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What Are The Odds That The NY Court of Appeals Will Admit Its Own Decision on Atlantic Yards Was Wrong?
December 10, 2009 by Neil · 2 Comments
In a valiant Hail Mary attempt to run down the clock, the plaintiffs who lost their eminent domain lawsuit in the Atlantic Yards case have moved to re-argue their case before the New York State Court of Appeals.
The basis for this motion is the Court’s recent decision against Columbia University to use eminent domain to condemn nearby properties. The Court in the Columbia matter ruled that Columbia’s basis for invoking eminent domain was a sham. In order to claim eminent domain, Columbia argued that the areas it wanted condemned were “blighted.” They were blighted, according to Columbia, because they were not built to their full floor area ratio, or FAR.
Justice James Catterson wrote that “counting any lot built to 60% or less of maximum FAR as constituting a blighted condition” is a “wholly arbitrary standard.”
In a delicious irony, this is the exact same ratio used in the Atlantic Yards Blight Study. (Hat Tip: Atlantic Yards Report)
Multifamily Investor agrees that the Columbia and Atlantic Yards cases are, indeed, factually indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the chances of the Court re-hearing this matter, let alone deciding that it was wrong only a month ago, are about as high as Gatorade putting all its marketing muscle behind its Tiger Woods beverage.
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2 Responses to “What Are The Odds That The NY Court of Appeals Will Admit Its Own Decision on Atlantic Yards Was Wrong?”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] not within its rights to invoke the same doctrine on behalf of Columbia University. The cases are factually indistinguishable (though Columbia as an educational institution has a stronger case to advance for “public [...]
[...] This site and many other observers were stunned when the Court of Appeals recently ruled against Columbia University on an eminent domain matter that was factually indistinguishable from Atlantic Yards. [...]