Columbia University’s controversial plan to build a $7 billion campus expansion in West Harlem was approved by city planners yesterday during a raucous meeting packed with neighborhood opponents who accused the panel of selling out.
The 12-member Planning Commission approved the project with one abstention and one vote against it, sending the zoning changes for 17 acres of mostly manufacturing and commercial land north of 125th Street to the City Council for final approval.
Columbia’s plan won the key approval only after the commission made several changes, including replacing two research buildings on Broadway with university housing and lowering the height of both buildings.
“The commission has been particularly concerned that the proposed concentration of six academic research buildings fronting along Broadway would potentially diminish the ability to create a vibrant and active corridor,” said Amanda Burden, director of city planning.
But the commission’s action did not settle the question of whether the laws of eminent domain would be invoked to take property owned by resistant land owners.
That will likely be left to the state’s Empire State Development Corp.
Dozens of Harlem residents shouted their opposition to the development during the meeting.
One opponent, Tom DeMott, threw fistfuls of green paper he called “Bollinger Dollars,” in reference to university President Lee Bollinger.
Another, Nellie Bailey, called Columbia’s expansion “a plan to dismantle and restructure Harlem. You are driving blacks, Latinos and working-class whites out of Harlem.”
But the Rev. Reginald Williams, a Harlem resident and pastor of Charity Baptist Church in The Bronx, welcomed the Columbia expansion.
“It’ll bring jobs and economic opportunity in an area that’s been blighted for a long time,” he said.
Columbia has so far pledged $20 million to help build affordable housing.
University officials propose building the campus in two phases, to be completed in 2015 and 2030.