From the Times Ledger:Developers of the $3 million Willets Point project are not contractually required to build affordable housing in part because the city wants to shield itself from a potential lawsuit.
The Bloomberg administration did not want to risk paying out legal damages to the developers — Related Cos. and Sterling Equities, the real estate arm of the New York Mets — should the city fail to build additional ramps off the Van Wyck Expressway, an essential precursor to constructing the housing component of the project, officials and the companies said at a recent meeting.
“If for some unforeseen reason [the ramps] didn’t get built, they didn’t want us to have a right to sue the city,” Glen Goldstein, president of Related Retail, said at an April 25 meeting with Community Board 7. “It was done so there would be no liability from the city to the joint venture.”
After passing the City Council with much fanfare over the affordable housing component of the project in 2008, the 62-acre project was subsequently split into two phases by the Bloomberg administration.
The first phase was then split into two more phases by the joint venture, which inked a contract with the city in August 2012 to develop 23 acres.
The first phase entails cleaning the historically contaminated soil. Then the Queens Development Group will build a hotel and small retail stores along 126th Street across from Citi Field, a temporary parking lot behind that and a 1.4 million-square-foot mall west of Citi Field in a parking lot leased to the Mets.
The housing component, including affordable units, is slated to be built on the temporary parking lot in the second phase beginning in 2024, but there is no guarantee that will happen. The ramps are required to start, yet the city is not required to build them.
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