ACORN: Beacon Tower Bad, Atlantic Yards Good

What is the difference between the developer Leviev Boymelgreen's Beacon Tower at 85 Adams Street in Dumbo and Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards?

ACORN likes Beacon Tower so little that it protested at an open house a couple of weekend ago, but likes Atlantic Yards so much that it endorses it in Forest City Ratner promotional material.

Making nice with developers, let alone helping them promote a project is an odd turn for ACORN, which has a long, long history of nasty and loud confrontations over affordable housing. The group, for instance, accuses the Beacon Tower developer of getting "rich off the backs of working families" because the building received a 421-a tax abatement designed in the 1970s to encourage residential development.

As for Atlantic Yards, which could be the beneficiary of up to $1.6 billion in public spending and subsidies, ACORN approves. A beaming Bertha Lewis of ACORN appears in the latest Forest City Ratner brochure and is quoted saying the developer "has worked in real partnership" with the community and shown "an unprecedented level of concern" for it. (As long as one isn't one of the Fort Greene-Prospect Heights-Park Slope community members that is skittish about the 17 planned highrises along Atlantic and Flatbush avenues.)

ACORN, of course, was one of the groups that signed off on a Community Benefits Agreement with Forest City Ratner.

It's a thin line between love and hate.