As It Seeks More Room, Columbia Treads Carefully

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From the issue dated October 1, 2004
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As It Seeks More Room, Columbia Treads Carefully

A planned $5-billion development in neighboring Harlem reawakens old animosities

By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE
New York

Columbia University would seem to have it all: Top-shelf professors. Students skimmed from the upper percentiles of their high-school classes. An Ivy League pedigree. A 36-acre campus in what many deem the world's greatest city. And a $4.3-billion endowment.

What it doesn't have is space.
Located on one of the most crowded and affluent islands in the world, Columbia is feeling squeezed. At least a half-dozen of its peer institutions (which include, for this reckoning, Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Michigan) have campuses that offer more than twice the square footage per student, Columbia's officials say. A concern for many years, the university's space constraints are beginning to threaten the institution's reputation for excellence, top administrators say. The university's president, Lee C. Bollinger, has made it clear that a solution must be found on his watch.

"To fulfill our responsibilities and aspirations," Mr. Bollinger said in his inaugural address in 2002, "Columbia must expand significantly over the next decade."

To that end, Columbia has proposed a $5-billion campus expansion that would claim 18 acres of Harlem real estate. Columbia's ambition, though, has collided with a local strain of New York skepticism and mistrust that has festered for most of the past four decades. Mindful of past slights by the university, a vocal faction of Harlem residents is adamantly opposed to Columbia's growth plan.

In Harlem, where jobs and affordable housing are scarce and gentrification is rampant, Columbia's attempts to tread carefully as it pieces together the multibillion-dollar expansion have received mixed reactions. Some say that Columbia is set on erasing their West Harlem neighborhood. And many don't believe that Columbia will follow through on its promises to compensate the community with thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new economic activity.

Columbia's dilemma in many ways mirrors tensions nationwide between urban universities and the neighborhoods that surround them. Like much in New York, though, the stage here is larger, and the stakes are higher. Opponents of the expansion plan have a say in whether the city grants Columbia's request to rezone the site of its intended growth. That rezoning is the linchpin of the entire undertaking and would allow Columbia to build the mixed-use high-rises envisioned for the new campus. If Columbia can't win over the opposition, it may have to revamp, or even scrap, its plans.

Mr. Bollinger and others acknowledge the possibility that Columbia might not prevail.

"Columbia has a history with this community, and many people in this community could care less about what Columbia wants," says Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of Manhattan Community Board 9, a New York City Council advisory group that represents the district that includes the Columbia expansion site. "Columbia has to convince the community that what they want to do is beneficial to the community."

A Legacy of Distrust
The intractable distrust that exists between Columbia and Harlem first crystallized in a flash of anger and resentment in 1968.

Columbia had proposed building a gymnasium in Harlem with separate entrances: one for the mostly white students of Columbia, and another for the mostly black residents of Harlem.

At the time, Columbia students were already angry about the institution's membership in a consortium of universities that did research for the U.S. Department of Defense. A protest at the site of the proposed gym turned into a sit-in at Columbia's Hamilton Hall and finally grew into a weeklong takeover of five buildings on the campus by about 800 students and their supporters. Hundreds of people were arrested and more than 100 were injured, according to press reports at the time. The gym opened elsewhere six years after the protest.

Also in the 1960s, Columbia built a faculty-apartment complex whose front door faces away from Harlem.

In the 1980s the university snapped up local apartment buildings to alleviate a student-housing shortage -- which triggered evictions in the neighborhood and heightened town-gown tensions.

A more recent faux pas: A year ago, Columbia opened an elementary school for the children of its faculty and used a lottery system to admit neighborhood students. But at the last minute, school administrators filled four openings with students who hadn't entered the lottery, triggering a local outcry.Mr. Bollinger, well aware of the strained relations between Columbia and Harlem, says the institution has to "put the ghost of the gymnasium behind it." So this time around, Columbia has been taking its time and trying to do things right.

The Search for Space
Over the last decade or so, Columbia has scouted the New York area for room to grow. It looked in the suburbs and at land on the West Side of Manhattan that is owned by the real-estate magnate Donald Trump. Columbia, the city's eighth-largest employer, also thought about putting up new buildings wherever it could find room in the city.

But shortly after Mr. Bollinger became president, the West Harlem sector called Manhattanville, near where Columbia's limestone campus has been since 1897, won out. The proposed northward expansion, Columbia officials reasoned, could serve as a link between the university's main campus and its health-sciences complex about two miles north.

"My belief is that the strongest universities are those that are mostly contiguous," Mr. Bollinger says. "Psychologically, this is our home."

To strengthen its claims, Columbia has for several years been circulating a document that shows how its crowded campus puts the institution at a competitive disadvantage. Columbia, the document says, has 326 square feet per student, while Princeton, Yale, and Stanford offer 800 or more square feet per student.

Meanwhile, Columbia has put unprecedented energy into cultivating community support for its growth plans. The university formed a 38-member community-advisory committee in early 2003 to consult with administrators about the expansion. Faculty and student committees were formed as well. The university has also held town-hall meetings.

"We knew we couldn't treat this as business as usual," Mr. Bollinger says.

To counter the mistrust, Columbia has been forthcoming about its plans, says Robert A. McCaughey, a history professor at Barnard College and author of Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York.

"I think the strategy of the earlier administrations, after making some passing efforts at community relations, was to just go ahead and do it," says Mr. McCaughey of putting up new buildings at Columbia. "For Bollinger to have laid out a 30-year plan, that is very different from Columbia announcing that the construction team will be there on Tuesday."

Harlem's "second renaissance," which began over the last decade and spawned a retail mecca of sorts on 125th Street, has largely bypassed Manhattanville. That made it an easy target for Columbia, which wanted to expand on a grand scale.

