Here's the real story of the recent court decision against eminent domain use for Columbia University's 17 acre expansion into West Harlem. I have been fighting for a more just expansion since I got accepted here a year and a half ago. We were all delighted by this decision, even though our school is admittedly cramped and needs to expand; the way they've gone about it is horrendous.
Also, the decision in favor of the last two property owners in the expansion area, who decided to challenge the state's claim to eminent domain at the risk of crappy compensation, is the first of its kind in the state, and one of the first of its kind around the country, in states such as California that have similarly weak checks on the state agency endowed with the powers to condemn and seize land for the public good.
Update: Fisher 1028 reminds everyone how great a job Norman Siegel did in arguing this case, as well as Philip Van Buren, his co-council. Norman is the former head of the NYCLU and a perenial candidate for NYC public advocate. I'd add that the coalition to preserve community had a lot to do with this effort.
Watch the 2-minute NY1 Story here first
So here's the deal. Bloomberg's new vision for New York has resulted in 50 rezonings. There are not that many areas left to rezone. Zoning was a way of keeping certain areas for manufacturing, others residential, and maintaining the character of a neighborhood... there were causes to rezone and its been a hit with upper-middle income voters. The reason he almost lost the latest election despite outspending comptroller Bill Thompson 10-1, however, is the areas of color in the city which rely on the zoning and rent control laws for protection against displacement in the face of the rampant speculation that has been going on in the real estate market.
That's the stage that I walked into upon moving to New York to finish my degree at Columbia last year, whereupon discovering that Columbia, the second biggest landowner in New York City, was lobbying hard to be excluded from those safe guards (never mind helping modernize, modify & strengthen them) for its massive new 7 billion dollar campus in Manhattanville.
Here's the quick and dirty with it: the plan was to build on a formerly manufacturing zone that had fallen a bit behind the rest of the city technologically, due mainly to the low ceiling limit on the buildings. Manufacturing, by the way, is still vitally important to the recovering US economy economy
But anyway, Columbia was originally supposed to be one of the new neighbors that the community board would choose to accomodate through this rezoning. As the court's decision affirms, they instead colluded with the state to receive all the land they couldn't buy through the use of eminent domain. The community board, the most representative body over such matters in West Harlem, ended up putting forward their own plan for the are, the 197-A plan, which they said would allow Columbia to meet 95% of their space requests in a way that was satisfactory to the community. This attempt to negotiate was swept aside. Columbia's plan ignored the tenets of the 197-a, and they received support for their own plan from the city councilman Robert Jackson, to the dismay of the community board and many other activists and community groups.
The main request of the community board was for eminent domain to be taken off the table, which they felt necessary to creating an environment conducive to businesses who want to remain in the neighborhood remaining. The unfortunate reason that Columbia refused this was because they were well aware of the bargaining leverage that eminent domain would give them over each business. Soon roughly 30 businesses signed deals and Columbia owned 76 percent of the land, with the state owning another 16% of it. The last two holdouts were the two petitioners in the above case.
The case was making the claim the Columbia intentionally let their property in the neighborhood go to disrepair from 2002 to 2008 in order to justify the state condemning the neighborhood. It also asserted that any benefit from the project such as cures for diseases, etc. was really Columbia's a massive, private institution, and not the public's.
It ruled that the difference with the recent precedent-setting Kelo case was that here we had a clear record of bad faith and collusion on the part of Columbia and the state. In Kelo, such a record would surely have changed the court's decision, as evidenced from some of the language of justice Kennedy's decision.
This is huge for a number of reasons.
- this kind of thing happens all the time (minus the courts' intervention), all over the country, and the reason is that rarely do people have the resources to fight it. This provides at least a road map for how to do that.
- The definition of blight has been increasingly considered too vague for condemnation to proceed unabated and at rich developers' benefit. But this case really spells out exactly how you can go about proving that blight has been created rather than been an economic condition in the area. The blight studies conducted by the state (for there were many) used no study of projected real estate value in the event of a rezoning, and the city had already concluded that there was a massive amount of interest in the area from developers should a rezoning be conducted.
- 10,000 people stood to be secondarily displaced by this project. It will probably still carry on, but this gives the community, the students at teh university, the faciulty, and the administration a wake=up call as to the negative aspects of the plan. Hopefully, as they are forced bythis decision to return to the bargaining table with the community, they will take a more accommodating, humble tack when they look back at this humiliating, righteous court decision.