ABSTRACT
It was unexpected. The Court ruled against Columbia University’s use of eminent domain to facilitate its West Harlem land grab, putting that project on hold. New York State Supreme Court Judge James M. Catterson’s precise language highlighted objections raised up from the grassroots by organizations (like the one I belong to, Coalition to Preserve Community) and by rugged individualists citywide: this was a project benefiting an elite private institution, an eviction plan with no noticeable public benefit to beef up legal rationales for eminent domain. The Court found that Columbia had acted nefariously and in “collusion” with Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to invent a neighborhood’s demise by caricaturing it, demeaning it, and labeling the place where we live and work a “substandard or unsanitary area” which “shall mean and be interchangeable with a slum, blighted, deteriorated, or deteriorating area, or an area which has a blighting influence on the surrounding area.” A related ruling a week later in a separate case before the New York Supreme Court ordered Columbia to turn over documents from a Freedom of Information request—info which could have been valuable to those opposing eminent domain. The judgment mandating disclosure of the documents had already been upheld by two lower courts but ESDC failed to challenge the heavy-handed delay tactics by Columbia’s lawyers, allowing evidence to remain unconsidered and the condemnation proceedings to continue. The Court’s decisions explicitly challenged Columbia’s bullying tactics—their effort to assume complete ownership of a 17-acre area (“all or nothing” as the U’s President Lee Bollinger threatened way back in April 2004 when he introduced his eviction plan at the local community board). So for now, Columbia’s all powerful—though maybe not all wise—pressure-plays, legal and otherwise, have resulted in a decision that calls the basic tenet of their projected expansion “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”
