light, casting a shadow over her garden and the back rooms of her house. Ms. Roake, who works at the Environmental Control Board, was devoted to the dense thicket of string beans, tomatoes and parsley packed into her narrow yard, and said her plants had “withered.”
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s morally right,” she said. “This is like if you have a peaceful piece of property on a lake, and a Jet Ski comes through.”
Mr. Goldstein said that from his backyard, it did not appear that Ms. Roake’s light had been affected. And many people on the block have no problem with Mr. Goldstein’s extension.
Nancy Carpenter, who along with her husband bought Ms. Frost’s home, said she was excited for the new neighbors to move in. Ms. Carpenter fears, however, that the Barclays Center will overwhelm its neighborhood, and she called Mr. Goldstein’s campaigning against the project “honorable.”
“We might be the perfect people to be right next door,” Ms. Carpenter said. “We weren’t here long enough to fall in love with what it was.”
On the other side of Mr. Goldstein’s new home, perhaps a similar calm will settle over the property line soon. Ms. Roake, who listed her house for $1.425 million, sold it on Wednesday. And this week, she said, after 22 years of living in the house, she will be gone.
|
|
|
|
Prev
Linear Mode
