Holdouts' hope fades in NYC as NBA's Nets arena project moves ahead

NEW YORK — On many mornings, Daniel Goldstein wakes to the sound of work crews demolishing the neighborhood around his Brooklyn apartment. Every crash and bang is a reminder that it may be just a matter of time before the wreckers come for his home, too.

Goldstein, 40, his wife and daughter are among a handful of holdouts living on several once-thriving urban blocks being cleared to make way for a new arena for the NBA's Nets.

The place isn't quite a ghost town, but it's getting there.

Goldstein's family is the only one left in its nine-story condominium building. Everyone else sold out years ago when the team's owner, developer Bruce Ratner, offered nearly double what their homes were worth to try to get control of the site quickly.

Other owners have cleared out, too. The two biggest apartment buildings nearby have been vacant for some time. Several structures have been reduced to rubble.

A hardy few — the stray tenant here, the homeowner there — remain.

As Goldstein's neighbors negotiated rich buyout deals, he ignored invitations to join the talks and became the lead spokesman for a neighborhood group opposed to the arena plan.

Money wasn't the issue. Nor did he have any burning love for the neighborhood, not initially. He bought his place only a few months before the arena project was announced.

He just didn't like the idea of being pushed around.

"I made a commitment to myself that I wasn't going to be forced to sell. ... I wasn't going to be pressured or bullied," he said. "I didn't know what that would mean. But I knew I was committing myself to it."

Only now is the cost of defiance becoming clear.

Financial blow

After a six-year fight, the state has begun the final legal steps to seize the family's condo, using eminent-domain law, and hand it to Ratner's company.

In November, Goldstein got a letter saying the state planned to pay him $510,000, about $80,000 less than what he paid in 2003.

That's a fraction of what Ratner was offering years ago, and nowhere near what Goldstein needs to buy a comparable place in the same part of Brooklyn.

Other remaining residents will get even less.

Years ago, Ratner's representatives offered David Sheets $75,000 to give up his rent-regulated apartment.

He turned them down, in part because they insisted he sign a gag order and stop criticizing the project. "Essentially, they wanted me to sign away my citizenship," he said.

Now, all he's being offered is help finding another place to live. In the meantime, life on the block has gotten tougher.

He spent much of 2008 without gas or electricity when the city ripped up the street. "We were overrun with rats. The jackhammering went 22 hours a day," Sheets said. "If I had any idea what a living nightmare this would be, hell no, I wouldn't have stayed around."

It looks like perseverance won't pay off.

It has been years since a state authority approved Ratner's plans to replace a rail yard and existing buildings with the arena, 16 new apartment and office towers and thousands of new residents for the development, Atlantic Yards.

The financing has been falling into place. A half-billion dollars in bonds has been sold. Ratner has a new business partner, Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who is also buying the Nets franchise.

Goldstein isn't ready to concede defeat, but he isn't blind, either.

"We'll have to find somewhere to live," he said. "Look, we're human and rational. We need to think about it now," he said.

Sheets is more bitter.

"There is no winning," he said. "My neighborhood has already been ruined. A thousand people have been displaced."

All that's left, he said, is the idea that opponents can make the process so painful for Ratner and his allies, government officials will think twice the next time they want to seize people's homes.

"If, in fighting Atlantic Yards, we've made it any easier for people to fight their own battles, then we've accomplished something," he said.

There may be a grain of truth there.

A judge overseeing a similar eminent-domain case involving Columbia University recently ruled that the state's process for declaring healthy neighborhoods "blighted" so they could be seized for redevelopment was, at least in that case, a farce.

Victory for the Brooklyn holdouts has always been a longshot.

By the time the arena project became public knowledge in 2003, Ratner already had lined up support from the city's most powerful political figures.

Plus, there was excitement about pro sports returning to Brooklyn and about the mini-city Ratner planned to build.

When architect Frank Gehry unveiled his initial designs for the site, New York Times architecture writer Herbert Muschamp pronounced the plan to surround the arena with a remarkable collection of towers, public plazas and greenery, a "Garden of Eden."

There was criticism, too. Residents complained the project was just too big for the neighborhood. Traffic would be terrible, parking impossible, schools overcrowded.

Over time, many things that excited people about Atlantic Yards have disappeared.

Vision on hold

Gehry was fired; plans for the towers and apartments were put on hold because of the uncertainty in the real-estate market.

Boosters promise the project will all get built, but the latest renderings of the arena show a conventional dome that will, at least for a while, stand alone while the cleared blocks around it lay empty or are used as parking lots.

One neighborhood business still operating, a tavern called Freddy's, recently installed chains so patrons can resist eviction by handcuffing themselves to the bar.

Goldstein is talking with others about what sort of symbolic last stand they could take in his building when authorities come to evict them. He hopes to find a new home in Brooklyn.

"We've really come to love where we live," he said.