Some things are free! (Courtesy Dumbo Books of Brooklyn)

Ever think "Where's my wallet?" when walking around the Atlantic Terminal or Atlantic Center malls?

It's probably missing. The shopping centers have become the "singular crime epicenter in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill's 88th Precinct," The New York Times reports.

At least 26 reported crimes have happened in the center since the beginning of the year, The Times noted:

• 14 purses and wallets stolen

• Four reported — and countless unreported — incidents of shoplifting

• Two victims losing $1,200 in an iPad scam

• Two fights

• Three muggings or attempted muggings

• One theft of a bicycle

The brazen thieves are even going after the center's employees. Rebecca Godfrey, a worker in the Altantic Terminal,  has been a two-time victim: three months ago someone snatched a purse containing valuables and $1,250 and last month someone grabbed her iPhone. "I saw it two seconds too late. They do it right in front of your face," she told The Times.

The commanding officer of the precinct said that he has to constantly reminds shoppers: "Close your pocketbook, keep it close to your person, don't leave the purse in the shopping cart."

Apparently, the outlaw culture has developed to such heightened levels that some thieves are even dressing as Best Buy employees selling discounted iPads. Once the cash is handed over, the pseudo-employee ditches and the customer is left with an empty box.

Although, c'mon guys, consumers typically pay for things at a cash register.

mewing@observer.com

The Lexus he rode in on.

In a navy suit with a merino v-neck sweater over a dress shirt with no tie and an open collar, he was also underdresed for the sunny but windy chill swirling across the $1 billion Barclays Center that his firm Forest City Ratner is well into building at the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn.

“I thought it was going to be 50 degrees,” Mr. Ratner said, immediately noticing the cold.

So much at the site hasn’t gone according to plan. Mr. Ratner has waded through years of lawsuits launched by landowners who were eventually booted from buildings on the yards via emminent domain, community groups and others that oppose the 22-acre development. If that wasn’t enough, the project, one of the largest developments in city, has had to weather a deep recession and its lingering aftereffects, which have put a damper on demand and pricing for the 16 residential buildings slated for the site.

Mr. Ratner managed to break ground on the basketball arena - which will be home to the Brooklyn Nets - in 2010, just before tax free bonds the state had permitted him to issue in order to finance the arena’s construction at below-market interest rates were due to expire. The timeline for other components of the project, including the construction of three residential towers that will hug the arena, is less clear.
“I think we’ll break ground sometime this year,” was all Mr. Ratner would say, referring to the first residential building that is slated to rise at the site, a tower on the corner of Dean and Flatbush whose base will cantilever over a rear entrance to the 14,000 seat Barlcays Center. The first building will be something of a barometer, Mr. Ratner suggested. The offerings in the other two buildings, he said, be they studios, one bedrooms, or larger apartments, will be based off the market’s reception of the spaces that Forest City Ratner will offer in the first tower.

Mr. Ratner bristled when asked to make further reaching projections of progress on the Atlantic Yards site. Standing inside the arena and gazing into its nearly finished bowl of seats, The Commercial Observer’s gaze couldn’t help but trail farther, through a large entryway being used by construction vehicles. Beyond was the rest of the site, a stretch of train tracks and dirt recessed below grade that runs east for several blocks between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street.

“We’re here to talk about the arena,” Mr. Ratner snapped when asked when those portions of the development would begin.

One could forgive Mr. Ratner’s edginess given the opposition he has faced. Sensing that he had perhaps recoiled a little too fiercely, his demeanor quickly loosened.

“You have to understand, my words have been twisted around in the past,” Mr. Ratner said.

“And then all of a sudden I’m getting sued,” he added, seeming to refer to a recent suit by a group of workers who claim they were promised union jobs by Forest City Ratner for enrolling in a training program, but subsequently weren’t offered employment.
Mr. Ratner said that the company had studied 16 arenas around the country, specifically Bankers Life Fieldhouse, formerly Conseco Fieldhouse, the home of the Indiana Pacers. The problem with most arenas, such as Madison Square Garden, according to Mr. Ratner is their elevation, which forces the flow of patrons all in one direction and creates congestion.

