Bargaining for Benefits: The Dilemmas of Implementing the West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement

Introduction

In January 2003, Columbia University publicized plans to build a 17-acre satellite campus in the Manhattan neighborhood of West Harlem. Citing pressures to remain competitive with institutions such as Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University, the expansion unveiled Columbia's long-term vision for West Harlem. “This is a great moment for the university, for the city and we hope for the communities around us,” said Columbia President Lee Bollinger. “Expansion is a critical requirement for us to remain one of the great universities of the world” (Williams and Rivera 2007). When describing the benefits the campus would provide to the city, New York's Deputy Mayor for Development Daniel Doctoroff echoed Bollinger's image for postindustrial New York. “The university's expansion is critical,” Doctoroff noted, “because the success of this city in the future will be a function of us having a diversified economy, and having science and technology as a key component of that diversity” (Williams and Rivera 2007).

Despite optimism echoing from New York's political class, the news of Columbia's plans was met with opposition from unaffiliated neighborhood residents. They leveled criticisms on multiple fronts. Business owners feared discussions of using eminent domain to make room for new development (Brown 2009). Others raised more place-based objections that centered around preserving what was left of Harlem, a neighborhood that embodies a complicated legacy for the Black experience in the United States (Freeman 2019). “Columbia is an important cog in the wheel that is driving gentrification in Harlem” asserted one local activist, “What will happen to the city's mosaic if the working and middle class can no longer afford to live here?” (Eviatar 2006). Even as local elected officials attempted to assuage the biggest criticisms surrounding physical and cultural displacement, such fears were validated when the cost of living in two of the ZIP codes adjacent to the new campus climbed sharply to among the borough's most expensive (Pogkas 2017).

In May 2009, in an effort to calm residents’ concerns, Columbia officials negotiated with neighborhood leaders to sign the West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement (WHCBA). A CBA is “a documented bargain outlining a set of programmatic and material commitments that a private developer has made to win political support from the residents of a development area and others claiming a stake in its future” (Wolf-Powers 2010, 1). This article uses regime theory as a framework to demonstrate that the relative increase in power of neighborhood interests across the urban political landscape does not automatically translate into more responsive solutions that address underlying concerns over new development. To this end, it uses the WHCBA to interrogate the viability of these agreements as vehicles for redistributing greater resources and power over development projects. It contributes to the literature on CBAs by considering the dilemmas encountered in their implementation phase. Specifically, it asks, what problems reduce the responsiveness of these agreements in ways that frustrate effective benefits delivery over time? If we can better understand the impediments to more responsive implementation, then benefits agreements can be made more accountable to those whose interests they are intended to represent.

Literature Review

Scholars of urban regimes have long held that the policy agendas of postindustrial cities were driven by powerful linkages between public actors and private business elites primarily focused on the goal of economic development (Mossberger 2009). As defined by Stone (1989, 6), an urban regime is constituted by “the informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together in order to be able to make and carry out governing decisions.” While the coalitional politics that undergirds regimes may necessitate a degree of “biracial bargaining,” they are generally centered around close ties between developers and politicians. As a result, the policies they produce tend to reflect middle-class interests at the expense of the city's poor and working-class residents (Stone 1989, 177). The perils of prioritizing downtown development to the detriment of neighborhood concerns were illustrated by Ferman's (1996) comparative analysis of Pittsburgh and Chicago. By injecting regime analysis with a “view from the neighborhoods” (1996, 65), Ferman shifts regime analysis toward the resistance strategies of those on the receiving end of coalition-driven policies. Failure to open urban policymaking to neighborhood groups, warns Ferman, has consequences for those on the outside: “Decisions made behind closed doors reflect the interests of those on the inside; neighborhoods often rise or fall as a result of those decisions” (Ferman 1996, 12).

