Legal News

Eminent Domain Month Continues: Kelo No Help For Columbia?s Plans

By Ashby Jones

The last few weeks have been hot and heavy on the Eminent Domain front. We had news about the fallout from the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision; a big ruling for private developers in the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards case; and arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court over whether Florida’s beach renourishment program constitutes a “taking.”

But wait, there’s more. Earlier today, the appellate division of the New York state Supreme Court found Columbia University’s expansion plans, which propose condemnation of parts of a 17-acre lot in West Harlem, unconstitutional. Click here for the NYT story; here for the court’s 65-page opinion.

According to the NYT, the court's decision is not fatal to the expansion plan. Columbia already owns or controls 91 percent of the 17-acres in the project area. It can simply build around the other property owners, or come to some sort of agreement. But the state and the university had always sought the entire site.

It bought most of the land between 125th Street and 133rd Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive. But the university failed to work out a deal with Nicholas Sprayregen, who owned four Tuck-it-Away Self Storage buildings in the area, and the owners of two gas stations.

The court viewed the facts of the case largely in light of the Kelo ruling, and found the two factual scenarios pretty different. The court found that, unlike as in Kelo, the Manhattanville neighborhood was not sufficiently blighted to justify a taking.

The contrast between ESDC’s scheme for the redeve19pment of Manhattanville and New London’s plan for Fort Trumbull could not be more dramatic. Initially it must be noted that unlike Fort Trumbull Manhattanville or West Harlem as a matter of record was not in a depressed economic condition when EDC and ESDC embarked on their Columbia-prepared-and-financed quest. The 2002 West Harlem Master Plan stated that not only was Harlem experiencing a
renaissance of economic development, but that the area had great development potential that could easily be realized through rezoning. . . .

Furthermore, ruled the court:

In this case, the record overwhelmingly establishes that the true beneficiary of the scheme to redevelop Manhattanville is not the community that is supposedly blighted, but rather Columbia University, a private elite education institution. These remarkably astonishing conflicts with Kelo on virtually every level cannot be ignored, and render the taking in this case unconstitutional.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 03, 2009 (boomark / email).