Officials from New York state say it is not collecting millions of dollars in penalties from the real estate firm behind the failed Atlantic Yards affordable housing project because the company threatened to sue them if they tried, according to the Gothamist.
The development firm Greenland USA owes more than $1.75 million in monthly fines for failing to deliver nearly 900 units of affordable housing in what is now called Pacific Park by the end of May, if the state honored the terms of a 2014 legal agreement.
But an executive from New York’s Empire State Development said the state let them slide after Greenland, which has defaulted on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to its investors, threatened to sue, Gothamist reported.
“They have expressed that there's unavoidable delays that prevented them from meeting the affordable housing deadline,” Joel Kolkmann senior vice president of Empire State Development, told members of a community task force on Aug. 6. “They have more or less expressed that, should we seek the collection, there would be litigation and that would stall the project.”
The Atlantic Yards redevelopment was first conceived in 2003 and was supposed to create 2,250 affordable apartments in buildings surrounding the centerpiece Barclays Center. The project included property seized through eminent domain. More than two decades later, only 1,374 affordable units have been completed and developers have yet to begin construction of a platform atop the railyard east of the arena where additional affordable units were planned, the news site said.
