Portfolio at NYU

Posted 05.01.07
Eminent Conflcit: Columbia University vs. West Harlem
America's latest post-Kelo land fight.

By Conor Renier Friedersdorf

In Morningside Heights, the dense Manhattan cityscape is interrupted by Columbia University, where academic buildings surround a sweeping plaza and grassy quads. Students throw Frisbees, socialize and spread picnic blankets during the warmer months. The rectangular lawns are closed during colder weather; a sign forbids revelry after rain or snow.

On a frigid winter afternoon, Columbia senior Rowan Moore Gerety gestured at the ice-encrusted expanse, insisting that it is underutilized and useless to the public. "We condemn Columbia's lawn as blighted," he said, flanked by West Harlem business owners, African American community leaders and student activists. "If given the space we'll use it to promote the public good broadly construed, and as defined in our mission statement."

The facetious speech was part of the ongoing effort to oppose Columbia University's expansion plans: President Lee Bollinger is eyeing a 17 acre swath of West Harlem, five blocks north of the Morningside Heights campus, for a satellite campus meant to alleviate the university's space crunch.

Columbia now owns roughly 80 percent of the neighborhood, which spans the blocks from 125th Street to 133rd Street, and from Broadway to 12th Avenue. The university insists it requires the whole area to move forward, and refuses to renounce the use of eminent domain. University officials say that asking the state to seize hold-out businesses is a last resort. So far they've paid the state agency that seizes land $300,000 to study the neighborhood, and declared it blighted in official documents, alarming nearby business owners.

"It's downright unethical, to take land from one person to give it to another," said hold-out Nick Sprayregen, the second generation owner of Tuck-It-Away storage, who doesn't mind university expansion so long as its done on land they own. "Fortunately I have the wherewithal to fight them. The threat of eminent domain is one that is going to haunt Columbia for decades to come."

In fact, opponents of the expansion plan are already finding common cause rallying against eminent domain: the issue unifies people who favor Columbia's expansion but object to university tactics, those who oppose Columbia's presence in Harlem regardless, and most everyone in between.

"Eminent domain is an easy in. It's an obvious wrong that has broad opposition, unlike the lack of affordable housing or environmental concerns," said Lindsay Schubiner, a Columbia senior who helps run a student group opposed to the project. "There are people who think that Columbia owns the land and should be able to expand as they please. But when they hear there are family owned businesses they're trying to take, they react against it. It's a core American value--no one should take your property--and it wins us converts."

Project opponents now hope to frame the controversy partly as America's latest post-Kelo eminent domain struggle, one that pits a fabulously wealthy university against a notoriously poor community. "Eminent domain is violence. It's forcing someone out of their home or livelihood," said Kenny Schaeffer, a Columbia alumnus working to oppose expansion. "The dice are loaded. The deck is stacked. A lot of the decision makers are career politicians who are influenced by Columbia and its lobbyists. But there are more of us than them."

THE FUTURE OF MANHATTANVILLE

West Harlem thrives on the southeast corner of Broadway and 125th Street, where pedestrians amble up from Morningside Heights, patrons return from a crowded McDonald's across the street, and crowds spill down a staircase as the 1 train rumbles away overhead. Foot traffic funnels east past a popular friend chicken joint, a bustling beauty shop and neighborhood teens flirting and gossiping outside a bodega.

The neighborhood at the center of the controversy, catty corner across the wide intersection, is a study in contrasts. Few walk north on Broadway; fewer turn left onto 130th, 131st or 132nd Streets. Non-descript buildings and drawn down metal shutters dominate the desolate streetscape; it is an emptied out manufacturing neighborhood in the shadows of an elevated viaduct. A closer look reveals life inside a few offices and behind a few locked doors. There are roughly 70 apartment units, a dozen businesses, a couple small churches and a delicious barbecue restaurant. Otherwise there's little reason to go there, a sparseness that attracted Columbia University as it sought space for expansion.