The court at the Barclays Center is below grade, so when fans enter from ground level, depending on where they sit, they will be split between heading either up or down to their seats.

“We broke up the flow of traffic,” Mr. Ratner said. “At a place like MSG, you have everybody heading up at the start of the game and then down at the end. It creates a jam and it’s confusing. You’re forced to kind of follow the crowd just to know where you’re going.”

Mr. Ratner also pointed out that games will be partially visible from the plaza in front of the arena.

“It’s going to be the only court in the league where you can literally watch the game from the street outside,” Mr. Ratner said, pointing out the arena’s embrace of the surrounding community.

Staff Writer Daniel Geiger can be reached at Dgeiger@Observer.com

Rain man. (Getty)

That is Michael Powell's assessment of the Brooklyn developer in his column in today's Times, noting that Mr. Ratner is involved in at least two corruption scandals involving state politicians.

Federal prosecutors have not implicated him or his company, Forest City Ratner, in either of these corruption cases.

But he figures prominently enough that the indictments identify him as “Developer No. 1” in Brooklyn and “Developer No. 2” in Yonkers. In Brooklyn, he has pushed the 22-acre Atlantic Yards development, including an arena and residential towers. Forest City Ratner was the development partner for the headquarters of The New York Times Company.

Mr. Ratner has a political maestro’s touch. His vice president, Bruce Bender, is a stalwart of the Democratic Party’s powerful Thomas Jefferson Club in south Brooklyn. Its members — Mr. Kruger, Councilman Lewis A. Fidler and State Senator John L. Sampson — quickly championed this project.

Mr. Bender was a hound to the chase after public subsidies. In 2009, the city’s Independent Budget Office concluded that the arena deal would cost the city $40 million more than it would generate in tax revenue over 30 years.

Mr. Ratner, by contrast, would haul in $726 million in special public benefits.

Who says The Times never goes after Mr. Ratner. Not that the paper managed to stop either of the projects while they were in the works.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Rusted and busted. (PH Patch)

After years and years and years of delays, debates, lawsuits and left turns, things have been moving along at a favorable clip at Atlantic Yards—at least compared to past history.

Since the Barclays Center broke ground two years ago, construction has continued pretty much unabated, a few rodents notwithstanding. Meanwhile, Bruce Ratner is behind on his plans for new apartment towers, but he is also shaking things up with the idea of making them prefabricated.

It is then a little surprising to learn that the firm responsible for the facade of the new arena has abruptly shut its doors, and the completion of the Barclays Center could hang in the balance.

Atlantic Yards watchdog Norman Oder first got wind of the closure of ASI Limited, which was fabricated the distinct weathered-steel facade panels for SHoP's reclad arena. This would seem like an easily solved problem—just hire another facade consultant to complete the project—but ASI created a special purpose-built facility for the express reason of creating this facade. Consider the complexity of the project, which Mr. Oder notes is "specialized work and presumably not easily transferred," reinforced by a description of the project from SHoP:

Earlier this year ASI Limited, the facade contractor for Barclays Center, flipped the switch on for their custom built 2500′ linear conveyor system designed to accelerate the weathering process for the 12,000 individual panels and supporting rails that make up the weathering steel portion of the facade designed by SHoP Architects.

Replicating the process elsewhere could present a challenge, especially considering the weathering process was already running behind schedule, according to Mr. Oder. Add in the fact that the arena was scheduled to open in only a matter of months, and solving this problem seems as challenging as the Nets making the playoffs.

