of affordable housing on the north side of Atlantic Avenue. Baruch College also considered moving but was stymied by the City's fiscal crisis. The seeds of gentrification were planted with the establishment of the Fort Greene Historic District in 1978. In the 1980s, a Fort Greene block association and other homeowners sued over an environmental impact statement that failed to consider how rerouted traffic would affect their neighborhood, one block away from the project. Then an economic downturn compounded community opposition. The Times reported that the stock market collapse had deterred office construction. "A lot of people are reassessing their expansion plans," James Stuckey, president of the city's Public Development Corporation, told the Times in 1988. Development The current project's name, devised by developer Forest City Ratner, relates to the rail yard located between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street. Officially, the Long Island Rail Road yard is called the "Vanderbilt Yard" by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (named for Vanderbilt Avenue that crosses over on its way to the Brooklyn Navy Yard). The LIRR's nearby Atlantic Terminal station is the westernmost stop of the Atlantic Branch. Easy access by rapid transit and suburban rail, and the desirable brownstone housing stock nearby made it a target for speculative development. The Pacific Park project is being developed and overseen by Forest City Ratner, an arm of Forest City Enterprises, of Cleveland, Ohio. The original master plan and some individual buildings were developed by architect Frank Gehry. Gehry was removed from the project in June 2009. After September 2009, the design for what became Barclays Center became a collaboration between Ellerbe Becket and the Manhattan architectural firm SHoP Architects. Pacific Park, overseen by the Empire State Development Corporation, is supposed to be a public-private project, Bruce Ratner told Crain's New York Business in November 2009. In March 2008, principal developer Bruce Ratner acknowledged that the slowing economy may delay construction of both the office and residential components of the project for several years. At this point, its design included the arena being surrounded by Miss Brooklyn, a Frank Gehry-designed office building and three residential buildings in its first phase. Forest City sent a letter signed by Gehry to CEOs of many of New York's biggest corporations inviting them to be tenants. The city and state had provided $58 million of the $300 million promised in public funds for the project. On June 23, 2008,