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The 21st century (not verified) says:
Why do people keep trying to strong-arm this project? Are they trying to get more money? Is greed their motive? Or is it jealousy of a successful university and misplaced class resentment? Or nostalgia and a destructive hope that nothing around them ever change?
Why should Harlem residents -- I won't say "the project's neighbors," because almost nobody lives in the area and the only businesses there are quasi-legal chopshops that leak carcinogens into the ground -- be able to hold Columbia ransom like this? Is it because it's a non-profit college and is therefore viewed as pliable? If it were some private developer, he'd just go and do his thing, and that'd be the end of it.
Columbia's project will create jobs and revive an embarrassing Third World deadzone in a way that would make any Rust Belt city would drool. What makes New Yorkers so selfish, or so unable to put things into perspective? Would people rather have decent-paying science, research and education jobs within walking distance -- or chopshops?
Opponents have no right to claim there's a community in the area, because there isn't. The university has waited years for the few remaining grannies to move out, rather than displace anyone.
What if New York were this opposed to progress in the 18th century? We'd all have cholera now because we'd still be living in squalor. There'd be no Empire State Building, no subway, and so on. What is it today that makes people think they have a right to use this kind of coercion on a landowner? (Columbia, after all, owns most of these buildings and has not used eminent domain and has shown no sign of doing so.)
It's like living amidst the secular Taliban. Luddites, if you please. Remember, what goes around comes around. If you kill development now, you'll live amidst autoparts dealers and groundwater laced with antifreeze for another 20 years. And as a non-profit university, the jobs Columbia offers the surrounding neighborhoods will be loaded with benefits, just as the school is already promising to build low-cost housing to the tune of $100 million (something it is in no way obliged to do). The Taliban, my friends.
Why do people keep trying to strong-arm this project? Are they trying to get more money? Is greed their motive? Or is it jealousy of a successful university and misplaced class resentment? Or nostalgia and a destructive hope that nothing around them ever change?
Why should Harlem residents -- I won't say "the project's neighbors," because almost nobody lives in the area and the only businesses there are quasi-legal chopshops that leak carcinogens into the ground -- be able to hold Columbia ransom like this? Is it because it's a non-profit college and is therefore viewed as pliable? If it were some private developer, he'd just go and do his thing, and that'd be the end of it.
Columbia's project will create jobs and revive an embarrassing Third World deadzone in a way that would make any Rust Belt city would drool. What makes New Yorkers so selfish, or so unable to put things into perspective? Would people rather have decent-paying science, research and education jobs within walking distance -- or chopshops?
Opponents have no right to claim there's a community in the area, because there isn't. The university has waited years for the few remaining grannies to move out, rather than displace anyone.
What if New York were this opposed to progress in the 18th century? We'd all have cholera now because we'd still be living in squalor. There'd be no Empire State Building, no subway, and so on. What is it today that makes people think they have a right to use this kind of coercion on a landowner? (Columbia, after all, owns most of these buildings and has not used eminent domain and has shown no sign of doing so.)
It's like living amidst the secular Taliban. Luddites, if you please. Remember, what goes around comes around. If you kill development now, you'll live amidst autoparts dealers and groundwater laced with antifreeze for another 20 years. And as a non-profit university, the jobs Columbia offers the surrounding neighborhoods will be loaded with benefits, just as the school is already promising to build low-cost housing to the tune of $100 million (something it is in no way obliged to do). The Taliban, my friends.