But Mr. Ratner has pulled off his fair share of buzzer beaters here before, and he and Nets owner Mikhail Prokorhov certainly seem determined to see the project through. A spokesman for the developer declined to comment: "No comment as of now." We're on the edge of our seats.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Raise high the roof beams, Mr. Ratner. (SHoP_

Last week, The Observer looked at Bruce Ratner's plans for a prefabricated Atlantic Yards project—whether he was serious about the project and whether he could achieve the steep 20 percent savings he claimed for the modular building process. A number of real estate professionals were skeptical on both counts, but they all pointed to the developers out-sized investment in prefab technology as an indicator of his seriousness. Now we know just how much of an investment that has been.

Forest City Ratner has spent $3.5 million on research and development for prefab construction, according to The Journal, which dug the number out of its annual report. Since Mr. Ratner began considering prefab apartment towers in 2009, that is more than a million dollars per year. Add to that the lawsuit Forest City helped fight, and this seems like a considerable commitment to this new approach.

This may put to rest claims that the developer was only looking at prefab as a means to break the unions and get a better rate from them on Atlantic Yards. Then again, with 15 towers containing millions of square feet of space, a few million could be but a drop in the bucket if it means bigger labor saving on the future of the site.

The entire project has been predicted to cost $5 billion, so even a 5 percent reduction in costs through labor negotiations could equal $250 million in savings. Even if Forest City Ratner were to spend $50 million researching prefab construction, if it gets the labor unions to bend and build a cheaper traditional building, that would be money well spent.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

If you build it, will they follow? (FCR)

For nine years now, Bruce Ratner has talked of transforming Brooklyn with his Atlantic Yards project. Bringing professional sports back to the borough, creating a new skyline, “a neighborhood practically from scratch,” as architect Frank Gehry once described it. There would be union jobs and affordable housing for all to enjoy.

As of now, only basketball and a handful of those jobs are guaranteed, all of which took three times as long as originally planned. Mr. Ratner and his partners like to blame the economy and the holdouts who sued to save their property, but the fact remains, they are running well behind schedule, possibly even in violation of previous commitments made to the state when the project was approved.

To catch up, Forest City Ratner has come up with a novel solution for myriad problems with his project: modular construction. More than transforming Brooklyn, Mr. Ratner may transform the way the entire city, even the world, builds. At least that is his hope.

“It’s taken us a while to get there on the architecture,” Mr. Ratner told The Observer last month on the day he unveiled his new plans for a modular approach at Atlantic Yards. “We did a lot of work to make sure it was something appropriate, in fitting in with the arena and a good reflection on Brooklyn, the city and our country.”

He is not alone in his optimism, either.

Mr. Ratner claims that with his new building process, not only will he be able to build by far the largest modular project ever, a 340,000-square-foot apartment tower rising 32 stories over Flatbush Avenue, but he will do it at a savings of 20 percent over conventional construction. He is working with an unproven technology that has been a dream of architects since Henry Ford began rolling cars off the assembly line a century ago.

Small advances have been made in the intervening, but nothing close to what Mr. Ratner is proposing has been achieved until very recently, and even then, there are questions about the viability of a project at the scale he is proposing. Mr. Ratner has admitted to falling under the spell of a YouTube video that demonstrates the current promise: a 15-story hotel erected in China in two days and finished several days after that. “That was the icing on the cake,” he said, “but we’d already been working on this for a while.”

There are those in the construction industry who view this in-sequence proposal with skepticism, but there is an equally strong tendency to simply build the next building just like the last one. Things have changed only so much since the pyramids. At the same time, Mr. Ratner is in the process of winning over once-wary construction unions. They had once feared losing good-paying jobs over a quicker, cheaper building process, much of the savings of which comes from off-site construction, but a number of union officials The Observer spoke with were sanguine about the prospects presented by prefab. Forest City is in the midst of negotiating the specifics of its plan with them.

“I think prefab is the wave of the future, and I think it will come to New York,” said Patricia Lancaster, a former Department of Buildings commissioner now teaching at NYU. “The only question is when and how much power the unions have to do something about it.” She points to the expiration of the New York Plan in January, the overarching arbitration agreement that governs the unions. “After that, anything could happen.”

