One of the commonly raised questions on DKos is the divergence between the theories of progressivism, and the hard and unglamorous work needed to carry any progressive idea into effect. Loving the idea is not enough. And none of that is fun or glamorous and it involves difficulties, costs and compromises.
I here toot the horn of the hard and unglamorous work of Manhattan Community Planning Board 9, who had to thread their way through, and at least for now have had a signal victory.
Yesterday, the Appellate Division, First Department of the New York Supreme Court system overturned an entire development plan by which Columbia University was essentially to be given eighteen acres in West Harlem to build a North Campus. The New York Times reported a decision yesterday which should be of interest to those who think the ordinary folk of a community cannot thread the bureaucracy and make their wishes heard or that ideas come into effect without that kind of work.
Some serious background is necessary, since community workers work in a specific community, whose characteristics figure in understanding what they were able to get done.
West Harlem is an area on the Hudson River west of the much more famous "Central" or old Harlem, that of the Cotton Club and Malcolm X. Forgotten by comparison. It is a community with large numbers of both well educated white and black folk and Latino, Haitiian and other immigrants, and African Americans without the snitz, a mix of landmarked periodically snitzy brownstones and fancy Riverside Drive coops, and the kind of apartments that Upton Sinclair wrote about. Most of it built before 1920. Much of the community lives in poverty or near poverty, and it has ethnic, social service and health, language and other issues consistent with generally not being a wealthy community but a racially, ethnically and culturally widely diverse one. Class warfare is common. But because it is in Manhattan just north of the now very trendy Upper West Side, some of it was a real estate developer's dream.
West Harlem is essentially two hills, Hamilton Heights to the north and Morningside Heights (where Columbia University sits along with a number of other prominent educational institutions such as Jewish and Union Theological Seminaries, Barnard College, and Manhattan School of Music) to the south, with a valley, called Manhattanville inbetween. Both the hills are solidly residential with the odd commercial arterial, but Manhattanville was small business-commercial with warehouses, auto repair places, gas stations, a doll factory and other businesses of the kind which you do want in your community somewhere but probably not next to your bedroom window. It was mostly two story buildings because that was the maximum the zoning allowed. By and large before the Columbia development began, those industrial buildings were fully or mostly tenanted with businesses. An upscale grocer, Fairway, has a large store there because the area has superb road connections to all sorts of other places, and the building was cheap at the time, and was and is successful in that place in its own two or three story buildings under a highway and a viaduct. CB9 did not then and does not now have an abandoned buildings problem, nor a vacant lot issue. Generally it most resembles a fully filled King Olaf Sardine can, with landmark touches.
NYC has something called Community Planning Boards, nearly the least of its bureaucratic children, whose charge is to consider land use and social service issues and interface between the various levels of government and the local businesses and residents, the lowest single such interface on the governmental pole, and its role usually only advisory.
Manhattanville's was Community Planning Board 9. Its fifty official members were all either residents of the board's area or people with businesses or other connections to it who served two year appointments, made by the Manhattan Borough president mostly from nominations by local politicos, and it has a regular community of activists not officially on the Board who work with it consistently.It always has a few Columbia level people, but most are 'simply' local residents or local businessmen with an interest in community matters, their block association, their cooperative apartment building, environmental issues in a big city such as recycling and the effluvia from the local sewage plant, landmarks, art or other issues with local flavor. Not high policy. Not themselves pols in the organized political system. Not all of them speak English as their first language, or at all. They are there at any one time to represent and perhaps speak for various constituencies so all of them have a voice on the Board and in its doings. Some work for thirty or more years and some leave very quickly and are replaced by new members who start at the bottom of the learning curve. It is not always a harmonious place and from time to time, police are asked to attend some of its meetings, not to report on what they are doing elsewhere. Chairs have been thrown, but not recently.
