So Long, Morningside Heights

Opinion

So Long, Morningside Heights

By Tao Tan
October 07, 2004

Last Friday, the 116th and Broadway gates were the site of a protest against Columbia’s plans to expand into Manhattanville. As I walked by, I stopped for a few minutes to observe the participants, read a few flyers, and take in the message.

“Biotech no! Housing yes!” chanted protestors. “Gentrification kills neighborhoods!” blared signs.

I was initially overwhelmed by the sheer volume of hatred and vitriol being spewed—hatred that was blind, and vitriol that was misguided. To them, Columbia wasn’t the Alma Mater we know and love; it was a greedy, land-grabbing, elitist nightmare of a neighbor that would stop at nothing to annex more lebensraum.

In that sea of hate, I hatched a brilliant plan that would solve all our problems. We need to expand. They hate us and don’t want us to expand. Solution? We leave.

That’s right. We leave. We relocate Columbia University, brick-by-brick, to Westchester County or Long Island. Land there is cheap and plentiful. We wouldn’t need to deal with the multitudes of community boards and zoning laws that building in the city would require. The Long Island Rail Road or Metro-North could provide efficient transit in and out of the city. Finally, a college campus in the countryside would at last provide the collegiate experience and foster the strong student-school connections that have evaded Columbia for the last 250 years.

No one denies that we have space issues: whereas Stanford University has its own particle accelerator, and Duke University has its own forest, our junior faculty have to share offices. Out there in the country, we can build the ultramodern research facilities that we need to remain on the cutting edge of the world’s universities. We can build a stadium that isn’t half an hour away from the campus. We can construct library facilities large enough to house the entirety of our holdings, instead of storing a sizable chunk off-site at, of all places, Princeton University.

When we leave, we level Morningside Heights. We open up 116th Street to traffic, and along the way, toss in 119th, 118th, 117th, and 115th Streets. Let’s even lend a hand to build those housing projects that the community groups so loudly demand.

Of course, with the removal of Columbia University from Morningside Heights, certain sacrifices will have to be made. For example, the $60 million that Columbia spends per year on Upper Manhattan vendors would be gone, as would the estimated 5,000 jobs Columbia provides for residents of Upper Manhattan. Columbia’s latest round of construction spending, estimated at over $800 million, will also regretfully be withdrawn. Services like the Architecture School’s Urban Technical Assistance Program, the Business School’s Small Business Consulting Program, and Lerner Hall’s Double Discovery Center would be shut down. And it goes without saying that the entire $2 billion operating budget, much of which is a direct injection into New York City’s economy, would be put to use elsewhere.

But the benefits clearly outweigh the sacrifices. Even though the entire corridor of businesses running from 110th to 120th on Broadway and Amsterdam, which draw the majority of their business from the 20,000 students (7,500 residential undergraduates) and over 10,000 faculty and staff, would have to close, the absence of Columbia’s gentrifying effect would more than offset that by depreciating property values and further entrenching rent control.

And to even get into Manhattanville would be silly. After all, who needs $4.5 billion worth of economic stimulus? Who needs a blighted, industrial area far underutilized compared to other city areas to be redeveloped to draw in hundreds of millions of dollars of research money? Who needs close to 9,000 new jobs? Not Manhattanville, of course.

So let’s pack up and move to the countryside. Let’s take our money, our commerce, our potential, and our ambitions with us into greener pastures and brighter prospects. Let’s lend a hand to build the rent-controlled housing projects that we will leave behind in a testament to the realpolitik of Columbia bad, community good.

That, after all, should make everyone happy.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in history and economics.