Above photo: Kai Cogsville, 33, has emerged as a key leader in the movement against gentrification and Columbia’s expansion in Harlem. His father, Donald J. Cogsville, 87, was head of the Harlem Urban Development Corporation before Governor George Pataki shut it down in 1995. Eric Stenzel.
Amid an affordable-housing crisis in the neighborhood, community members are fighting to stop the university’s ongoing construction of a satellite campus.
Columbia University, New York City’s largest landlord, is facing increased community resistance to its ongoing Manhattanville campus expansion, located between W. 125th and 134th Streets.
Since Columbia won a lengthy legal battle in 2010, the campus has grown to include residential, artistic, science, business and gathering spaces. While most of the Manhattanville campus has already been constructed, Columbia plans to further develop over the next two decades. One of the university’s most recent acquisitions, 2.5 acres of land along the Hudson River, is yet to be redeveloped, and community members want to see it serve them.
Community members say they are concerned because the project is driving neighborhood gentrification, and the benefits Columbia previously promised them have not been fully realized.
The Empire State Development Corporation, a state development agency, used eminent domain in 2008 to enable the development. In 2009 Columbia sought community support for the project by signing a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), committing $170 million in benefits to the community. Recent reporting by Columbia Daily Spectator, however, revealed that promised community spaces have been hard for residents to access, and the school’s local investments are a small fraction of its tax exemptions.
“There needs to be regulation; there needs to be control; there needs to be some sort of counterbalance to Columbia’s unabated expansionary and displacement practices,” says Cameron Clarke, Harlem resident, environmental-justice fellow at We Act for Environmental Justice and MD candidate at Columbia’s medical school.
A coalition of residents, university affiliates, and local officials are fighting to “defend Harlem” against more expansion.
“Columbia, Columbia, you can’t hide! You displace and gentrify!” chanted Harlem residents and Columbia affiliates outside the Morningside Heights campus gates on Sept. 30. Organized by Defend Harlem, a campaign of the New York Interfaith Commission for Housing Equality (NYICHE), Columbia University Apartheid Divest and the Housing Equity Project, about a hundred rally-goers lined the sidewalk.
A petition launched by Defend Harlem last year now has nearly 3,000 signatures. It calls for Gov. Kathy Hochul to rescind the 2008 Education Mixed-Use Development Program that allowed Columbia to start building that year, for Columbia to make its newly acquired properties public, “prevent the university from using their personnel and/or students from gentrifying uptown neighborhoods,” and “support legislation that would prevent the university from using their tax-exempt status for discriminatory purposes.”
Columbia says it intends to meet with NYICHE and Harlem State Senator Cordell Cleare to discuss community concerns but has given no date for a meeting. In April Cleare introduced a legislative package that would rescind state support for the expansion and create additional oversight for the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency that used eminent domain to force the development 16 years ago.
Many of Harlem’s representatives, including Assemblymember Inez Dickens, Assemblymember Al Taylor, Councilmember Yusef Salaam, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, supported one of Cleare’s bills, SB 9028, at a June press conference.
In an April statement Columbia representatives sent to The Indypendent, the university opposed Cleare’s legislation, saying it was “premised on a fundamental misrepresentation of both the history and present-day reality of the Columbia project.” The university said eminent domain “will not be a part of any future development” for the campus and that Columbia “has never had plans to expand its campus beyond” the Manhattanville campus “parameters or to acquire any existing residential property in its vicinity.”
Cleare’s office initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to follow-ups from The Indy.
A university spokesperson told The Indy Columbia continues “to prioritize engagement with our local community” and that “the additional sites that should be added over the next two decades will create academic, research, housing, and recreational spaces, as well as public retail, cultural, and community programming amenities along Broadway and 12th Avenue.” The spokesperson said the project “has the strong support of local elected officials, community leaders, local residents, and many other longtime partners whose input and guidance has ensured the active participation of the Harlem community every step of the way.” The spokesperson did not answer who the elected officials were.
There was community opposition to Columbia’s Manhattanville campus when it launched in 2008. Protests started happening again in 2022, and things heated up over the 2023–24 academic year — Defend Harlem launched new initiatives; Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which received heavy media attention, included demands against the expansion; and the Columbia Spectator began to ramp up its reporting on the planned work.
Rising costs in West Harlem have galvanized increasing numbers of people and organizations to join the cause. The Community Service Society of New York released data in June showing West Harlem had seen significant reductions in Black and Latine residents and increases in housing costs. In Central Harlem, according to the NYU Furman Center, from 2000 to 2022 the Black percentage of the population dropped from 77.3% to 45.8%. “As of 2022, the change in median gross rent outpaced the change in median household income by 19.2 percentage points,” the center reported.