Fifteen years ago, Board 9 began a community planning process to create what the court decision called a 197-a plan, named after a NYC planning law provision which permitted a community, through its community planning board, to create its own development plan, with proposals for zoning, services and other matters, which if you ever got it done, could be enacted and become legally binding. It is very difficult to do and the one here under discussion was one of the first two or three to make it to the finish line. The Board, through several administrations of Chairmen, spent literally years learning how to do and then doing all of the work to prepare this plan, and got it done, just as the Columbia matter got rolling with its own plan which would have eaten the heart out of the 197-a plan. At the time it was frustrating because of internal politics on the Board and the sheer bureaucracy, with which Board members and others were simply not familiar when they began. Many of the members had street smarts but not initially either the legal or technical or bureaucratic background to do it when they began. But they put their many shoulders into the task, and learned, because the protection of their communities needed them to do that. A prior attempt to create a Master Plan had failed over Manhattanville, and this time that was not going to be allowed to happen.
When Columbia got started on its expansion plan, the Board was many years into the effort, and rapidly realized that they would not be able to simply buy up all the private buildings in the area, and would, since they threatened publicly to do it, take some by eminent domain. In other places, this is called 'condemnation', the taking of land by government from private owners for what might or might not be a public purpose. The thought of someone taking private property by eminent domain energized all involved, even those to whom 'eminent domain' first had to be explained.
That board sat down, its members did a lot of research, and it then strategized about how bureaucratically it would have to be done, and realized one hot August night that the core act which made anything thereafter possible or barred the use of eminent domain, was a finding that the area Columbia coveted had to be 'blighted.' Usually this official finding of 'blight' came before the more public acts, more or less without notice, but according to applicable law, this particular step was the Rubicon. If the community gutters could get by this one, they could do what they wanted. I now think the developers didn't realize that the Board, all those hokey little people in the estimation of the Columbia group, wouldn't realize until it was too late that this was so, and wouldn't be able to do anything effective to resist it if some of them did understand. As the survivors of an Urban Renewal effort several decades prior which had gutted a healthy community just north of Columbia, and not proposing to have another part of its community similarly gutted, the Board, its activists, its unofficial but busy community members and some expert technical assistance who came in to help, got busy and did a full survey of the Manhattanville area. A great amount of time and effort was spent in determining what had to be in a blight finding and why that was inappropriate. And what one had to do to fight it.
Part of this dealt with the rapidly appearing fact that many of the buildings which might be called 'blighted' or at least scabrous, were those which had been fine in former years until Columbia bought them, at which time they were vacated of their various business tenants, allowed very visibly to deteriorate, to be covered with garbage not theretofore present but available to be photographed, and the like. The Board and its community of workers correctly suspected that these Columbia buildings would be used to create a situation which would be used to support a blight finding.
All of this was being exposed as it happened in the public meetings of the Board over the months and years, among the pol's constituent reports, the designation of landmarks in the Board, environmental justice issues, battles between activists in their forties and fifties and those in their twenties who did not sing the same song, fighting about high rise buildings with no affordable housing in low rent areas that needed affordable housing, approval of public art, redevelopment of an abandoned school building, problems with maintenance of low income cooperative apartment buildings, all another of their functions, and general assistance to residents in all their various interfacing needs with local government. This could have gotten lost because of its difficulties. They refused to let that happen.
Another equally important part dealt with the community visualizing and reducing to paper in legally understandable and defensible form, what they saw as the proper use of the same Manhattanville area. It has the only street level river access in that part of upper Manhattan, and a new park was settled on that area. It had some buildings of historical relevance, as one end of one of the Underground Railroad routes, and had had a prior history as an independent town in its own right before Manhattan expanded to surround it in the 18=9th Century. A few new restaurants had moved in. There were many sound businesses which operated in the low rise industrial buildings with few residental neighbors to offend, which provided local employment, including the businesses of the two plaintiffs who officially won the decision, and who had refused to sell out to Columbia. These businesses, some of which had been on the same site for decades, were treated as a part of the community just as much as the individuals, not a usual result. Columbia's needs were also considered and it had the full right as part of the Community, to participate as well in the formulation of the 197-a plan's creation. Also considered was the fate of the many low income tenants of the Board area, who would be forced out of their apartments, often subsidized because they were not low income but very low income, by landlords who would see the possibility in a rent regulated city of student and staff tenants who would move on after a few years, and allow rent to rise, and were prepared to clear out the existing residents to create vacancies for this purpose. Real estate brokers drooled at the chance to sell brownstones to upper echelon Columbia people or to Columbia to be able to house them, who would now be close enough to the brownstones in a way they had not been before, urban areas in upper Manhattan being what they are.
