Ratner funds BUILD to bash the bid from Extell Development Company (they have claimed Extell would not work with the community, is racist because they've partnered with the Carlyle group in the past, has a lower bid when it was not true).

Ratner funds BUILD to rally against the districtÕs Councilwoman, Letitia James and accused her of being racist, and against jobs and housing..

Ratner funds BUILD to create racial tension and divisiveness in the community by threatening, at a rally, that an MTA vote against Ratner would equal a vote against Black people.
Ratner funds BUILD to use racially charged language at public hearings and meetings and in the press.

Ratner funds BUILD to while BUILD claims it has community support by claiming financial support from the community, when itÕs financing comes entirely from Ratner.

Ratner funds BUILD to bus people into public hearings - and likely paying them to fill up the room so that opponents could not get in. *

* Excerpted from reporter Aaron NaparstekÕs New York Press article from July, 2005 article,
Same as the Old Boss

At about 7:00 a.m. on the morning of the vote, Brooklyn neighborhood advocates started lining up in front of the MTA's Madison Avenue office. They were late. The first nine spots in line belonged to Ratner supporters from an organization called Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development. BUILD members had been camped out in front of the building since midnight.

BUILD is what you call an "astroturf" organization. The group is designed to look, sound and feel grassroots but it was conceived in the Forest City Ratner board room with the express purpose of providing the developer a "community organization" it could deal with. The mission of BUILD, ostensibly, is to create jobs for Brooklyn's unemployed. Notably, the organization has been in business for about a year and a half and the only jobs it has created are the staff positions at BUILD.

Also around 7:00 a.m. a caterer arrived dropping off "what seemed like enough boxed lunches and drinks to feed half the people in Prospect Heights," according to Eric McClure, a neighborhood advocate from Park Slope. A gaggle of cell phone-bearing Forest City p.r. women in designer threads distributed the grub to the BUILD folks. Then a livery van rolled in and unloaded about a dozen more BUILD people. The Ratner crew also continued to multiply. At one point, McClure estimates there were as many as 20 Forest City staff people bustling about the sidewalk.