Jamie Chen

ive years of controversy have brought us from Columbia’s first announcement of its plans to expand into West Harlem to June 18th, 2007, where New York City’s Planning Commission certified Columbia’s application for re-zoning. This date marks not the end but, the beginning of a journey. CPC’s certification opened the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) that will stretch through December, when New York’s City Council will vote on whether or not to approve the plan. If the plan goes through, Columbia will have its green light from the city to proceed with its plan of expansion into West Harlem.

Bollinger’s e-mail to students marking the certification heralded this event as the culmination of university-community planning and years spent preparing a design under which university buildings would be “woven into existing streets and the surrounding community.” No mention was made of the contentious atmosphere caused by Columbia’s timing, or that the “surrounding community,” according to Columbia’s own Environmental Impact Statement, was in danger of being seriously depleted: 3,293 residents are at risk of secondary displacement if Columbia moves into the neighborhood.

The first step in the ULURP was for Community Board 9, the local advisory board that oversees the expansion area, to enter a 60-day period of review. The summer certification date, however, came at a time when many members of the Community Board typically go on hiatus, and also while the Board was moving offices. Community Board 9 Chairman Jordi Reyes-Montblanc stated in an open letter that “it is only the sleaziest of projects that are actually pushed through during such periods [as summer hiatus] in order to by-pass and neutralize the community boards.” Community leaders and the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification called on Columbia to petition City Planning to push back the certification, but received no response from Low.

Community Board 9 members involved in the ULURP review and dealing with expansion did not go on hiatus this summer. They held their public hearing to receive community feedback as scheduled on August 15, during which only 22 of 95 people who testified spoke in favor of Columbia’s plan.

The vote that came back several days later was a resounding no: 32 to 2, against Columbia.

According to the website of NYC’s Department of City Planning, the idea behind mandating a ULURP for large-scale development is to institute a forum through which changes in land use would be “publicly reviewed.” The public review of the Community Board and all the people who voiced their opinion at the public hearing, however, are merely advisory; only City Planning and City Council may cast binding votes to approve or disapprove Columbia’s plan. One wonders how far “advisory” is from “nominal.”

Then students trooped back to campus. The ULURP process drove relentlessly forward, unbeknownst to most ‘11ers and even ‘08ers.

In support of its plan, Columbia organized student dinners, briefings with Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin, and Open Houses to illustrate their side of the issue with glossy photos mounted on easels. Their presentation is always pristine, and the language chosen very carefully. At an interview, Kasdin said of Columbia’s many talks with the community, “One can never over-communicate,” going further to say that “the commitment is to keep communication going in both directions.”

Columbia officials weren’t the only ones on campus mobilized around this issue. Students quickly jumped back into the fray as well.

In its first couple of meetings, the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification (SCEG) set up weekly dorm-storming rounds to gather signatures for a petition asking City Council not to approve Columbia’s plan until it conformed with the community’s needs as outlined in its 197-a plan, a plan that was developed over the years by CB-9 with input from community leaders and urban planning experts at the Pratt Institute. SCEG believes that this plan is much more representative of the community’s needs.

The 197-a plan, for the record, does allow Columbia to expand, but only into the spaces that it already owns; Columbia claims that it cannot build the necessary state-of-the-art research center with piecemeal properties. This may be a valid argument, but threatening the use of eminent domain on businesses in the area and ignoring community concerns about the safety of building a research facility on a fault-line are not tactics that promote respect and “mutual growth,” a claim made by many a Columbia press line.

When asked about why SCEG opposes Columbia’s plan as it stands and is pushing for a more equitable expansion, Sam Barron, a sophomore at Barnard, said that expansion is “a very local issue – we can see with our own eyes how these processes are so corrupt. Columbia says it is talking to community members but we can see and hear firsthand how these talks are actually taking place. We can witness all of that, how can we not organize around it?”

But while SCEG delivered demands, went dorm-storming, and reached out to various student groups, the political correctness on campus fell apart. Bollinger insulted President Ahmadinejad in a high-profile speech; all who were not white were instructed that America was not for them from the peeling wall of a SIPA bathroom, and a Teachers’ College professor found a noose on her door a scant week after students participated in a walk-out against racism on campus and around the country. Only a few weeks later, a swastika was found on the door of another Teachers’ College professor. With the campus becoming more and more incensed over issues pertaining to people of color, it is difficult to keep expansion in the neutral grayish-blue color of Columbia website backgrounds and not to consider how race figures into Columbia’s expansion into Harlem.