Forest City is proposing building 40 percent of its project out of more than 930 modules, which will be made in a factory, trucked onto the site, hoisted into place and finished there. Because the prefab process reduces the materials, time, energy and exposure of the total project, as well as employing lower-cost union labor, it could greatly reduce the price of the project. Forest City predicts 20 percent savings from these measures, and hopes to drive the cost further down, as it continues to build the rest of its 15 apartment towers on the 22-acre site.

“Atlantic Yards is the only place this could ever happen,” Forest City Ratner executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said. “Nowhere else could you find the scale to justify building a new factory on spec.”

Once the project is up and running, Forest City believes its presumed success will attract other developers to the modules, which are being built by a firm called XSite. Forest City’s requirements drove off a handful of modular firms considering working on the project, as revealed by the dogged blogger Norman Oder in October. One of these, Kullman Offsite Construction, sued XSite, as a number of the firm’s employees left and ultimately joined Mr. Ratner’s efforts. The suit was dismissed in July.

“In a way, it’s been an R&D project, not just a ‘D’ project,” Mr. Ratner said.

We've been dreaming prefab dreams for decades. (Getty)

Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, believes Forest City has no choice but to go prefab to make the project viable. “Just start putting it together: a tough construction market, a commitment to build union, a commitment to build affordable housing, to build infrastructure, this is a bear of a development challenge,” he said. “They’re between a rock and a hard place, and this may be their only option.”

The fact that prefab, after decades of dreaming, could finally take off is what has so many unions interested. The current assumption is that the bulk of residential construction will still be built through conventional means, but the market for affordable housing, where modular has already enjoyed some minor success, could be huge. After all, half of the first tower at Atlantic Yards, and 30 percent of its total apartments, will be set aside for low- and middle-income families.

“Unions have never really had any kind of hold in the world of affordable housing,” one labor source said. “We are taking it slow, but there is huge potential upside here.” If the labor agreement between unions, contractors, Forest City Ratner and XSite is properly written, it could ensure union jobs on many future prefab projects, and not just in the factory, but in the field, as well.

And for an industry with the highest unemployment in the city, hovering around 30 percent, construction workers cannot exactly say no to new work. If prefab means more jobs, as some of the more than 600 stalled construction projects across the five boroughs are revived, it could even mean more work. And Forest City has talked of exporting prefab modules across the country and even the globe, which could mean yet more jobs.

Given the complexity of building a 32-story prefab tower—with taller ones to come—a number of building professionals were suspicious the firm could achieve the 20 percent cost savings Forest City has been boasting about. Among them is Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Planning & Housing Council and a former housing commissioner in both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, where she worked on a number of low-income modular projects. “I’m not against modular. I think it has its place,” she said. “I don’t think it’s like discovering fire.”

Even boosters of the process are ambivalent about modular’s prospects. “You go down this path, you promise a lot of things,” one engineer who has done modular work said. “Whether or not you realize those things, it remains to be seen. It’ll be cool if it works, but it’s a pretty heavy lift.”

Among the challenges facing Forest City is that to build the tallest modular structure in the world would require a structural system the likes of which has never been achieved. “Technology moves very fast, people move very slow,” Ms. Lancaster countered. Indeed, SHoP, the architects behind the arena and apartment towers, had two separate design teams working on the project at once, walled off from each other. They used different engineers and everything, had a mini architecture competition, and the prefab team came out on top.

Despite the promise at Atlantic Yards, there is skepticism of the applicability of prefab elsewhere. Simply getting modules over the bridges and into Manhattan would seem to pose a challenge, not to mention the tight streets. Such a building in the Financial District seems remote. Regardless, almost everyone in the industry seems to be rooting for Forest City.

