With the city’s approval process more than a year in the past, Columbia’s Manhattanville campus expansion has moved into new stages of planning.
This academic year was dominated not by controversy over city review of the project itself, but over logistics of land acquisition and construction.
The biggest news of the year came on Dec. 18, when the Empire State Development Corporation approved the use of eminent domain in the University’s 17-acre expansion site, eliminating the last procedural obstacle to construction. Eminent domain is the process by which the state can seize private property for the public good, and Columbia’s Manhattanville project drew criticism for receiving this civic designation.
Unless mutually agreeable deals can be reached with the two remaining local property holdouts who have refused to sell their land to Columbia—Tuck-It-Away Storage owner Nick Sprayregen and gas station owners Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur—eminent domain will be invoked and ownership of those properties will be transferred to the University with the understanding that the area is blighted and can be put to better public use as part of the planned campus.
Eminent domain law requires the University to pay the current owners market value for the properties.
Columbia and the ESDC both maintain that the expansion will benefit the community by creating jobs and revitalizing the neighborhood, a point some local activists strongly dispute.
“Columbia is one of New York’s largest employers, and this project will generate tens of thousands of jobs,” ESDC spokesperson Warner Johnston said at the December hearing.
But critics fear the expansion will lead to commercial and residential displacement, both directly and indirectly through gentrification and higher real estate prices.
Also, as has been the reaction to many public hearings regarding the Manhattanville expansion, some attendees complained that their voices were not acknowledged.
“This was just another dog and pony show,” Gwen Goodwin, chair of the Coalition to Save P.S. 109, said of the ESDC hearing. “It was just a different venue for people to speak to the wall and have the government dismiss us.”
Following the ESDC vote, the two property holdouts—Sprayregen and the Singhs—filed separate lawsuits to state appellate court in January, challenging the legality of using eminent domain in the expansion. The suits remain unsettled, but there is no indication that construction will be delayed while they are pending.
Eminent domain also added a new dimension to an ongoing conflict between the University and Ramon Diaz, who owns Floridita Restaurant & Tapas Bar on Broadway and 125th Street. Columbia owns the building, and Diaz rents three storefronts under two separate leases.
A dispute with the University over rent payments was resolved in October, but an ESDC “Statement of Determinations and Findings” released Dec. 22 indicated that Diaz’s property could be subject to eminent domain even though Columbia already owns it. The primary lease on Floridita is good until 2015 and the secondary tapas bar lease must be renewed yearly, though Diaz fears eminent domain could invalidate these contracts.
Members of student activist group, Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, joined with neighborhood protests to rally for Diaz in Manhattanville, and SCEG later submitted a petition with about 90 signatures calling upon the University to guarantee it would not prematurely terminate businesses leases around the expansion area.
Columbia Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin said the December statement was a formality, as eminent domain will be invoked as a matter of procedure on all properties in the expansion zone—even ones the University owns and vacant lots. Kasdin added in January, “We look forward to having active leases as long as possible.”
In February, University President Lee Bollinger stated at a University Senate meeting, “We are making the case that part of the stimulus package would be well-spent on Manhattanville.” Since then, SCEG and members of local activist group, Coalition to Preserve Community, have challenged that idea, particularly in the absence of details on how much money is being sought, from which government agencies, and for what specific purposes.
“Columbia shouldn’t be entitled to getting stimulus funding without a transparent process,” SCEG member Andrew Lyubarsky, CC ’09, said. “If Columbia were to get stimulus funding without anyone in the public knowing the content of their application, that would be a form of a blank check.”
“This is a non-profit educational research institution and we do what we do because there is a public benefit,” Bollinger said of SCEG’s protest, adding, “We have an assignment in this society, and it’s not to make a profit ... it’s just that’s not what we do. And so to be criticized for being selfish, it just doesn’t apply.”
The first week of May brought the most recent development for the Manhattanville project, with the release of the long-awaited Community Benefits Agreement, which allocated $150 million from the University to the West Harlem community as a condition of the expansion. The CBA was negotiated over the past several years with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation—a group of neighborhood representatives—and designates Columbia funding for affordable housing, building a public school, and other local programs.
The 20-member LDC passed the CBA on May 8, with 15 votes in favor and three abstentions. On May 4, the executive committee of West Harlem's Community Board 9—which has two delegates on the LDC—voted unanimously against the agreement.
Of the total sum, $76 million is “unencumbered,” meaning the local development corporation can choose to use it however it wants. But this open-ended allocation of money made some CB9 members uneasy. “This is a very loose document. It really is a bad agreement,” said CB9’s Savonna Bailey McClain, who had asked for more details about how the $76 million would be prioritized and spent. “It just looks like the community is going to fight over $76 million.”
Though CB9 as well as CPC activists vocally opposed the agreement, others are optimistic.
Susan Russell, an LDC member and chief of staff for City Council member Robert Jackson, who represents West Harlem, called it “a very good agreement—in fact, it’s an outstanding agreement.”