Theresa Toro points out the Greenpoint/Williamsburg community plan, whose difficulty of finding I lamented earlier.

I’ll continue to take the community groups to task for not promoting their own visions enough. It shouldn’t have been even the slightest bit hard to find the Greenpoint/Williamsburg plan - they should have been shouting it from the rooftops and more importantly linking to it from rezoning-opposition sites.

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn has about 30 links and PDFs about how bad Ratner’s plan is - “Anatomy of a Sweetheart Deal”, “Boondoggle Basics”, and various position statements. Then, somewhere below the fold, buried on the right sidebar, is a tiny “alternative plans” section with one link, the UNITY Development Plan. I wish a group called Develop Don’t Destroy spent a little more of its ink talking about its vision for the Develop part, and a little less than the current 99% on the Don’t Destroy part.

The UNITY plan looks nice to me, with a couple of elements I really like, such as adding more street connections (rather than taking them away - superblocks are already an awful feature of the crap that’s there now, like the Atlantic Center mall), and a mix of parks, retail, and residential. That document still spends several pages criticizing the Ratner proposal BEFORE it talks about its own ideas, however.

Now the opponents of the Atlantic Yards plan have scored a big win as Extell Development Company submitted a competing proposal that would develop the railyards without destroying existing buildings. So wouldn’t it be nice if Develop Don’t Destroy or any of the other sites put that plan online? All I can find is a few concept sketches, but only by searching Google, not from the DDDB site.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.