Some of the best news the city has heard in months came yesterday with the disclosure of plans to build a basketball arena and office and residential towers at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn.

Much of the attention, naturally, will be focused on the basketball arena part of the project. About this we would say that if the Nets can be lured to New York City from New Jersey, it would be a good thing for New York City. A basketball-arena would be used for more than 40 home games, unlike a football stadium, which would be used for fewer than 10. Doubts about how this can work can be allayed by the experience of Washington, D.C. There, the move a few years ago of an NBA team to a new arena in downtown Washington from suburban Landover, Md., helped turn a once-shabby district neighborhood into an area that now bustles with fine restaurants and new condominiums.

But the most important part of this project is the scale of the new construction: 2.1 million square feet of office space, about the amount in the Empire State Building, and 4,500 residential units. The reflexive neighborhood groups were already out complaining yesterday about potential traffic and a “land grab.” The general concerns about eminent domain laws and their abuse are well founded. But in this case, most of the site is already publicly owned rail yards of the Long Island Rail Road. And the activists opposing the project have gone beyond “nimby,” or not in my backyard, to “banana,” or build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. What they are really opposed to is the kind of economic growth that this project represents.

Worth noting, as well, is developer Bruce Ratner’s assertion yesterday that the $2.5 billion project will be financed “almost exclusively” with private funds. That will be a promise to keep an eye on as the project progresses. The plan sketched by Mr. Ratner and the architect Frank Gehry deserves quick clearance from the city and state when it comes to the logistics and approvals necessary. But in a city where residents face the highest combined state and local tax burden in the nation, any tax relief should be distributed equitably to those who pay the most taxes, not on an ad hoc basis by politicians as targeted subsidies to politically powerful developers.

It seems the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues has been under construction for one reason or another for the past century. For all the construction work and underground improvements made, however, the fruits of the work have been sometimes difficult to detect above ground. It will be a good thing to see some office and residential towers rising in Brooklyn instead of in New Jersey or some city in the Sunbelt.