UPTOWNflavor

Not everyone is thrilled about Major League Baseball (MLB) coming to Harlem.  Diane DeGrassi writes about MLB scoring a financial homerun by the time all the corporate welfare (tax abatements, incentives and bonds) has been tallied up and accounted.  Read the scathing article she wrote for Sportscolumn.com.

It is bad enough that much of MLB’s revenues come by way of the very taxpayers it seeks to disenfranchise, and namely the African-American communities in the inner cities. However, now they are after even more.

This latest feat by MLB should make even bona fide global capitalists wince. For in a coup by one of the largest realty developers in the United States, Vornado Realty Trust, has been granted by New York City’s Planning Commission a waiver on building height restrictions on 125th Street and Park Avenue, which is the main thoroughfare of the historic neighborhood known as Harlem.

In addition, Bloomberg has been campaigning to rezone the entirety of Harlem allowing massive buildings as tall as 29 stories in order to attract even more major corporate partners.

As part of the waiver to Vornado, which raises the height limit to 21 stories, or an additional four stories, in this mixed-use residential and commercial area, the building will include 630,000 square feet of office space and will contain a variety of corporate businesses.

With the steep rise in real estate costs in New York City, many corporate entities are willing to move uptown to save on leasing costs, even at the expense of displacing thousands of people from their residences or crushing over 70 small local businesses in the neighborhoods made up of African-Americans and Hispanic communities.

Of significance, is that those four extra stories, most likely to be approved by the New York City Council in the near future, will be occupied by none other than MLB and its new cable television baseball channel. MLB would occupy two floors for executive offices and the top two floors for television studios.

However, the Vornado organization also gave New York City an ultimatum along with the height restriction being lifted. They said that without the additional four stories it would be a deal-breaker for them attracting MLB as an anchor tenant in its building and thereby the whole deal would be off.

It also gets even worse, as Vornado also demanded $15 million in a public funding incentive package for itself and an additional $5 million package of incentives to be paid directly to MLB by the City of new York. Out of that $5 million package part of it would be allowed to cover the costs for redecorating Commissioner Bud Selig’s MLB headquarter offices at 245 Park Avenue, in mid-town Manhattan. This brings but new meaning to corporate-welfare.

Read the whole article here.

Related: New York Times[Feb. 27, 2007]