EDC has selected the Related Companies to turn the historic 575,000-square-foot building in Kingsbridge Heights into a mixed-use development encompassing retail stores, entertainment venues, and recreation and community facilities. The Related Companies isn’t just any developer: its $12 billion national portfolio of real estate that includes Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. The Armory is the latest in a series of City-sponsored development projects awarded to Related; others include the Bronx Terminal Market and Brooklyn’s Gateway Mall.

In an impressive show of force, yesterday dozens of members of the Kingbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance, or KARA, stood in front of City Hall to call for negotiations for a community benefits agreement for the armory project — one that will include living wage jobs, space for schools, and other badly needed resources for the neighborhood. KARA is also calling for a labor peace agreement and a project labor agreement to make sure that jobs, in construction, retail, janitorial services, and more are union positions. And its members want to see amenities the area simply doesn’t have, from a bookstore to a movie theater.

KARA is being organized by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a venerable force that helped the area withstand the devastation of abandonment in the 1970s. It’s now making sure that as the tide turns the other way and new profit-seeking ventures arrive in the neighborhood, that the new development strengthens the neighborhood, which remains predominantly low-income, instead of pushing it aside.

Behind the scenes, the alliance has already made an important stride: Wth local elected officials it persuaded EDC to set up a task force of residents, businesses and local leaders to set standards for the armory’s redevelopment. EDC proceeded to give preference in its selection process to developers who would agree to pay living wages, create community space, and support the neighborhood in other essential ways.

There was just one problem: neither of the viable proposals, from Related and from Atlantic Development Group, included any of those things. The preferences therefore meant nothing, and Related’s winning proposal looks like any other plan to develop a shopping and recreation center (its closest kin in the New York area is probably New Roc City, in downtown New Rochelle).

Now KARA is doing something extremely gutsy: It is trying to wrest the whole concept of a community benefits agreement back from the jaws of elected officials who have perverted it beyond recognition, so much so that New Yorkers who pay attention to development simply assume that a CBA is one step removed from a shakedown. (Check out the comments on blogs and news sites if you’d like to think that’s not true.) And you can’t exactly fault that perception, given “CBAs” like the Yankee Stadium deal that basically gives Bronx officials a pile of money they can spend in any way they want, plus an ample supply of free sports equipment.

The question now is: how is KARA going to change the script here? After all, EDC has already selected Related. Here on The Eminent Domain we’ll be following the story as KARA works to get Related to the bargaining table. KARA members will be providing updates on their campaign and vision for the neighborhood.

But the situation highlights a glaring reality: New York City is suffering from its lack of a citywide framework for how economic development projects like this happen. All over the city we’re seeing citizens wage campaigns to make development more responsive to its host communities — in West Harlem, Willets Point, downtown Brooklyn, Coney Island, and those are only the big ones — but they each fight their own lonely battles, often pitted against their own elected officials.

KARA has already assembled a strong roster and — this is key — a united front between residents, businesses, labor, and elected officials. Its members already include the Retail Workers, Teachers, Service Workers and Building Trades unions, and the alliance’s vision for the armory’s redevelopment has received endorsements from the Bronx Borough President Congressman Jose Serrano, the City Comptroller and Public Advocate, and seven members of the Bronx City Council delegation. But in the absence of a mechanism through which they can exercise influence on EDC’s development process, they will have a tough road to setting a better precedent for community benefits agreements.

Kudos to the Times for reporting the story, but what’s up with this, in the second paragraph?: “The deal was similar to agreements in other major projects, like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem.”

Similar how, exactly? Aha: Carrión and the Yankees called the deal a Community Benefits Agreement…and so did the groups negotiating in Brooklyn and Harlem. Ergo, the Times calls the Yankee Stadium agreement a CBA, too. Further down in the story, reporter Timothy Williams clarifies: “The agreement for Yankee Stadium was unusual, however, because it was not negotiated or signed by community members.”

Unusual. Note to copy desk: “Bogus” might be a better word. By its own admission, by calling the Yankee Stadium deal a CBA the Times is using a term, supplied by the subject of its story, that blatantly misrepresents the origins and purpose of the enterprise.

Can you say WMD? It’s mind-blowing that in 2008, the Times is still allowing itself, and the public, to be manipulated by fraudulent misuse of language by the powerful. The Yankee Stadium deal is simply not a community benefits agreement, no matter what Carrión says.

Think about that $76 million for a moment. That’s equivalent to Yankee Stadium’s $800,000 annual “community” pledge to Bronx elected officials — for 95 years. We’ll have to wait to see the language of the agreement, of course, but unless the promised body overseeing this thing is a paragon of democracy, what we have here is essentially a long-term purchase of elected officials’ compliance, long after Borough President Scott Stringer, Councilmember Robert Jackson and other parties to this deal will have been term-limited out of office.

While Columbia deserves ample credit for a few things — for its persistent if incomplete efforts to keep the surrounding community informed about its plans, for its commitment of $30 million for a school and $20 million for an affordable housing fund, and for being willing to sit down to negotiate community benefits in the first place — university officials have been anything but encouraging of serious community participation. Yes, Columbia, some of the local demands were unreasonable, intransigent, contradictory, and polarizing. Certain groups made clear they intended to stop Columbia’s expansion altogether. That’s the nature of democratic debate, as Columbia President and First Amendment specialist Lee Bollinger knows very well. Dissent and resistance are not a reason to steamroller local input; on the contrary, they demand meaningful engagement. Alas, nothing so far suggests the new body to oversee the funds will be any more inclusive.

Then there’s the collateral damage we’re already seeing, to the very idea of community benefits agreements. Check out the comments in response to Matthew Schuerman’s article in the Observer this week (his last, as Schuerman moves to WNYC radio). Virtually every one characterizes the deal as a shakedown of near-criminal proportions. Even a lonely commenter who gives the agreement benefit of the doubt expresses a fear that “some of the community activists (or their backers) will end up making out like bandits.”

Beyond the racially charged imagery of this emerging narrative, which is echoed in so many accounts of the community benefits negotiations, is a larger sense that major developers have no responsibilities to the communities they occupy, which are in fact lucky to have them there. But some other cities don’t look at it that way. After Boston went through similar agonies over hospital and university expansions in the 1980s, the city redevelopment agency there developed a formal process for community participation in planning institutional expansions — and plans must always include some clearly delineated community benefits. Until the mayor and Department of City Planning take the leadership to develop something like that, pushing community benefits from a fringe demand (thus easily manipulable to bad ends) to a tenet of city planning, we’re going to be a poorer city, in which institutions that should be investing in building strong community ties instead sow mountains of distrust, then have to spend millions buying elected officials’ support.

We’ll get you the details as soon as we have them. But based on earlier reports, we can be fairly sure of two things: the deal will include substantial funds for housing, and it represents the interests of the elected officials whose staffs negotiated it — not the community in whose name it was executed. As a certain resident of Yankee Stadium used to say, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

For further enlightenment, check out Good Jobs New York’s excellent report on Yankee Stadium, which describes how the Yankees hired longtime political operative Stanley Schlein to broker a “community benefits agreement” with the City Council — giving Bronx members $800,000 a year in cash to spend — in order to win the Council’s support for the stadium plan. The community had nothing to do with it.

Columbia can’t do any worse. Or can it?

Crains reports that two more members of the West Harlem Local Development Corporation have resigned as negotiations with Columbia for community benefits — including a housing fund — hurtle forward. As we’ve noted, three other members who resigned last week reported that community representatives had been excluded from negotiations with the university.