Owner of Pacific Park defaults on site, auction set for January

As 'Atlantic Yards,' project saw plenty of controversy

December 5, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Here’s a glimpse of Barclays Center with some of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park apartment towers in the background. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

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PROSPECT HEIGHTS — The company that has owned the controversial and delay-plagued Pacific Park development in part or in whole since 2014 is about to lose control of the 22-acre site in Prospect Heights.

The company Greenland USA has defaulted on nearly $350 million worth of loans, according to The Real Deal, a well-known New York real estate publication. Its lender, U.S. Immigration Fund, which raised money through the cash-for-visas EB-5 scheme, has moved to foreclose on the site. An auction is scheduled for Jan. 11 of next year, several media outlets reported.

Greenland USA is the American arm of Greenland Holdings, a Chinese company. It went into partnership with the previous owner, Forest City Ratner, in 2014, and by 2019 had secured 95 percent of the development.

It was also in 2014 when the name of the development was changed from Atlantic Yards — the name it had when it was the focus of one of the biggest controversy in modern Brooklyn — to Pacific Park.

Here’s a glimpse of the Pacific Park development in 2019. — Here’s a glimpse of the Pacific Park development, originally called Atlantic Yards, in 2019. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

Just this past summer, Greenland received permission to begin the first phase of a platform over the MTA’s below-ground Long Island Rail Road yards near the LIRR’s Atlantic Terminal station. This was always a centerpiece of the plan.

In an earlier Real Deal article, a Greenland spokesperson hinted that the discontinuation of the state’s 421a program, which gave developers tax exemptions in return for building affordable housing, might cause problems down the road.

One of the “selling points” of Pacific Park was always the fact that it would contain affordable, as well as market-rate, housing, although some community groups questioned exactly how affordable this housing really was.

The best-known element of the Pacific Park plan was always Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty, former home of the New York Islanders, and host to big-name mega-concerts. Barclays Center was proposed way back in 2004 when the original developer, Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner Companies, purchased the site.

For the next few years, a huge battle played out in local political circles and the courts between organized neighborhood residents, who objected to Forest City Ratner’s use of eminent domain to build the arena, and the developer, in alliance with state and city government.

Finally, Forest City Ratner won out and the arena opened in 2012, although Bruce Ratner, who professed to be a big-time basketball fan, soon sold it and the team to Russian businessperson Mikhail Prokhorov. Nowadays, Joseph Tsai, who owns the Nets basketball team, is also chairperson of Barclays Center.

This August 2019 photo shows 550 Vanderbilt Ave., seen from the corner of Dean Street. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

As far as the housing component of Pacific Park is concerned, some of the buildings were indeed constructed and occupied, although not at the pace its advocates originally envisioned.

The first, 461 Dean St., opened in 2016. It attracted attention because it was built with modular construction — a technique in which portions of the building are constructed off site, then trucked to the building location and joined together there.

At the time, many of the anti-Ratner forces questioned whether modular construction was safe for such a tall building. However, not only was 461 Dean St., which Eagle reporter Lore Croghan called an “eye-popping, cherry-red tower,” completed, it proudly advertises itself as the tallest modular building in the United States.

Also completed are 38 Sixth Ave., 535 Carlton Ave., 550 Vanderbilt Ave. and a few others. BTW, most of these buildings are advertised as “pet-friendly,” for what that’s worth.