A top official overseeing Brooklyn’s $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project is being accused by one of its biggest supporters of making insensitive comments about a green-card program being used to raise funds for the cash-strapped plan.
Former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis — who was largely responsible for garnering key grass-roots support for the planned Prospect Heights development that includes an NBA arena – told the Post yesterday that she wants developer Forest City Ratner’s vice-president MaryAnne Gilmartin to apologize for comments reportedly made at a recent Manhattan public event.
“As citizen Gilmartin, I’m not sure how I feel about it. This is not your cleaning lady’s green card program,” Gilmartin is quoted in the New York Observer saying while speaking at the New York Commercial Real Estate Woman Inc. event.
She was referring to the federal “EB-5” program, which gives green cards to investors of at least $500,000 in US job-creating projects. FCR expects to raise $249 million through 498 Chinese and South Korean nationals buying their way into America.
Why is she dragging cleaning ladies into this?” Lewis said. “It makes me sad because my aunts and grandmother were cleaning women, and there’s a lot of educated people in this country who are cleaning women.
“What is she saying? That rich people can buy their way into the country but the heck with the poor?”
Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn), a staunch Atlantic Yards opponent, said “this is a rare case” where she agrees with Lewis and also called on Gilmartin to apologize for “insensitive remarks.”
“These comments disrespect the dignity of working-class people, who Forest City Ratner and the Atlantic Yard project have displaced to create their version of an ‘urban oasis’ — one that apparently doesn’t include cleaning ladies,” James said.
FCR spokesman Joe DePlasco said Gilmartin realizes her comments were “inappropriate” but says they “were taken completely out of context.” DePlasco said Gilmartin was talking about how best to raise money for a project “expected to bring the city thousands of units of affordable housing. “
The two-decade-old federal cash-for-green cards program has rarely been used in the Big Apple, but the city-run Brooklyn Navy Yard last year also tapped into it to help raise $125 million for projects there.
Former Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg and Borough President Marty Markowitz all assisted FCR in its campaign to attract overseas investors through EB-5, and some critics have charged that the potential investors were given misleading data by FCR about the benefits of Atlantic Yards.