What’s next for Atlantic Yards? How about a giant parking lot?

At least, that’s what some Brooklynites fear is coming in light of developer Bruce Ratner’s announcement that the recessionary climate has stalled parts of the $4 billion project.

“He’s demolished a number of buildings,” said Tish James, the area’s City Councilwoman and a vocal critic of the project, at a recent City Hall hearing on congestion pricing. “I don’t want those lots to be turned into parking lots.”

Ratner has said construction on the 18,000-seat arena was scheduled to begin by yearend, but other parts of the project’s first phase — housing, retail and an office tower dubbed “Miss Brooklyn” — are on hold.

Some have already predicted that if congestion pricing becomes a reality, a boom in parking lots and garages will soon follow in easy-access portions of the outer boroughs.

James said she is worried about the parking-lot scenario at Atlantic Yards because “it’s a revenue generator and right now [land is] sitting fallow.”

Currently, empty land in the 22-acre development site has attracted the homeless and illegal dumping, James said. A Ratner rep insisted the land would not be turned into parking lots.

But looking at New York’s history wih clearing large swaths of blighted land for development, idyllic visions have a way of turning into vacant lots. In the Rockaways, 300 acres of waterfront property sat vacant for 40 years after a slum-clearance project.

And the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in the Lower East Side — where nearly 2,000 families were displaced more than 40 years ago as part of a federal program to build new low-income housing — remains empty, much of it used for parking lots.

The plans died when federal money dried up and then political problems arose over who would get the housing, explained Marci Reaven, director of City Lore’s Place Matters Project.

“This period from the announcement of ‘public action’ to the actual implementation of renewal has always been a very vulnerable time, fraught with potential problems,” Reaven said. “Historical experience would suggest that plans should be scaled to accommodate that fact of life.”

Source: Metro NY