"It's interesting how New Yorkers have a hard time thinking outside the box sometimes," said Jennifer Murphy, a vice-president at Plaza Construction. "For such a forward-thinking city, we can really lag behind. Maybe this will be the turning point."

If modular happens, it would be a miracle. But then again, so is the fact Atlantic Yards is being built in the first place.

mchaban@observer.com

That friendly man was Bruce Ratner, head of Forest City Ratner Companies, who had no  idea that he had just invited two reporters from The Commercial Observer to join him.

When we—colleague and fellow "Dan" Daniel Geiger is here as well—introduced ourselves to Mr. Ratner, he politely asked that we not ask him anything on the record. So we did not, and instead shared a nice conversation about growing up in New York City—he is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and I grew up blocks away from where he lives now on the Upper East Side—and on the imminent return of the NBA.

In person, Mr. Ratner is a delightful and forthcoming chap—nevermind that his vision for a basketball arena in Brooklyn has also included the removal of homeowners living in Prospect Heights through the use of eminent domain.

We were among the 6,600 people in attendance at the 2011 International Council of Shopping Centers' New York National Conference and Deal Making, an annual convention that brings the biggest names in retail and commercial brokerage and situates them in a string of booths along the comfy expanses of The Hilton New York.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg was scheduled to give the opening remarks at the event, and he arrived moments after we did and gave Mr. Ratner a hearty greeting.

The Mayor then took the podium, where he proceeded to tell the attendance how New York, in all her glory, has thrived in retail where the rest of the nation has not.

"Every way you look at it, I think it's fair to say retailing is the key industry, a $78 billion-a-year industry, employs more than 300,000 jobs, and makes up roughly 10 percent of our private sector employment," said Bloomberg.

The city has regained two-thirds of the jobs lost in the recession, he said, and the city's commercial real estate market is the strongest in the nation.

"People are clearly confident in New York's future, and want to be a part of that future themselves, and there's a lot of evidence for it," Mayor Bloomberg added.

That evidence has been foot traffic. The city's population is at an all-time high - over 8 million - and the city remains to be a top tourist draw throughout the US.

Mayor Bloomberg expects 50 million tourists to have visited New York City by year's end, and 90,000 hotel rooms by the close of December (a big bump from the 30,000 hotel rooms that existed roughly a decade ago, he estimates).

In short that is a lot of feet (100 million, be they real or prosthetic). Of course, that many feet translates into the more annoying byproducts of a tourist boom: Namely, crowded streets and traffic jams.

"Lot's of cities don't have crowded streets. While traffic is an annoyance, it's also a symbol of the number of people that want to be here, and the same thing can be said not having enough housing," he added.

Retail spending by international visitors was 37 percent higher during the third quarter of this year, he said.

And growth is not just limited to Manhattan. The Mayor urged attendees to venture out to the outer boroughs.

"During the past 10 years we've worked very hard to try to make sure that the growth of retailing, as well as the growth in our cultural institutions and job creation is through all five boroughs, but retailing is, for example, in our initiative to build and preserve affordable housing for nearly half-a-million New Yorkers," said Mayor Bloomberg.

There have been a host of mixed-use developments in the outer-boroughs - like The West Farms Development  in the Bronx (spearheaded by former speaker of the City Council Gifford Miller) and The Ironstate Development Company's $150 million project at a former Naval port base in Staten Island - that have been announced in recent weeks, each riding on the premise that these retail-friendly developments will bring affordable housing and economic opportunities to neighborhoods in need.

Through the city's affordable housing initiative, it has created enough retail space  - 650,000 square feet in the past seven years alone - to house the MoMa, he added.

"By zeroing in on what has long been underused land throughout the city and combining that with targeted public investments, we've created the potential going forward for millions of new square feet of retail space in all five boroughs," he added.

Downtown Brooklyn's population is thirty times greater than what it was ten years, and more than 150,000 shoppers visit the area every single business day, he said. Sugar and Plumm and America's BBQ Company will be moving into the area, he added.

