By Scott Carlson

New York's top court ruled on Thursday that a state development agency has the right to use eminent domain to claim a large swath of property in Harlem, long planned as the site of a new campus for Columbia University.

Columbia has long had designs on 17 acres in the area known as Manhattanville, with plans for $6.3-billion in facilities for science and health-care research, along with housing and amenities. However, after the university began buying properties, it could not strike deals with some owners—in particular, the owner of a storage company who had buildings in the neighborhood. Residents were also wary of gentrification in the neighborhood.

Although Columbia has strained to distance itself from the case—its representatives will point out that the lawsuit does not involve Columbia—the university released a statement in which Lee C. Bollinger, its president, hailed the ruling. "We are gratified by the court's unanimous decision and look forward to moving ahead with the long-term revitalization of these blocks in Manhattanville that will create thousands of good jobs for New Yorkers and help our city and state remain a global center of pioneering academic research," the statement said.

The plaintiffs and their lawyers could not be reached for comment.

Intentional Rot?

The decision, by the New York Court of Appeals, reverses a prior ruling by an appellate court, which said the Empire State Development Corporation, or ESDC, had acted unconstitutionally in designating the Manhattanville neighborhood as blighted. Such a designation would give the development agency the power to claim the properties. The appellate judges had said that the properties became blighted after Columbia acquired them and allowed them to rot.

However, the Court of Appeals ruled that the development agency had hired environmental-planning and consulting firms that had extensively documented blight in the area. "A court may only substitute its own judgment for that of the legislative body authorizing the project when such judgment is irrational or baseless," wrote Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick for the court. "It cannot be said that ESDC's finding of blight was irrational or baseless. Indeed, ESDC considered a wide range of factors including the physical, economic, engineering, and environmental conditions at the project site. Its decision was not based on any one of these factors, but on the project-site conditions as a whole."

The lower court had also said that the private university's expansion did not qualify as a "civic project" with a "civic purpose. " But Judge Ciparick wrote that the development agency had a history of working with private entities. "Unlike the Nets basketball franchise, Columbia University, though private, operates as a nonprofit educational corporation," she wrote. "Thus, the concern that a private enterprise will be profiting through eminent domain is not present. Rather, the purpose of the project is unquestionably to promote education and academic research while providing public benefits to the local community."

Karate Schools and Adult Video Stores

Judge Ciparick was joined in the ruling by five other judges on the court. Judge Robert S. Smith wrote a separate concurring opinion, in which he said that the finding of blight was "strained and pretextual" but consistent with precedent.

Judge Smith mainly took issue with the court's reading of what constitutes a "civic project." The statutory definition "implies that any public or private activity that can fairly be called educational—or, by implication, cultural or recreational and so forth—will qualify a project as 'civic,'" he wrote. "Surely this approach will, in some imaginable cases, cause the statute to be unconstitutional as applied: Would anyone seriously suggest, for example, that private tennis camps or karate schools ('educational' uses), or private casinos or adult video stores ('recreational' uses), qualify as 'public' uses in the constitutional sense?"

A statement issued by the Empire State Development Corporation also celebrated the ruling, asserting that the development would create 14,000 construction jobs over the next 25 years in addition to 6,000 positions at the university.