Columbia Expansion 101: Wealthy University Devours West Harlem
A year ago, six auto repair shops packed the corner of Broadway and 131st Street, in West Harlem’s dingy industrial zone. The bulky, five-story building employed about 45 people, mostly black and Latino residents of the area, who spent their days servicing cars that rolled in from homes on the West Side.
At the end of July, both workers and property owners were emptied out of their shops. Not long after buying 3251 Broadway last year, Columbia University informed the tenants that they would have to permanently vacate the space. The school does not plan to demolish 3251 Broadway until 2015 when it will make room for its ambitious $7 billion 17-acre academia mixed-use expansion project.
But for the next eight years — like many local businesses plucked by the university — the building will collect dust.
“I don’t have a job,” Tony Garcia said flatly, shrugging. A large, Dominican man with a dour expression, Garcia sat under the scaffolding of 3251 Broadway Auto Center, before the business was forced to close shop by its new landlord. At 38-years old, he has worked in this building for the last 14 years. “There are only 12 to 13 guys here now,” said Garcia through broken English. Some of the guys are trying to find jobs in the area, but they close everything. Columbia has everything. You can’t find a job. You have to go to the Bronx maybe. You know?”
But according to Columbia’s statistics, Garcia’s sudden change of fate does not count as a lost job. Columbia estimates that 902 permanent jobs will be lost by 2030, but those do not include people who lost work after their landlord “voluntarily” sold their building to the university giant.
SLOWLY STRANGLING A NEIGHBORHOOD
In Manhattanville, this kind of story has become old news. Since the late 1990s, Columbia has amassed about 70 percent of the property it seeks, vacating many of the buildings. As the university has grown, West Harlem’s manufacturing and service shops have fallen by the wayside. In the 1990s, West Harlem’s industrial sector added 403 jobs to the workforce.
But between 2000 and 2002, when Columbia picked up the bulk of its Manhattanville property, this same industry suffered a sharp loss of 372 jobs, according to a study commissioned by Community Board 9 (CB9), which represents West Harlem.
For local residents, Columbia’s expansion comes with the sting of irony. Having emptied out a large portion of Manhattanville, the university is now asking New York to find the area “blighted,” so that it can use eminent domain, a state government power, in order to force remaining holdouts to sell and demolish the area for “public benefit,” as university President Lee Bollinger put it in a March interview on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” This “public benefit” comes in the form of urban renewal. Bollinger says the new campus is about building the future. Columbia estimates that its new facility will generate 7,086 permanent jobs on site, though the vast majority of those would not be available to the average person currently living in West Harlem, where 32 percent of residents hold less than a high school education. (more)