12-4-09: Higher Ed Environment: Columbia Will ’Continue’ Expansion After Court Ruling

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Columbia University said its 17-acre expansion in the Manhattanville neighborhood of New York won’t be delayed by a 3-2 court ruling yesterday that said government efforts to seize land for the project are illegal.

Construction of the first building, a medical research facility, can proceed on property that is owned by Columbia and doesn’t require land from other owners, the university said today in an e-mailed statement. The $6.3 billion Manhattanville development is scheduled to be completed in the next 25 years, according to the school’s Web site.

“Initial steps in construction, including the Jerome L. Greene Science Center housing the university’s interdisciplinary neuroscience initiative, are on land Columbia now owns,” the university said in the statement. “It will continue to move forward.” Site demolition and other pre-construction work has already begun and can continue, the school said.

Lee Bollinger, 63, president of Columbia, the oldest university in New York State, told the Columbia Spectator student newspaper that the decision “‘will not hold us back.”

Eminent Domain

The school sought to benefit from New York State’s power of eminent domain, which allows condemnation of private land for public purposes. The state’s use of the power was flawed because the property in Manhattan wasn’t blighted and the development isn’t a civic project, the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court said in a ruling yesterday. The state intends to appeal the decision, said Warner Johnson, a spokesman for Empire State Development Corp., New York’s lead economic development agency, in a statement yesterday.

Initial plans for the Manhattanville campus required the university to control the entire plot of land, according to the school’s Web site. Columbia owns or has options to buy more than 80 percent of the lots of land, the Web site said. The Manhattanville campus sits on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, about 10 blocks north of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. The new campus would lie between Broadway and 12th Avenue and between 125th and 133rd streets.

Campus Sizes

Columbia continues to hope to negotiate with owners of properties on the site, said Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president of the school. The parties that filed suit operate a gas station and self-storage facilities in the neighborhood.

“We continue to hope for mutually beneficial transactions with the remaining owners as we have done with the dozens of other owners in the project area,” Kasdin said.

Columbia’s main campus in Morningside Heights and medical center in Washington Heights sit on 56 acres (23 hectares). Harvard University, the country’s oldest and richest college, occupies 246 acres in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Boston, not including its 360-acre property in neighboring Allston, while Yale University, the third-oldest college, is on 337 acres in New Haven, Connecticut, and Princeton University, the fourth- oldest college, in Princeton, New Jersey, has a 500-acre campus, according to the schools’ Web sites.

Zoning Change

Columbia, founded in 1754, had 25,459 students, including 4,247 undergraduates at Columbia College, during the 2008-2009 academic year, according to the university.

In 2007, a required zoning change for the Manhattanville project won approval from the New York City Council. The vote capped a five-year effort by the school to persuade city officials and the neighborhood that its plan would help Columbia maintain its reputation and revitalize an area dominated by warehouses and auto repair shops.

Yesterday’s court ruling said the state’s position that the area was “blighted,” justifying seizure, is “mere sophistry” and “idiocy,” the panel said.

The expansion is not a “civic project” because Columbia is a private institution, according to the 3-2 ruling. The “blighted” designation of the properties by a Columbia consultant “was hatched to justify the employment of eminent domain, but this project has always primarily concerned a massive capital project for Columbia,” the court said.

Dissenting Opinion

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Peter Tom said that the state’s finding that the area was blighted was reached legitimately, and he said the project served a civic interest.

“A private institution of higher learning serves a public purpose,” he wrote.

Norman Siegel, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, said in a telephone interview that the ruling “sends a message that small property owners can fight a huge landlord backed by city hall, and sometimes, you can win.”

Siegel, 66, was the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 to 2000 and a candidate for New York City Public Advocate. He said the case will likely be appealed to the New York Court of Appeals in Albany, the state’s highest court.

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