Issues that cause the largest divisions between Columbia and the community – a lack of affordable housing, a need for living wage jobs, among others – are largely issues that affect communities of color in the city.

A 2005 City University of New York publication entitled Affordable Housing in New York City stressed the obstacles faced by minorities in receiving loans and approval for mortgages, going so far to say that the housing system in New York increasingly reflects race divisions in the city. Diane Houk of the Fair Justice Housing Center stated in an October panel on Civil Rights in Housing that New York City is the “fourth most segregated city” in terms of housing in the country. In the same panel, Rob Lieberman, a professor of political science at Columbia, said that “levels of housing segregation remain extraordinarily high” in the United States.

Critics cannot claim silence on Columbia’s part when it comes to affordable housing, though. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer approved Columbia’s plan for re-zoning in the second step of the ULURP process after announcing the negotiation of a compromise: Columbia would provide a base $20 million for an affordable housing fund, to be supplemented by outside resources and the affordable housing developers themselves. This fund would be a revolving fund – meaning that it will lend money out to developers who will eventually be obliged to pay back the money, so that the money will operate more as a loan than a grant. Columbia claims that because the government provides tax breaks and government subsidies to builders of affordable housing, the $20 million will translate into much more with these added subsidies.

On the other hand, critics would be completely justified in the argument that Columbia has not once engaged the question of race in its project of expansion, and chosen rather to refer to the cultural vitality of the area and its commitment to revitalization. Kasdin maintains that the expansion “cannot be understood along simple racial lines,” going on to explain that both West Harlem and Columbia University are incredibly diverse communities.

Columbia’s Environmental Impact Statement submitted with its application to re-zone the expansion area specifically states that many black and Latino people will probably leave the area, with white and Asian people taking their place. This, it claims, is not a significant adverse impact.

“If racism and disparity of income based on race did not exist,” says Katie Miles, BC ‘10, “changing the racial composition of a neighborhood ideally would not be a big deal, but an event like this cannot be viewed in a vacuum.” Expansion into West Harlem doesn’t shoot up the red flag like a noose on a professor’s door, but actively not engaging in a conversation about race “not only ignores the racial history of the area but of Columbia and the area and adds to a long pattern of racism, both institutionalized and overt,” says Katie.

After all, earlier plans of Columbia expansion in 1968 included a decision to create a gym in Morningside Park that had segregated entrances: a large, ornate entrance for students and faculty, and a back door entrance for the community. To have administrators state in a meeting with students that so many thousands of people are going to be displaced, most of whom are black and Latino, and have them say this is an inevitable occurrence, for the betterment of a neighborhood, is disturbing, to say the least.

Certainly, the over-theorized student can empathize with Robert Kasdin when he rejects a simple racial framework of expansion: it is not just whites fighting minorities on this issue, but a much more complex and nuanced matter. Housing doesn’t always break down on racial lines, nor is Columbia only choosing to displace people of color. But many students organizing around recent racist activity on campus claim expansion as a key component in how the university routinely ignores critical engagement with and active deconstruction of discriminatory practices.

At a recent Latino Heritage Month event, guest speaker Luis Tejada explained that many people living in and around the expansion area do not speak English, nor do they know their rights as tenants. Coalition to Preserve Community meetings often feature tenants’ associations who complain that Section 8 vouchers, which are supposed to apply to those who are part of affordable housing programs even after landlords opt out of these programs, were not translated or delivered on time to many tenants in buildings that were converting out of programs.

Granted, these problems are not directly Columbia’s responsibility, but as a leading institution in intellectual thought and self-proclaimed promoter of the public good, Columbia has an obligation to examine how its own actions may, consciously or inadvertently, inform racist discourse in how powerful institutions interact with the world, and especially with communities of less privilege. Columbia also has a responsibility engage this issue critically in its conversations with students and the community. If not, we are left only with well-rehearsed rhetoric on diversity and mutual respect, and wondering when we can expect some true leadership from our alma mater.