His grand plan is to hold the (widely recognized as dysfuncitonal) city hostage until he can make a gazillion dollars.
Here's an excerpt from a 2010 Bloomberg/BusinessWeek story:
"There's a litany of explanations for this, but for the last decade, through a boom and a bust, several mayors, and nonstop recriminations, a single constant has loomed over the city: the Manhattan real estate billionaire Howard Milstein. In the late 1990s, the municipal government designated a private group backed by Milstein as the "master redeveloper" of 140 acres of downtown real estate. Milstein appeared, at first glance, to be just the man to help the city finally capitalize on its natural potential. He had a hotel and other development interests in Times Square—a fabulously successful example of commercial reclamation—and he proposed to revive Niagara Falls along similar lines, as a casino-centered playground. It never happened. Today, Milstein is still sitting on an enormous swath of land, a ghost town of abandoned homes, shuttered storefronts, and vacant lots in the shadow of a closed-down factory where Nabisco used to make Shredded Wheat.
"Precisely because the community was so excited by the promise of an enormous amount of development over a decade ago, I think today many people in our community feel let down by their inability to build something," said the city's mayor, Paul Dyster. Once hailed as a savior, Milstein is now maligned as a slumlord by many in Niagara Falls. "He's a big boa constrictor," said David Crapnell, a Presbyterian minister and community activist, who accuses the developer of "bad faith." To the pastor, the past decade of dithering and decay offers a parable of the risks any city takes when it wraps up its redevelopment hopes with a rich investor.