Though NYICHE has been advocating for the Harlem community for years, Defend Harlem was only founded in 2023, and since then it has fostered coalitions and amassed a following of almost 5,000 accounts on Instagram. A focus of its strategy has been to reach a younger audience by developing media like testimonials from long-time residents, video essays, infographics and montages. While fighting the expansion is a top priority, Defend Harlem hopes to address gentrification in Harlem at-large. According to Kai Cogsville, 33, the campaign’s founder, NYICHE is beginning to transition into a funded organization. “We’ve really been blessed,” he said.
Defend Harlem hoped to “build up some more leverage before our meeting with Columbia” with its Sept. 30 protest, Cogsville said. At a prep meeting the week prior at Mt. Olivet Church in Central Harlem that garnered around eighty attendees from Harlem and Columbia, he told The Indy it’s important that the community and students are “on the same page” for demands. “I think we have more of a chance of getting those heard and executed if we’re constantly putting that information out there,” he said.
Part of NYICHE and Defend Harlem’s distrust of Columbia is rooted in Columbia ignoring them and misleading them about its intentions, the groups say.
As attendees lined up to enter the church meeting, organizers distributed a copy of a July 22, 2024 letter from NYICHE Vice Chairman Dr. Dedrick Blue addressed to Columbia Executive VP for Public Affairs Shailagh J. Murray. The letter alleges that prior correspondence from February outlining their concerns and requesting a meeting went unanswered.
According to Donald Cogsville, Kai’s father and former head of the now-defunct Harlem Urban Development Corporation; Mt. Olivet Pastor and NYICHE Chairman Dr. Charles A. Curtis; and a chronology document distributed by Defend Harlem organizers at the church prep meeting, in a 2021 meeting between Columbia and NYICHE members, university representatives said they did not have development interest in the “Fairway Properties” near the Hudson River waterfront.
But in 2022, Columbia won the top bid for the 2.5 acres at $84 million — in cash. That parcel had previously served as a heavily trafficked Fairway grocery store before Fairway’s owners declared bankruptcy in 2020 and put the property up for sale.
Asked about NYICHE’s correspondence and Fairview property allegations, a Columbia spokesperson told The Indy they “don’t have any additional information to share at the moment.”
Defend Harlem’s advocacy was further bolstered when pro-Palestine student protestors at Columbia included stopping the Manhattanville expansion in their demands last fall — a historical parallel to 1968 protests over a proposed segregated gym that converged with anti-Vietnam War protests; the gym was never built.
At an Aug. 29 Sakura Park teach-in event called “Displacement in Harlem” hosted by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), local activists taught students about gentrification in Harlem.
On Sept.15 CUAD, Harlem for Palestine, Defend Harlem and Harlem Peace Walk gathered in Marcus Garvey Park for a community-building event with food and meditation. Blocks away, Defend Harlem volunteers flyered at the annual African-American Day Parade.
While the campus expansion is in West Harlem’s Manhattanville, many locals fear broader impacts. Brandon Tizol, 40, a videographer with Defend Harlem and organizer with Harlem for Palestine, told The Indy, “We’re never just talking about Manhattanville.” While that’s where the campus is, “if you displace people in Manhattanville, they have to go somewhere, right?”
Tizol, who, like all Harlem community members quoted in this story, is Black, sees the expansion as part of a pattern that displaces communities with ties to the land and culture. “The end game is [pushing] poor Black people out of Harlem, so that all that remains of Harlem is the memory.” He said there’s a similarity at a different scale with Israel’s occupation and genocidal campaign against Palestine, where “the entire point is to get people to leave, so that their homes, their land, can be taken.”
Hagen Feeney, a Columbia College junior who joined the Housing Equity Project (HEP) in the spring, connected with NYICHE and Defend Harlem through mutual-aid work. Citing how Columbia often refers to itself as “Columbia University in the City of New York,” he said there is a “great irony” in how Columbia profits off its proximity to Harlem and its culture. “Morningside Heights has existed due to redlining of the segregated community from Harlem and President [Nicholas] Butler,” responsible for the university’s early-20th -century expansions, who, “repeatedly said that he did not want Harlem residents moving near Columbia.” Butler used the term “invasion;” he also had ties to fascist Italy and avidly defended a Nazi German diplomat speaking on campus.
Feeney says HEP, which is part of the CUAD coalition, stands for a free Palestine. “We recognize that displacement in Harlem from Columbia is also tied to displacement in Palestine through the use of Columbia dollars,” he says. One of CUAD‘s main demands has been divestment of the university endowment from Israel.
On a walk by Columbia’s Morningside campus, lifelong East Harlem resident and Columbia Secondary School graduate Ari Springer, 22, noted the overwhelming majority of security guards staffing the gate checkpoints are Black and brown. He recalls being able to walk through the campus before the university increased security after the Gaza Solidarity Encampment roiled the campus in the spring.
Springer said Columbia’s employment of many Black and brown individuals for its security and support services allows the university to “leverage someone’s race to avoid talking about their position.” He asked, “What is the purpose of those security guards staying? Who are they trying to keep out so bad?”