In the mid-1950s, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proposed that the city condemn the site, where he could then have built a new stadium for the ball club to replace Ebbets Field.

City officials refused to condemn the property for subsequent sale to O'Malley on the grounds that they did not consider a privately financed baseball park to be an appropriate public purpose as defined under Title I of the Federal housing act of 1949.

A 1968 New York Times article described a $250 million (over $1.4 billion in March 2006 dollars) plan for the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, also known as ATURA.

"A lot of people are reassessing their expansion plans," James Stuckey, president of the city's Public Development Corporation, told the Times in 1988.

[7][8] Its name, devised by developer Forest City Ratner, relates to the rail yard located between Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street.

Easy access by rapid transit and suburban rail, and the desirable brownstone housing stock nearby made it a target for speculative development.

[12] Pacific Park, overseen by the Empire State Development Corporation,[1] is supposed to be a public-private project, Bruce Ratner told Crain's New York Business in November 2009.

[13] 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.

[27][28] Subsequently, Forest City and Greenland signed an agreement to allow TF Cornerstone and the Brodsky Organization to develop three of the Pacific Park sites in August 2018.

[10] By mid-2024, The Related Companies—which had developed Hudson Yards in Manhattan, another project above a rail yard—had expressed interest in taking over the remaining Phase 2 sites.

[44] The development is sited in Prospect Heights, a gentrifying area[45] where the median price of a residential unit exceeded $1 million in 2019.

Forest City Ratner controls much of this private property and has benefited from the state's use of eminent domain to acquire and close the streets.

The Nets, by that time owned primarily by Russia's second richest man Mikhail Prokhorov, began playing at the Barclays Center arena in 2012.

[49] On September 18, 2019, Joseph Tsai, the executive vice chairman of the Alibaba Group, completed the acquisition of full ownership of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center.

The increase of car traffic to the area caused by extra housing and the construction of an arena has been frequently cited by critics as a major reason for their opposition to the project.

[59] In 2005, The Brooklyn Paper revealed that Forest City had paid large sums of money to organizations, offering what they had presented as grassroots neighborhood support for the proposed Pacific Park development.

[61] In a Huffington Post blog, Daniel Goldstein called Pacific Park, then named Atlantic Yards,[62] "a corrupt land grab," "a taxpayer ripoff", "a bait and switch of epic proportions", and "a complete failure of democracy."

[64] The most vocal opposition group was a nonprofit named Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, though other organizations are opposed to or seek to scale back the project.

These organizations include: 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, Boerum Hill Association (BHA), Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats (CBID), Committee For Environmentally Sound Development, Creative Industries Coalition (80 local businesses, galleries and collectives), Democracy for New York City (DFNYC).

Other neighborhood organizations that are critical of the project are gathered under the banner of 'BrooklynSpeaks',[65] which initially eschewed a litigation strategy but in 2009 finally went to court, in a case combined with one filed by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn charging that the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) failed to consider the impact of an additional fifteen years of construction on the surrounding neighborhood when it approved a renegotiated project plan in September 2009.

In November 2010, New York State Supreme Court Judge Marcy Friedman ruled[66] in favor of the petitioners, ordering the ESDC to either provide a justification for its continued use of the original ten-year construction schedule, or otherwise conduct a supplemental environmental impact study.

Under the project, 68 residential or business properties were to be seized and razed; it would also cause increased traffic congestion, light pollution, gentrification, and crowding.

On February 14, 2006, New York State Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead ruled in favor of the dismissal of attorney David Paget as the ESDC's outside counsel.

Paget, who has been advising the ESDC in its environmental review of the Atlantic Yards project, had previously also worked for FCR companies until October 2005.

Justice Edmead concluded that the appointment of Paget to the ESDC represented a conflict of interest, calling it "a severe, crippling appearance of impropriety."

[72] An issue concerning wastewater management was brought up during a preliminary environmental impact assessment of the project, catching the attention of Carroll Gardens residents.

According to The Brooklyn Paper, the sewage generated by the development would flow into the city's antiquated combined sewer, which overloads during large rain storms.

Allegedly 27 billion US gallons (100,000,000 m3) of untreated sewage would drain into waterways around the city each year, including 13 outfalls on the Gowanus Canal.

[51] One of the more prominent members of this group was ACORN, which signed the Affordable Housing Memorandum of Understanding with Forest City Ratner in 2005.

[51] Anchor of Fox's Good Day New York, Rosanna Scotto, a native of the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, is also a supporter.