The New York press is flooded with stories and editorials about the fight over Columbia University’s expansion plans, but most accounts ignore a key part of the story. Unlike the opponents who successfully fought Columbia’s 1968 plan to build a gym in Morningside Heights, today’s community residents and students, while they too protest Columbia’s proposals, have their own plan for the area.
Columbia proposes to build 17 acres worth of campus in the Manhattanville area of West Harlem. The university would develop about seven million square feet of building space. The $7.4 billion project would take 25 to 30 years to complete and, according to Columbia, result in 2,000 construction jobs and another 9,000 permanent jobs. The project includes rezoning 35 acres and displacing some 400 people and 1,600 jobs.
Columbia has made much of its willingness to listen to and meet with community residents and businesses, to help relocate those displaced, and to mobilize their signature architect, Renzo Piano, to design a new campus that is more inviting to the community. Piano’s designs purport to open up the new campus to the street grid, promote ground floor retail, and generally create quality urban space instead of a campus enclave.
But other people – in the community, on campus and elsewhere – see a future for the area that includes a different kind of Columbia expansion – and much more than the university’s plan to rezone the area to spur new growth.
After scores of community meetings, Manhattan Community Board 9, which includes West Harlem, put together their own vision of the future. Drawn up with the help of the Pratt Institute Center for Community Development and the Department of City Planning, the plan was submitted to the City Planning Commission in the fall of 2005, at the same time the commission saw Columbia’s proposals to rezone the area. The commission ruled that the community plan met minimal requirements for consideration under Section 197-a of the City Charter. This provision allows community boards to do their own plans and submit them for official approval by the borough president, planning commission and City Council.
The community’s broad-ranging 197-a plan differs from Columbia’s rezoning scheme in several ways. The community plan includes, but is not limited to, rezoning the area so that Columbia can expand. The plan calls for preservation of existing housing and businesses as well as new development in keeping with the existing built environment. It would protect and expand low cost housing. Instead of eliminating industrial and auto-related activities, the mixed-use character of the neighborhood would be expanded. Redevelopment would be achieved without the use of eminent domain to force existing owners and tenants to leave. And any rezoning would be done to help implement the community plan, whereas Columbia's rezoning proposal reflects mainly its own development needs.
While Columbia’s proposals for rezoning leaves the future of the neighborhood to the vagaries of the real estate market, the community plan calls for a different kind of development that would shape instead of succumb to the market. This would include limiting the amount and scale of new residential development. The community plan favors the use of innovative green or environmentally friendly building technology, zero waste development, and proposes specific measures to improve the quality of the environment. This responds, in part, to community concerns about Columbia’s plans to build a biotech facility that could pose risks to community health. The plan also calls for expanded social services for those in the community so that neighborhood residents get services on a par with Columbia’s student services.
Columbia’s rezoning plan would allow the university to pursue its expansion plans, but create uncertainty for the rest of the neighborhood. The proposed rezoning from manufacturing to residential and institutional uses will increase land prices and rents, feeding neighborhood concerns about displacement and gentrification. The phenomenon has already had effects in other parts of Harlem, creating concern among people with modest incomes about whether they will be being able to stay in their neighborhoods.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger has been adamant that his vision of the university’s future requires that Columbia build on the entire tract of land between 125th and 133rd Streets. Nearby residents have a role he said – but should not be all powerful. “We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything," he told the Times
Meanwhile, the City Planning Commission, the city’s main decision-making body on planning and zoning, has looked at both the community plan and Columbia’s zoning proposal and told both parties to “enter into a dialogue and make good faith efforts to achieve consensus.” Some discussions are taking place but so far no one seems to have budged very much. Community representatives recently created a local development corporation that will negotiate a legally binding “community benefits agreement” with Columbia. Agreements like this can be useful when consensus can’t be reached, but once those discussions start it is hard to imagine where the consensus will come from.
While the city’s planning department worked closely with Columbia and the community to devise their respective proposals, the planning department and commission have stayed on the sidelines. This poses the risk that the planning commission could act hastily and without adequate information when the plans finally get submitted for their approval.
According to some community activists, Columbia’s relations with its neighbors had improved substantially until a few years ago. A decade ago, the university put together a working group involving a number of community representatives to explore options for the school’s expansion. The university’s administration worked quietly to develop trust and partnerships with local groups and activists.