Under the university's proposal, the 17 acres would include a new building for the school of arts, scientific research facilities, a new building for the business school and a residential building by 2015. Other structures would follow until 2030, when the site would be built out. President Bollinger asserts that the university needs space to expand. As professors are made to share offices and students are forced to find off-campus housing, Columbia is losing some of the best and brightest minds to other institutions, he says. Its ability to do scientific research is also constrained.

Columbia's proposal is backed by a multi-million dollar public relations effort whose fruits are on display in Low Library, an administration building where largely African American public relation staffers, many recruited for the project, labor to sell the university's vision to faculty, students and the Harlem community.

"Today an urban campus isn't defined by gates and walls, but by weaving the university into the fabric of city life," a promotional video asserts, echoing an oft-repeated university talking point.

Those words are reflected in the architectural philosophy guiding the project. The Morningside Heights Campus is enclosed by block walls and traversed only after passing through gates flanked by uniformed guards. Most buildings face interior quads, leaving their backs to the street. On the satellite campus, however, artist renderings show glassy buildings on wide city streets accessible to cars and pedestrians. Cafes and shops open to the public occupy street level spaces, and glass facades allow passersby to peek inside buildings.

Community critics are suspicious. If an urban university should be integrated into a city rather than cloistered behind gates and walls, they ask, why doesn't Columbia remove the gates at its Morningside Heights campus? If Columbia wants to weave the university into the fabric of the city, why can't it intersperse new university buildings among existing landowners and businesses who want to stay, rather than lobbying for their ouster?

Columbia insists it needs the entire site to build a cohesive campus, and to construct underground areas for parking, loading docks and utilities. And the spirit of welcome will transcend architecture, the university promises. A black family is included in some of the artist renderings, perhaps having wandered from Central or West Harlem onto campus, en route to a planned park or new developments along the river. The neighborhood kids' exposure to campus life is another university talking-point. "They'll see that being part of a college campus is attainable, it's not that complicated, it's something that they can strive for just like anybody else," said Victoria Mason-Ailey, a former Philadelphia city planner hired by Columbia to work on the expansion.

The gulf between the university and its critics is apparent in the latter's response. "If I'm an administrator of a learning institution, and I say it's good for you to pass through, that person passing through will say to themselves each time, I can't get in, I can only pass through," said Dr. Vicky Gholson, a longtime Harlem resident and educator. "We heard those responses during the Civil Rights movement. We want you to come and see and experience how pretty everything is, but don't drink from that fountain. Don't use that bathroom. And unfortunately, and I don't think people realize it, they're saying the same thing."

The disagreement reflects a larger tension: an elite university, though it may strive to benefit the community, is necessarily separated from it. Admission is ultra-competitive. Dorms are secured by card readers and security guards. Neighborhood residents aren't permitted to audit classes or use computer labs. A neighborhood transformed under Columbia's plan is sure to accommodate more working, living and learning than goes on today. Even so, Columbia students and faculty will benefit more than people who live nearby.

ANOTHER VISION

Columbia's detractors often articulate their own vision for the neighborhood by describing what they don't want to happen. Harlem is a historically black oasis whose culture and well-being is threatened by gentrification, they say. The 17 acre Manhattanville site isn't an island--as Columbia's Morningside Heights campus changed everything around it, so too would a satellite campus, threatening places like that bustling street-scape on the southeast corner of Broadway and 125th.

The elements that make West Harlem special are most at risk, Dr. Gholson says: nearby clubs would be driven out by rising rents, locally owned businesses would be replaced by chains, and the beauty parlors, boutiques and haberdasheries that cater to Harlem residents would be replaced by businesses catering to students and professors.

"I want to pay 50 or 70 cents for a cup of coffee," she said. "I do not want to pay a dollar fifty, 2 dollars and 25 cents for a cup of coffee, especially when it's something I drink everyday."

She worries about eroding community too.

"When a store has been there for ever, I have a certain pattern and a certain routine--there's certain information I find out about," she said. "I know somebody's looking out for my child when they walk past that store. When a franchise comes in, those special relationships aren't possible."

