It’s now significantly smaller than originally intended, but NYU’s ambitious — and critically important — expansion plan has cleared another critical hurdle.
The City Council’s Land Use Committee this week gave the plan a green light in a 19-1 vote — though several members said they still had misgivings.
This despite the fact that the plan is now 26 percent smaller than originally announced.
In the end, though, committee members deferred to Councilwoman Margaret Chin, whose district incorporates the NYU campus — and who extracted yet another round of concessions from the university as the price of her support.
At the end of all this ankle-chewing — from Chin, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and the City Planning Commission — NYU’s plan has been scaled back from 2.5 million square feet to just under 2 million.
But many Greenwich Village residents and activists are still opposed, clinging to the unreal notion of preserving their neighborhood as a never-changing bohemian community.
Never mind that NYU has been part of Greenwich Village since 1835 — and had proposed a plan that would limit construction to property it already owns, negating any need to use eminent domain.
To be honest, it was pretty clear that the original plan would never survive intact — some scaling back to meet the naysayers’ objections was inevitable.
And NYU says it can live with what remains. We certainly hope so.
Fact is, this much-needed 20-year expansion is good not only for NYU, but for the city as a whole.
It means 18,200 construction jobs, 9,500 new permanent jobs and $6 billion in spending over the next two decades.
Higher education is a critical part of New York’s economy — and it’s only going to get bigger in the years to come.
Which is why Columbia is expanding its Morningside Heights campus and Cornell is building a $2 billion tech-centric campus on Roosevelt Island.
Those are the kind of win-win situations for New York that normally draw a thumbs-down from the council’s perennially clueless economic Luddites.
Now that the nitpickers have finally been mollified, it’s time to move forward.