Then a couple of years ago the velvet gloves came off. As if to remind everyone that, in any partnership, Columbia would always be the senior partner, the school’s administration floated the idea that, if they had to, they would get the Empire State Development Corporation to condemn the property needed for the university expansion. This provided a sharp reminder to all that Columbia had access to the pinnacles of government.
The threat of condemnation has often been called “planner’s blight” because it can force owners to sell and businesses to close decades before anything new goes up on the site. Under Governor George Pataki, the state development corporation has let developers use the threat of eminent domain to force deals with local property owners and create the impression that nothing can be done to stop the development bulldozer (as in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, for example).
Despite the relatively good years of the 1990s, some community activists think Columbia never took community participation seriously. According to Nellie Bailey of the Coalition to Preserve Community, “Columbia created an image of engagement and their dialogue was not of substance. For years they have worked behind the scenes to push their agenda. They pressured business owners to sell and the city’s housing agency to get rid of tenants.”
Now, with the threat of condemnation facing them, residents worry they cannot be equal partners in the University’s Community Advisory Committee. And it is not only residents: Columbia’s own students have formed the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification and neighborhood residents and businesses have come together in the Coalition to Preserve Community. According to the student coalition, “we are unified in our commitment to continue to work and stand in solidarity with those most affected by the process of gentrification, and in our commitment to educate and mobilize the student body towards a goal of greater university accountability.”
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.Â
While the city's Rent Guidelines Board deliberated on rent increases for almost one million apartments in the city, the Supportive Housing Network of New York held a conference celebrating new money and interest in building housing for particularly vulnerable populations. The two issues - rent increases and building supportive housing - are not unrelated: As rents go up, people are forced to move and the government needs to step in to provide more affordable housing.
For the first time in its history, the Rent Guidelines Board held a public hearing in the Bronx as part of its 2006 deliberations on how much to increase rents. It was a fitting place to hear painful testimony: Most Bronx tenants live in rent stabilized apartments. The Bronx Housing Court has the highest number of cases filed for non-payment of rent and issues more warrants for eviction than any other housing court in the city.
As the board's chair, Marvin Markus, learned, the packed Hostos College Main Hall was no place to sneer at tenants. When he told boisterous tenants who crowded to "shut up," a tenant at the public microphone shouted back at him, "Don't you talk to them like that! Show some respect!"
The sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to the range of increases -- 3 to 6.5 percent on one-year leases and 5 to 8.5 percent on two-year leases -- the board approved in a preliminary vote May 8. One man, speaking with a tone of dread, said times were happier when the city had no rent regulation. But he was roundly hissed, along with a landlord, and left quickly after he spoke.
"You need to know the suffering these people are going through," Reverend John Powis of the Bushwick Housing Independence Project told the board. "More and more people are moving out of New York City because they cannot afford to pay the rent.... Everybody is afraid."
But privately Powis said he was not expecting much. "It's a sham," he said of the board's deliberation.
The board has always voted to increase rents.
In the past, Markus and the landlords' representatives on the board have conceded that the city has an affordable housing crisis. But, they have said, that problem needs to be addressed by government, not landlords.
As for the government, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has embarked on a 10-year plan to build and preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing. But reports continue to show a severe shortage of affordable apartments. A New York University studysaid the number of apartments affordable for moderate income households in the city dropped by more than 200,000 - or 17 percent - between 2002 and 2005. And more and more New Yorkers spend more and more of their incomes on rent.
For those who are most disadvantaged, much attention lately has focused on supportive housing. This interest arises partly from a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, "Million Dollar Murray" and partly from the third New York/New York agreement to finance construction of more supportive housing.
Supportive housing is a catchall term that has referred to facilities that provide an array of services to people suffering persistent mental illnesses. Many of these people might always need some sort of supportive housing, said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.
Targeting chronically homeless people and devoting significant resources to help them - psychiatric services and substance abuse counseling, for example - has, when made available, correlated with a decline in the homeless shelter population, Markee added.
But providing those services is not easy, said some workers who attended the June conference.
"A lot of the people [placed in the facilities] don't utilize the services," said Michele Hall, a social worker in one Manhattan facility, who said many of the resident have debilitating diseases. "They really have to have the motivation to change."
The New York/New York III agreement will provide financing for the construction and operation of 9,000 supportive housing units over 10 years in New York City. There are currently about 25,000 supportive housing units located in about 360 projects in New York City.
