The Eminent Domain

Sure enough, just over half of the Columbia community benefits commitment, $76 million, will be devoted to “a flexible benefit fund to be overseen by a committee of community and Columbia representatives,” the New York Times reports this morning — a committee presumably not including tenant representatives Tom DeMott and Luisa Henriquez, storage company owner Nick Sprayregen, or Rev. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, all of whom have recently resigned from the body negotiating with Columbia for community benefits, the West Harlem LDC.

Think about that $76 million for a moment. That’s equivalent to Yankee Stadium’s $800,000 annual “community” pledge to Bronx elected officials — for 95 years. We’ll have to wait to see the language of the agreement, of course, but unless the promised body overseeing this thing is a paragon of democracy, what we have here is essentially a long-term purchase of elected officials’ compliance, long after Borough President Scott Stringer, Councilmember Robert Jackson and other parties to this deal will have been term-limited out of office.

While Columbia deserves ample credit for a few things — for its persistent if incomplete efforts to keep the surrounding community informed about its plans, for its commitment of $30 million for a school and $20 million for an affordable housing fund, and for being willing to sit down to negotiate community benefits in the first place — university officials have been anything but encouraging of serious community participation. Yes, Columbia, some of the local demands were unreasonable, intransigent, contradictory, and polarizing. Certain groups made clear they intended to stop Columbia’s expansion altogether. That’s the nature of democratic debate, as Columbia President and First Amendment specialist Lee Bollinger knows very well. Dissent and resistance are not a reason to steamroller local input; on the contrary, they demand meaningful engagement. Alas, nothing so far suggests the new body to oversee the funds will be any more inclusive.

Then there’s the collateral damage we’re already seeing, to the very idea of community benefits agreements. Check out the comments in response to Matthew Schuerman’s article in the Observer this week (his last, as Schuerman moves to WNYC radio). Virtually every one characterizes the deal as a shakedown of near-criminal proportions. Even a lonely commenter who gives the agreement benefit of the doubt expresses a fear that “some of the community activists (or their backers) will end up making out like bandits.”

Beyond the racially charged imagery of this emerging narrative, which is echoed in so many accounts of the community benefits negotiations, is a larger sense that major developers have no responsibilities to the communities they occupy, which are in fact lucky to have them there. But some other cities don’t look at it that way. After Boston went through similar agonies over hospital and university expansions in the 1980s, the city redevelopment agency there developed a formal process for community participation in planning institutional expansions — and plans must always include some clearly delineated community benefits. Until the mayor and Department of City Planning take the leadership to develop something like that, pushing community benefits from a fringe demand (thus easily manipulable to bad ends) to a tenet of city planning, we’re going to be a poorer city, in which institutions that should be investing in building strong community ties instead sow mountains of distrust, then have to spend millions buying elected officials’ support.