All of this the little Board put into their 197-a plan. They were told they needed to do X or Y, this study or that finding, and they got it done. They finished it and got it filed and accepted, despite all the bureaucratic bells and whistles needed to do that, one of the first few in all of New York City.
When that plan hit the City Planning Commission, it made a carveout for the Columbia plans. But the plan went forward.
Right into the Court's decision, where it figures prominently as a well considered alternative plan to the Columbia plan and one which simply did not see as blight but something which could be tinkered with with a few zoning changes, to improve what was already there rather than leveling it. A finding which the court found credible. And the heart of the matter in the majority decision is the blight finding.
It could have gotten lost because those directly in the way of the eminent domain hazard were businesses, not the kind of individual with issues which was their usual stock in trade and the object of sympathy, but they did not let that happen.
It could have happened because the underbrush of bureaucratic requirements that had to be met for the plan was so thick and impenetrable and was not something most of them started out knowing anything about. Or they could have made beginner's mistakes. They didn't.
Or given it up as something that the Manhattan Masters of the Universe wer not ones they could fight, they just weren't big enough. But they didn't let that happen either.
When the steamroller went forward, some of the businesses sued (the Board had checked whether they could and were told they could not themselves do it), which lawsuit resulted in the decision linked above. Using the work the little Board was not supposed to be able to do, but did. And their 197-a plan, which was complete and correct. And stood there gleaming as a legitimate alternative to the cooked studies on blight which Columbia submitted. To the result seen in the opinion.
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After Kelo v. New London in SCOTUS, and after a recent decision in the Second Department and the Court of Appeals, on the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, it is possible that this wonderful decision will not stand.
But, Kelo and Atlantic Yards or not, what it makes clear is that eminent domain in poor communities is not inevitable, nor the developer steamroller irresistible, when opponents sit down and identify and carry out the actual tasks necessary to fight back. To study the opinions and distinguish the properly distinguishable and work with what can be worked with. To apply themselves, whether they were originally equipped to do so or not, to the unglamourous work with its compromises and chances to get side tracked and frustration and boredom and a sense of want of that over educated competence so often used as a club against ordinary citizens. Now there is a clear anti- blight finding decision, and a legal basis for it despite Kelo and Atlantic Yards.
But I must take this moment in time, before the Court of Appeals gets the case, to cheer on the Little Board that Could and Did, for the effort they made. And the result it has had in the decision. The Appellate Division, First Department, is not an ideological place, and even the tone of this one is ....unusually forceful. And I ask you to join me in cheering them, and to learn from, not just be encouraged by, their example.
I also point out that part of what made this possible was the determination of ordinary folk that they WOULD master all the political and other bureaucratic and technical issues that had to be confronted, and their persistence until they did. It would have been easy to rail at Columbia's plan in progressive ideological ways, and there was a good bit of that in the mix (Hello ranty Kossacks), but even those who railed recognized that railing was good for the ire but would not stop a thing, and the only way to get done what had to get done was move beyond the rant and to put aside personalities (we had a lot of them in the mix over the years) and mixed motives and cultural and class issues and do all the years-long boring, tiring, frustrating bureaucratic and political compromises inconsistent with progressive ideology, which alone could produce the result they wanted.
Dance with me for them.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I sat on this board for over a decade during this process until I retired to home from New York, the good parts and the ugly and worked as a part of the Board on this process. I opposed the Columbia expansion. All florid opinions and King Olaf type comments are my own. All factual errors, if any, or errors of interpretation, are also my own. The article is the New York Times' to whom I refer you for followup.
But I feel I must put up to others the significant and obtained-with difficulty accomplishments of my former colleagues who have been there to the end of this, at least as far as now. They don't think they are heroes but I do and want to salute them publicly for it and have their diligence and faithfulness, and ability to put aside divisions and fatigue in favor of the greater good, and actually to get done the job,seen and recognized, and perhaps for a few learned from. I am not naming names, but this went through at least five Board chairman, one of whom has died betimes, through partisan battles between factions, and everything else which could have gotten in the way, and THEY DID NOT LET THAT HAPPEN. There are too many who contributed too much to single out names, but you know I know who you are, no matter how improbable some of you will find my saying how good a job I think you did. I have already forgotten the names of the ones who did not.