Advocates for the homeless were happy to get a third agreement - it took seven years - but disappointed that much of the housing actually will not be ready until after 2010.
Unlike the past New York/New York agreements, this one aims to expand the "target populations" for the housing to foster children aging out of foster care and homeless families with other "special needs."
"We had to broaden our scope significantly ... and make family supportive housing more significant," explained George Nashak of the city's homeless services department. Previous New York/New York agreements focused on housing for seriously and persistently mentally ill people.
Expanding the targets poses challenges, experts at the conference said. "This is not business as usual," said Tim O'Hanlon of the city's Administration for Children's Services. "In fact, this is targeted at very different populations."
Serving "different populations" means the non-profit organizations that run supportive housing facilities will have to hire people qualified to work with those populations. At least one person at the conference pointed out that at salaries as low as $22,000 annually, finding those people is difficult.
"If you have lots of housing, that's great," he said. "But without competent staff, you're not going to do the job."
The experts at the conference also said that organizations would have to try to obtain new funding assistance and increase their capacities. In other states, Medicaid funding, for example, has been used to pay for supportive housing services.
Finding places to build supportive housing is also an issue in the city, O'Hanlon said. Community opposition to supportive housing is a frequent issue at community board meetings wherever projects are proposed. But the development of successful facilities have been has made finding sites easier, O'Hanlon added. "There wasn't ever a concept of supportive housing when we started," he said. "The success of what we did ... has changed their minds." Perhaps. In some areas of the city, board members have complained that their neighborhoods are dumping grounds for this type of housing. The "success" of local facilities is not always so convincing, particularly when critics point out that richer and whiter neighborhoods never get picked for such developments.
So how is supportive housing related to the deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board? Well, supportive housing is certainly a unique type of housing - and could not exist without government subsidies. Many of the people, maybe most, living in supportive housing might never be able to move out. But when I asked one worker what prevented those who could move on she said it all: "They can't afford to move."
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â
For many New Yorkers, the words “rent regulation" immediately conjure up the boisterous annual deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board. The board's deliberations this year, now ongoing, promise to be more boisterous than last year, when political pressure from the mayor's office kept the board from giving landlords a huge spike in rents on the almost one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city.
The board's June 19 hearing, which will take place for the first time in the Bronx, could be the most intense yet. Tenant organizers are working to bring out as many tenants as possible in the borough that has the highest number of tenants hauled to court for non-payment of rent.
The rent spike this year could set a record. Its public members, appointed by the mayor, largely determine the final outcome of the board's deliberations. It does not bode well for tenants that last month the mayor dumped the one public member, Martin Zelnick, an architect, who showed the greatest concern for tenants in recent years.
The board's annual deliberations, however, are just one piece of the rent regulation system, albeit the piece that generally gets the most attention. Of equal or greater significance is the work of the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), the agency charged with enforcing the laws that apply to rent-regulated apartments.
Some tenant advocates are hopeful that with the election of a new governor next year, the state agency would do a better job of protecting tenant rights. Critics charge that the agency has gotten so bad under Governor George Pataki that the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which the agency enforces, should be renamed the Emergency Landlord Protection Act.
The Division of Housing and Community Renewal is also the state's main housing development agency and its efforts on that front, too, have drawn complaints from housing advocates.
The agency is adamant in its own defense, releasing a statement that said in part: "This agency has a very strong and distinguished record supporting affordable housing and tenants' rights across this state, and we take that role very seriously."
State Senator Liz Krueger is one of those who is disappointed in the agency’s performance. "It's not a surprise that people have a high frustration level" with the state's housing agency, Krueger said. "Dramatic problems have been growing in DHCR over the years. Some of their interpretations [of housing laws] raise red flags."
Tenant advocates charge that on virtually every type of complaint tenants can file and every type of request to increase rents landlords can file, the agency comes out on the side of landlords.
Take the case of "preferential rents." Wherever landlords have trouble renting apartments or where they have sought to keep a tenant, landlords have offered to rent apartments for less than the rent registered with the agency. For years, the agency considered preferential rents the base rent for that tenant. But following a change in the law in 2003, when a lease renews on a rent stabilized apartment, the landlord can now charge an increase based on the (higher) legal registered rent. The agency's interpretation of this change show its favoritism,say some critics.