And then the Mayor referenced The Atlantic Yards project, the controversial - and thriving - development headed by my esteemed new seat mate (Mr. Ratner, not Mr. Geiger). The Mayor joked that he had already bought himself a Nets ticket for when the team relocates from New Jersey to Brooklyn in 2012.

"I bought mine. Did you send me a bill yet?" Mayor Mike asked Mr. Ratner.

"I sure did. Better question is have you paid yet?" chuckled Mr. Ratner.

In short, New York's cards are the best cards to play, emphasized Mayor Mike. And he asked the brokers and retailers in attendance to venture to the outer boroughs, and to take heed to the fact that 2 out of every 5 people who live here were born outside the United States.

And with that, he exited the ballroom, with Mr. Ratner rushing to join him.

Farewell, Mr. Ratner. It's been real.

drosen@observer.com

Slam doink. (Getty)

Brooklyn may be home to a swelling creative class, but all that brain power—or at least that of Jay-Z, Bruce Ratner and Mikhail Prokhorov—could do no better than "the Brooklyn Nets" when it comes to naming the team, which moves to the borough next season. The Observer was really pulling for the Brooklyn Queens Expressways or the BroBos, but our dreams were rejected like a Kris Humphreys lay-up.

"We're going to create an atmosphere like only Brooklyn can," Jigga said in a press release. As our colleague Drew Grant informs us, Jay-Z will also be the first act at the Barclays Centre when it opens sometime next summer, with plans for eight shows among other festivities beginning September 28. That's just a year and two days away. Jay had better get pickling if he's going to have enough snacks ready in time.

Correction: An earlier version of this post originally mispelt Mr. Humphreys' name as "Chris Humphries." The Observer regrets the brick.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The group will find its new home at the soon-to-be-built Barclays Center on Flatbush and Atlantic Ave., as part of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards Project that's been going so well. Jay himself announced the official name in a "brief and anticlimactic" ceremony in New Jersey today.

So starting on September 28th, the pre-season for the Brooklyn Nets  will include three weeks of festivities, including eight concerts by Jay-Z. Hopefully this will give Jay comped front-row tickets to the games, as a season VIP pass will run customers $15,400. And what happens if Jay and Beyonce are still photographed at Knicks games when he's telling everyone else to switch their allegiance? Does that hurt his endorsement in a team that he's soon to become the campaign face for? (Get ready, lower Manhattan!)

This is why guys like Jay-Z need to follow their own advice and not be a businessman, but a business, man.

Raise high the roof beams, Bruce. (NBA.com)

Here comes the next round in the city’s most intractable debate over the further development of Atlantic Yards, as it appears that exactly one week ago, Forest City Ratner filed its first building application for a residential tower on the corner of Dean Street and Flatbush Avenue.

The Observer’s initial read of the DOB application, which Brownstoner turned up today, details Bruce & Co.’s intention to build a residential tower that will run 33 stories tall and 375,000 square feet large. Although there is no word yet on whether this tower will be the pre-fabricated tower that got us so excited back in March, it is clear from the filing that, in keeping with the company’s initial agreement to develop the Atlantic Yards site, approximately half of the new building’s 368 units would be reserved for affordable housing.

What is most telling about the filing is not contained in the document itself but in the mere action of its filing.

As The Observer reported in the fall, Forest City Ratner planned to begin construction on the project during the first half of this year. While it has missed that mark, there was suspicion nothing would get built this year at all. Herewith is the first proof that might not actually be the case.

According to Forest City Ratner, everything is moving ahead as planned. "The permits were filed as standard operating procedure as we move forward," Director of Commercial & Residential Development MaryAnne Gilmartin said in a statement. "We are still designing both prefab and conventional alternatives for the first residential building at Atlantic Yards and are shooting for a year end groundbreaking. We hope to show renderings to the public during the 4th quarter of this year."

tmcenery@observer.com