Residents Speak Out On M’Ville
By Betsy Morais
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2008
“Here we are again,” Harlem activist and historian Michael Henry Adams said at a public hearing on eminent domain in Manhattanville. “The more we talk, the less anyone seems to hear what we have to say.”
It was frustrating business as usual for local activists who gathered to garner public opinion on the use of eminent domain in Manhattanville. Everyone who testified at the Community Board 9 spoke out against state seizure of private property for the “public good” in Columbia’s uptown expansion project. But with two property owners in the campus footprint still resisting deals offered by the University, the possibility of the use of eminent domain is rapidly approaching reality.
Many in attendance argued that, because the University is a private institution, eminent domain would not rightly serve a civic purpose in this case. Others, like Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center member Maria Sosa said it would simply be, “very good for them [Columbia], very scary for us.”
The Spanish-speaking Mirabal sisters, in their trademark yellow T-shirts, testified through a translator or with broken English, in many ways embodying the divide and misunderstanding between members of the Manhattanville community and the officials behind Columbia’s development there.
At the Tuesday night hearing, and at a Broadway Democrats meeting last week, local residents lamented the fact that no board members of the Empire State Development Corporation attended the state-run eminent domain hearings earlier this month—even though the ESDC is the state agency with the power to invoke eminent domain on Columbia’s behalf.
“They called it a public hearing, but it really wasn’t,” state assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell said Tuesday night. “‘Public hearing’ would imply that there was someone there to hear the public, which there wasn’t.”
ESDC communications director Warner Johnston countered their claims, defending the agency by explaining that, though the board may not have been present, about six members of the agency’s senior staff were present, and all oral testimonies were recorded for the board’s review.
Still, Kihani Brea, a spokesperson for Councilman Robert Jackson (D-West Harlem and Morningside Heights) said of the CB9 hearing and other local testimonies, “that the likelihood of the ESDC taking this into account is slim.”
Brea also noted that the state-approved plan for Columbia’s Manhattanville campus ensures benefits for the surrounding neighborhood only until 2018—just as construction will be winding down. Many in the room on Tuesday feared that the University’s promises will ultimately be dropped, opening up the possibility of eminent domain use to displace residents from the area, though the University reaffirmed its previous commitments.
“The ESDC’s General Project Plan affirms that Columbia did not request and the ESDC will not use its eminent domain authority to acquire the small number of residential buildings that cover less than four percent of the proposed project area while they remain occupied,” University spokesperson LaVerna Fountain said in an e-mail.
Fountain added that the “The University remains committed to reaching mutually beneficial agreements with the two remaining commercial property owners on these blocks if they will agree to do so.”
But neighborhood leaders aren’t convinced. “Columbia’s development will cause irrefutable harm” to Manhattanville, Coalition to Preserve Community leader Tom Kappner, CC ’66, said.
“The Columbia expansion is first and foremost about the private interests of the University,” district leader Mark Levine said, adding later, though, that the ESDC’s decision won’t likely reflect that sentiment. “I think we have an uphill fight—an extremely uphill fight.”
State Senator Bill Perkins will hold his own hearing on eminent domain at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning at the Adam Clayton Powell Building.
Zack Hoopes contibuted to this article.