The concerns of Harlem residents often filter up to Nellie Bailey, who runs the Harlem Tenant's Association.

"One rarely hears about the increased presence of police when property values go up. The kids complain constantly that the cops are always harassing them," she says. "When kids get out of school what are they going to do anywhere? If they are in suburbia they go to the mall, but they hang out, right? If you're in a small town there is always the local spot where kids hang out. Anywhere in America kids are hanging out after school. But in the inner city hanging out after school in a group becomes loitering. Loitering means an arrest. Loitering means you have a criminal record."

A culture clash is almost inevitable, she says, because the street culture of Harlem--the stoop sitting, the outdoor barbecues in the summer, walking the block--is often unfamiliar to outsiders moving in.

"If somebody paid $1.5 million for their brownstone, or six or seven or eight hundred thousand dollars for their condo, and they are of a lighter skin or a different hue than folks here, by golly when the police call they are going to respond. They'll say, 'I didn't pay almost a million dollars for my co-op to come out and see these kids hanging out on the corner. What's this about? I'm not used to this; I don't feel safe when I come home.'"

THE EMINENT DOMAIN FACTOR

On a February evening, Columbia students, Manhattanville residents and others opposed to the project gathered for a dinner of chicken, rice and beans served on paper plates in an upstairs meeting room owned by the university. Conversation often turned to the possibility that eminent domain proceedings will transfer all remaining land to the university, a scenario several present referred to as "the worst possible outcome."

Already Columbia University owns the bulk of real estate on those 17 acres--if market signals are to be believed the university values those parcels more highly than any other actor; it could easily transform the neighborhood without using eminent domain. Neighborhood activists argue that local residents value their neighborhood more highly than Columbia, but lack the money to express their will in the real estate market. Even so, the market gives residents some recourse. They can rally around hold-out landowners, patronize local businesses and ensure that some diversity of ownership endures.

Eminent domain is a different thing: it enables the state to assert that Columbia's vision for the neighborhood is superior to the residents' revitalization plan. And everything is suddenly staked on a winner take all fight that poor people almost always lose.

"If you allow the government to condemn any property they want, there's an extreme danger that politically powerful interests will capture this process and use it to take property from people who are politically weaker than themselves," said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. "The Columbia case seems to fit that pattern. Columbia is a very politically influential institution, whereas the mostly poor residents of the Harlem neighborhood around Columbia are mostly not politically powerful."

Indeed, land seizures remind some Harlem residents of bygone days when the state seized property precisely because its inhabitants were mostly black. "The history of eminent domain is rife with abuse specifically targeting minority neighborhoods," the NAACP writes in an amicus curiae brief opposing the eventual outcome in Kelo versus New London. "The displacement of African-Americans and urban renewal projects were so intertwined that 'urban renewal' was often referred to as 'Negro removal.'"

The Manhattanville parcel is suited to Columbia's interests regardless of its neighborhood's racial makeup. But eminent domain proceedings are particularly troubling in this case because Columbia, as the biggest landholder in Manhattanville, has a perverse incentive to keep its own properties run down and underused.

"One of the biggest contradictions here is that Columbia has bought up a bunch of land over time," says Brett Murphy. "If they're being underutilized that's Columbia's fault. It's like Columbia is creating blight in the neighborhood so that they can take over the rest of it."

A university spokeswoman asserted a contrary position. The university has often upgraded Manhattanville property it has purchased, she wrote, and "anyone who has been on these blocks in the past 20 years knows what the general state of the area was before the university announced its proposals."

Weighing Columbia's plans for Manhattanville against its detractors, the vision one prefers for the neighborhood turns on complicated questions. It isn't possible to quantify the value of scientific research facilities versus family owned businesses versus the preservation of Harlem culture. If Columbia succeeds in getting the land through eminent domain, however, one thing is certain: the free market will have done a better job protecting the least powerful--poor though they may be--than a political process that allows for eminent domain, even in a liberal community famous for its grassroots organizing, where the numbers are on their side.