"Even when the lease says the preferential rent will last the length of the tenancy, (DHCR) is ignoring it and allowing landlords to charge the legal registered rent upon renewal," said Kenny Schaeffer of the Met Council on Housing. "It's a terrible idea" for tenants to complain to DHCR about preferential rents, he added. Instead, they should seek to address the matter at housing court, he said.
The decisions on preferential rents are not unfair, replied Mitch Posilkin, general counsel of the Rent Stabilization Association, a trade group that represents property owners across the city.
"We think it's common sense," Posilkin said. "When a landlord is willing to accept less, and then at some point down the road the landlord says he wants to collect what he's allowed to collect, tenants view that as the end of the world."
Tenant advocates said another example of pro-landlord bias is Major Capital Improvements. Landlords who make big repairs or improvements to their buildings - say, installing a new boiler or replacing the elevator - can pass along the costs of such improvements to tenants. These costs are added to tenants' rents -- permanently. Landlords who make such improvements will get reimbursed for much more than the actual cost of the work.
Over the years, the state agency has decided that costs associated with MCIs can also be passed along. These "enhanced MCIs" stretch the rules, said Bob Katz, general counsel to the Queens League of United Tenants.
"They included the costs of pruning trees and seeding lawns -- in order to put in a boiler," Katz said of one MCI request made by a Queens landlord.
Advocates believe that one motivation pushes every request landlords make to increase rents: Deregulating rent stabilized apartments.
"All of this happens because landlords want to deregulate apartments," said Katz, who added that he overheard a state official telling landlords’ attorneys ten years ago that by the time Governor Pataki is out of office, “most of the apartments will be deregulated.”
"It's coming to pass. They're going down very, very quickly."
Others agreed that deregulation of rent regulated apartments - which can occur when a rent reaches $2,000 and becomes vacant - is the force pushing interpretations favoring landlords on MCIs, among other examples.
"Since George Pataki has been governor, there has been a shift toward landlords in the state legislature, the appellate courts and the housing court," said Sam Himmelstein, a tenant attorney.
But landlords see the agency as finally emerging from years of bias toward tenants.
"There's no question that historically DHCR was notoriously biased in favor of tenants," said Posilkin of the Rent Stabilization Association. "We would view it as a more evenhanded organization today. In the past, there were two possible results: no determination, where the case would languish, or a ruling against the owner."
Whether it is "evenhandedness" or "pro-landlord bias," the state housing agency's interpretations can be traced to its leadership, which changed significantly when George Pataki became governor, said Michael McKee of the Tenants Political Action Committee.
"As soon as Pataki was elected, he brought in top people from the real estate industry and turned the office of rent administration over to them," McKee said. An attorney who represented slumlords in Harlem, Marcia Hirsch, became the agency's general counsel, McKee said.
A former employee who worked at the agency for over 15 years agreed.
"Four or five people were hired to run the show," explained the former employee, who requested anonymity because he says he is still in the field and fears retaliation. "They basically swung the agency 180 degrees. (Agency staff) just assumed the top people wanted it interpreted in a pro-landlord way and they would, on their own, issue orders in favor of the landlords.
"Most of the people who were hired had worked as landlord representatives before. That certainly was a total change under Pataki."
And the agency came under pressure from attorneys representing landlords with cases before the agency, the former employee charged.
"There were certain landlords' attorneys who knew these few key people in the agency and could find a way to get a ruling in favor of their clients," the former employee said. "Eventually the exceptions they created would swallow the rule.... I think that went on a lot and probably still goes on to some extent."
The agency denied that allegation.
"These assertions are obviously the work of an unidentified former and disgruntled state employee," the agency said in a statement. "And we cannot say in stronger terms that the charges are false, inflammatory and wholly without merit or truth."
Would a Spitzer administration hire people to make the agency over? Housing advocates are not counting on it.
"My fear is that Mr. Spitzer comes from real estate money," said Himmelstein. "His father's a big landlord in New York.... He's been very good at going after Wall Street, but I bet you can't name one real estate person he's gone after."
"I am not aware of the attorney general's position on any of these issues," Posilkin said.
Spitzer could help everyone if he were to indicate more clearly how he views critical housing issues, McKee said.
"We don't know if Eliot Spitzer is going to be pro-rent regulation," he said. "He's carefully avoiding any mention of it. We've asked him. He hasn't said a word about being in favor of rent regulation, repealing home rule, or repealing high-rent decontrol.”
Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations. Â