The land Columbia is eyeing for a tree-lined extension of its campus is a mostly industrial area of roughly five city blocks that is bordered by an elevated subway track, a highway viaduct, and two housing complexes. It is a gritty swath of warehouses, auto-repair shops, and car washes -- a testament to the area's having been zoned for manufacturing. Residences, which house mostly working-class people of color, are few. The university says 140 legal apartments, one-third of which are not occupied, are affected by its plans.

Zoned for Manufacturing
The site is home to two neighborhood institutions: La Floridita, a Cuban restaurant, and Fairway, a mega-grocery store on the Hudson River waterfront. People can often be seen casting their lines for fish just off the store's parking lot. Both neighborhood landmarks would remain after the expansion, Columbia officials say, although La Floridita would get a new location.

The first phase of the 30-year expansion, to be completed over a decade, would include building a new School of the Arts and a science building, which Columbia says it desperately needs to keep attracting top researchers, professors, and students.

"Our science building is four or five decades old," says Jeremiah Stoldt, director of campus planning. "Those types of restraints don't really lend themselves to cutting-edge research."

Columbia's plans for the first phase also call for setting aside 200,000 square feet of space in the ground floors of some buildings for retail that would serve the campus and the community. The university says it is too soon to know what construction will come next.

Columbia has been buying land in Manhattanville over the last year or so. Officials say the university now owns or leases about half the land it wants to develop. It is negotiating to buy the remaining property. For property that it can't buy -- and some owners are indeed holding their ground -- Columbia would have to turn to the state to help it get the land through eminent domain. It is an option the institution has not publicly ruled out.

"I think we want to go in with the assumption that we can buy everything we need," Mr. Stoldt says.

For all of its attempts to do things right this time around, Columbia still faces entrenched opposition. Some people like Maritta Dunn, a member of Community Board 9 and a Manhattanville resident of 44 years, says Columbia hasn't learned much in the 36 years since the massive student protest.

Ms. Dunn says Columbia's refusal to say that it will not use eminent domain to oust property owners from their land kills the spirit of partnership that the university says it wants with Harlem. And she is not impressed with Columbia's outreach efforts, dubbing them a "public relations" ploy at best.

Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, the Community Board 9 chairman, says that sentiment is somewhat widespread.

"My problem with Columbia is they use the same format over and over again," says Ms. Dunn, who also leads the Harlem Valley Heights Community Development Corporation. "They definitely need to expand, but this doesn't require them sucking up a whole neighborhood. The plan as it stands is ambitious -- to be nice. And invasive -- to be real."

Columbia officials have "been making a tremendous effort to communicate what they want," Mr. Reyes-Montblanc says. "But there is a sense in the community that the communication is one way."

Local activists have become increasingly vocal in their opposition.
"We're just simply trying to do our best to build a coalition that will make it clear to Columbia that we don't want their expansion in our neighborhood," says Tom DeMott, a founder of the Coalition to Preserve Community. The coalition exists, Mr. DeMott says, "to attempt to defend the neighborhood from what we see as a tremendous onslaught on the community to push out longtime residents and businesses."

Mr. Bollinger says he knows there will be "people who will continue to oppose" the institution's expansion plans no matter what.

The community's frustration spilled over at an April meeting, attended by more than 150 people, in which the university officially unveiled its expansion plans. As if making an academic presentation, Columbia officials turned to a sprawling three-dimensional model of the project, stacks of paperwork, and a polished PowerPoint presentation to pull everything together. Mr. Bollinger stood before the crowd to speak.

When he finished, members of the audience peppered him with pointed questions, revealing their skepticism about the project and the university's intentions. "I felt they were denouncing me and denouncing Columbia," Mr. Bollinger says of the meeting, which was held by Community Board 9.

'Palatable' Opposition
The neighborhood, however, is by no means monolithic in its opposition. Barbara Hohol, a local activist and self-described "wide-eyed moderate" says she believes that Columbia has good intentions to be a part of the community.

The expansion, Ms. Hohol says, should be "more palatable" because it is not imminent -- thanks to the 30-year timetable that the university has for the project. "But I do think their feet should be held to the fire," says Ms. Hohol.

More palatable still, Columbia has promised that the expansion would create 9,000 new jobs and pour $4-billion into New York's economy. Columbia also says it will provide minority construction contracts and the relocation of businesses and residents.

But in Manhattanville, Columbia's word is not enough.
The community advisory committee, in a report it produced in June, recommended that such promises be put in writing. Other neighbors are pushing to get the university to sign a community-benefits agreement as well. Such a document, which Columbia isn't obligated to sign, would outline more specifically how Harlem would be improved because of the project.

The advisory committee's report recommended that Columbia provide job training for the new positions it plans to provide, play a role in the development of affordable housing, preserve more of the area's historic landmarks, and improve the quality of education in the schools surrounding its campus, among other things.

"I do think they have to make some assurances that the jobs created will be to the extent possible filled by people in the neighborhood ... and not just simply Ph.D.'s from other parts of the country," Mr. McCaughey says.

Columbia appears to be reluctant to sign such a contract, saying that doing so would bind the hands of future administrations.

"I think they are perplexed and divided over the issue of a community-benefits agreement," says Joseph Wilson, a Columbia alumnus and director of the Graduate Center for Worker Education at Brooklyn College who helped write the committee's report. "There are some who would like to see a pledge and others who are more cautious to committing the university to anything in writing."

Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of one of the handful of governmental entities that will have a say in Columbia's rezoning request, says a community-benefits agreement is key.

"The rezoning they will receive is dependent on that," Mr. Reyes-Montblanc says. "Most people in the community are not against developing the area. The question is whether what Columbia is proposing is the best solution."

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Section: Money & ManagementVolume 51, Issue 6, Page A29