COLLUSION between Columbia University and the Empire State Development Corp. over using the ESDC’s powers of eminent domain to acquire land for the school seems to violate both the letter and spirit of the law.
The damning evidence is presented in a 107-page petition filed by Nick Sprayregen, one of the local property owners whose land Columbia covets, with a state appellate court.
Sprayregen has battled Columbia and the powerful state agency for five years over their bid to seize land in Manhattanville, where four of his successful Tuck-It-Away storage businesses operate.
The university wants free rein to build a massive new research campus. The ESDC laid the groundwork for the expansion in July by declaring Manhattanville to be “blighted” – the state of economic disrepair required to trigger an eminent domain seizure. But Sprayregen’s filing last month “to reject, annul and set aside” the ESDC’s ruling makes a powerful case.
Among his evidence: In 2006, the ESDC hired the planning firm Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc. (AKRF) to perform an “impartial” neighborhood blight study. Yet the firm was already on Columbia’s payroll and actively working on the school’s controversial Manhattanville plan.
According to billing records Sprayregen obtained through the state Freedom of Information Law, as many as six AKRF employees worked on both the blight study and the redevelopment project – by definition, a conflict of interest.
The report itself proved to be just as flawed. For starters, AKRF failed to mention that Columbia already owns 76 percent of the neighborhood – and was thus directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of alleged blight that it now seeks to exploit, from overflowing basement trash heaps to major roof and skylight leaks.
Numerous tenants have now reported that the university refused to perform basic and necessary repairs – thereby both pushing tenants out of Columbia-owned buildings and manufacturing the ugly conditions that later advanced the school’s real-estate interests. AKRF admitted as much in preliminary findings delivered to the ESDC, which identified “Open violations in CU Buildings” and “History of CU repairs to properties” among its “issues of concern.”
On top of that, AKRF relied on misleading evidence, including irrelevant crime statistics and building-code violations that had zero relationship to actual physical conditions (such as the failure to file an annual boiler inspection).
In fact, the ESDC-Columbia scheme fails to meet even the low standards set by the Supreme Court’s notorious Kelo decision, which permitted a government’s transfer of property from one private party to another so long as the seizure was part of a “comprehensive redevelopment plan.”
As Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion in Kelo made perfectly clear, “Transfers intended to confer benefits on particular, favored private entities, and with only incidental or pretextual public benefits, are forbidden by the Public Use Clause.”
Sprayregen’s petition demonstrates that that’s exactly what’s happening between the ESDC and Columbia University.
Perhaps the worst part of the whole story is that Columbia no longer even needs eminent domain to get its way – the threat alone did the trick. For years, the school has been dropping none-too-subtle hints to property holders that they should sell their land before the state condemned it.
Between the 76 percent of the area that Columbia now owns and the 15 percent that the city controls (including property held by the MTA), the university holds sway over 91 percent of Manhattanville. Surely that’s enough land to build a swanky new campus?
As for Sprayregen’s four holdout properties, all but one of them sits on the periphery of Columbia’s proposal. To date, the university has made no offer to buy any of them.
So what happens next? As Sprayregen told me, “Although we are hopeful that the New York courts will stop this use of eminent domain, if need be we are more than prepared to take this case to the US Supreme Court.”
Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine.