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MIXED-USE PROS SAY GOOD PR VITAL FOR SUCCESS

By Curt Hazlett

It might have seemed like a slam dunk when Forest City Ratner Cos. in 2004 proposed a $4 billion mixed-use project in Brooklyn, N.Y., that would include an arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team. A third of the 22-acre project would be built over some rail yards; old factory buildings occupy much of the rest of the site. Besides, Brooklyn has not had a home team to root for since baseball’s Dodgers packed up for Los Angeles in 1958.

Yet the Atlantic Yards project has been a battleground. Residents of the borough’s Prospect Heights and Park Slope neighborhoods have aimed a torrent of criticism at the project and at Forest City Ratner, an affiliate of Forest City Enterprises.

A Web site titled Develop, Don’t Destroy Brooklyn touts their belief that sweetheart land deals have been put together, that the project will create gridlock and that eminent domain is being abused. Forest City Ratner rebuts these charges on the project’s Web site and says Atlantic Yards will be “one of the most important developments in the history of Brooklyn.”

Atlantic Yards is controversial both because of its size — the plan calls for 6,400 housing units, a hotel and a quarter-million square feet of retail, in addition to the arena — and because it has been proposed in a densely populated area filled with vocal constituencies. But the reaction is far from unusual. Across the United States, mixed-use projects are facing opposition as never before, forcing developers to become experts not just at planning and design but also at managing public opinion.

In the town of Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Long Island, opponents have rallied to stop a 166-acre, mixed-use development called Old Plainview, even posting an anti-growth petition online. To counter them, the developers — New York Islanders owner Charles Wang and RexCorp Realty — have held meetings and run newspaper ads. It’s too early to know the outcome.

In Simsbury, Conn., Konover Development Corp. proposed a project on 60 acres zoned for industrial. Even before a plan was unveiled, residents formed a group to oppose it. To blunt the criticism, Konover worked with environmentally friendly designers whose plan would protect the neighborhood’s scale and character. The formal proposal is just beginning to move forward.

In Broward County, Fla., Forest City Enterprises has gotten the green light to start construction on The Village at Gulfstream Park, a huge project that will add housing, retail and hotel space to the famous horse-racing park. Getting to “yes” took a concerted communication effort and hours of community meetings. “There were concerns that needed to be addressed and people who wanted to understand what was going on, so we had to step up and be responsive,” said Will Voegele, Forest City’s vice president of commercial development and the manager of the project.

Chalk it all up to the rising power of the not-in-my-backyard movement.

“The real estate industry is coming to realize that managing the community outreach process is as important as getting financing for a project, because political and community resistance can delay or stop a project dead,” said Debra Stein, president of GCA Strategies, a San Francisco public affairs firm that builds community support for controversial projects. Stein is author of a landmark 1992 book on the topic, titled Winning Community Support for Land Use Projects.

In Stein’s view, outreach needs to begin “when a proposal is merely a twinkle in the developer’s eye,” and it should consist of more than just a few meetings and a direct-mail campaign. Developers need to use opinion research to identify messages and arguments that make a project compelling, she says.

“What matters is what’s persuasive, not popular,” Stein said. “Child care centers are very popular. No one will say they don’t want a child care center in a mixed-use project, but most research shows they won’t cause people to shift from opposition to support.”

At one project, research showed that restoring a creek and building soccer fields was popular among neighbors. But the research also showed that this would not persuade opponents to change their minds, she says. What would? Equestrian trails.

“We found we could counteract almost half the objections to the project’s density through building equestrian trails,” Stein said. The result: Approval was granted for higher density than competing projects.

Stein identifies four reasons that people oppose projects. First, there is misperception (“everyone hates the project”) or misinformation (“it’ll cause gridlock”). Then there is the resentment of those who feel slighted because their input was not sought or who feel otherwise disrespected. The third reason is moral opposition — from those who believe that green space needs to be preserved at all costs, for instance. And last, there are those who oppose a project because it genuinely conflicts with their interests.

Strong, consistent communication can help defuse any of these types of opposition, but three of the four “have nothing specifically to do with the project itself,” Stein said. “In only one — the kind based on conflicts of interest, where your development project will have an impact on the status quo — should a developer engage in negotiations or concessions.”

Though Stein says she believes personal lobbying is good — “I’ve always told my clients that sitting on Mrs. Smith’s sofa and letting the cat shed on your lap is a lot less expensive than making concessions” — she stresses that it is a mistake to try to turn every opponent into a supporter.

“It might be simply a political race to the finish line to see who can pack the town council chambers with the most people when it comes to the final hearing,” she said.

That may be so, but developers are working hard to bring people over to their side early. This was the case with The Village at Gulfstream Park, a 55-acre project that will be built next to the Gulfstream Park racetrack, in Hallandale Beach, Fla. The project is a big undertaking: 1,500 condos, 750,000 square feet of retail, 140,000 square feet of office space, a hotel and a cinema, all to be built over 15 years.

The challenge for Forest City Enterprises was to “understand the community’s concerns early in the process and communicate the project’s benefits,” said Voegele. Traffic was high on the list. “Making sure you could get people in and out of the project was very important to people,” Voegele said. Affordable housing and schools were important too, he says.

The developer held community meetings promoted in full-page newspaper ads. “Some of them had five or 10 people, and some had 60 or 75 or 100,” Voegele said. “I stood up there and made a presentation that was designed to inform and to address concerns, and then we opened it up to discussion. A lot of what we were doing was building confidence in us as a company.”

To ease worries about transit, Forest City created a plan to improve traffic flows in the area. The firm will spend $3 million to help develop a light-rail station. It will build 225 units of affordable housing, both on-site and in the community. And it has committed $2 million to Broward County to improve schools.

The result? “There’s no question we were successful,” said Voegele. The project won final approval from the city in November, and at press time the firm was expecting to break ground before summer.

To Voegele, the lesson for developers is simply that “you have to be there — you have to make yourself available. There are complexities everywhere you develop today, and our job is to understand and address them.”