Delays in $4 Billion Brooklyn Development Are Challenged in Tenants’ Lawsuit

The ever-lengthening timeline for completing the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn is not just bad news for those who hoped to see the project’s basketball arena, office towers and apartment blocks completed quickly.

It is also, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, illegal.

The suit challenges an agreement between the project’s state sponsor, the Empire State Development Corporation, and the developer, Forest City Ratner, that gives Forest City at least 12 years to complete just the first phase of the project and an unspecified amount of time after that to build the second, final phase.

The agreement, the suit says, violates a provision in the state’s eminent-domain law, under which the state agency intends to seize private buildings on Forest City’s behalf. The law says a seized property must be offered back to its prior holder if it is not “materially improved” in 10 years.