More recent work departs from regime theorists’ description of urban political power being limited to a small number of regime participants. In contrast to top-down policy agendas focused primarily on increasing downtown property values, these scholars identify a paradigm shift in approaches to policy thinking and practice across American cities. In this “new era” of neighborhood revitalization:

The narrow pursuit of economic development and growth as an overriding aim has been modified; the economic imperative has become less distinct and now intermingles with other considerations … economic development is no longer seen as a necessarily discrete and privileged domain. The intermingling of community-level concerns with economic development has become part of a new era in city politics. (emphasis mine) (Horak et al. 2015, 2)

In contrast to the earlier period (1945–1980) of development strategies focusing largely on the enhancement of “exchange,” or market, value of downtown business interests (Biles and Rose 2022), city agendas are now more contested. As a consequence of this shift, urban policy is more likely to reflect “use” values that are more cherished by working-class residents such as identity, emotional attachment to place, and community (Logan and Molotch 1987). In this context, universities occupy an uncertain position. Some contend that their implicit obligations of social responsibility are rooted in receiving public supports such as subsidies and tax exemptions (Etienne 2012, 10–11). But, as “anchor” institutions for broader efforts at spatial reorganization (Winling 2018), universities become sites of contentious politics where unaffiliated neighborhood residents make claims, assert interests, and raise wider questions of distributive justice.

Nonetheless, despite the increased presence of community-based coalitions in urban governance (Shiau, Musso and Sellers 2015), this more diffuse policy landscape did not eliminate the power of business in the policy process, nor did it abolish the structural inequities that shape urban life. However, it has created space for historically disempowered residents to challenge the prevailing status of the “politics of capital attraction” (Schragger 2016). In challenging growth-oriented development strategies, Stone (2015, 113) remarks that low-income residents “remain politically marginal, but less unremittingly so” than throughout the earlier period of downtown-centered development. This recognition of increased agency led residents to organize for improvements in neighborhood services by leveraging urban growth in land development, resulting in less adversarial developer-resident relations. Horak et al. (2015, 5) aptly make this point:

Neighborhoods still find reasons to protest, but the strategic goal has changed. Rather than seeking to protect neighborhood integrity by a go-for-broke effort to derail an intrusive economic-development agenda, neighborhoods can seek to participate in the policy process and make claims for the sake of community improvement. Bargaining for benefits is a more flexible approach than purely defensive opposition. (emphasis mine)

By linking the competing ends of economic growth and equity through development projects, CBAs are ideal representations of this constructive approach.

However, scholars disagree as to whether CBAs actually deliver equity in urban development. Some argue that benefits agreements “bring economic inequality and redistributive claims to the center of contemporary urban politics” (Parks and Warren 2009, 89). In addition to economic redistribution, CBAs invite a range of civil society interests into public discussion about the ends of development (Baxamusa 2008). Others, however, take a more critical stance. Biggar (2021) contends that a central problem of these agreements is that they condition the supply of social welfare resources on incentivizing development. In a similar vein, Fox-Rogers and Murphy (2015) illustrate how benefit agreements not only privatize essential public goods, but they also enable developers to instrumentalize them to their own advantage. This is done through what Rosen (2023) calls “community bypass,” or the selective negotiation with groups with demands most conducive to their interests. Thus, rather than achieving a paradigm shift that “fundamentally alter[s]” growth-centered policy goals, benefits agreements only leave community members “negotiating with” it (Cain 2014). Therefore, they do not allow for the questioning of the desirability of growth itself. Understood in these terms, CBAs are limited to managing urban inequalities rather than repairing the social harm inflicted onto neighborhoods by historical disinvestment and institutional neglect (Wolf-Powers 2022, 134).

To this point, the CBA literature has primarily interrogated the relations between residents, developers, and local government prior to the signing of an agreement. How did community groups bring developers to the bargaining table (Dorobantu and Odziemkowska 2017)? What was the role of organized labor in CBA negotiations (Saito and Truong 2015)? Which groups were chosen (and how?) to “represent” the welfare of the community (Salkin 2007)? While concentrating on ideal negotiating conditions ¹ , much of the literature overlooks the critical issue of long-term benefits delivery. This article contributes to the implementation side of the CBA literature (Berglund and Butler 2021; Marantz 2015; Simmons and Luce 2009; Stephan 2022). Fundamentally, the dilemma of implementation is a structural one, as explained by Rosen (2023, 151):

[S]ince pro-development interests generally get what they want early in the process—to promote development through project approvals, to publicly claim benefits delivery, and/or to secure public resources and subsidies—they may have little incentive afterward, unless explicitly motivated, to produce (often costly and cumbersome) community outcomes. At the same time, community leverage over pro-growth actors declines when the project moves forward after agreement approval. This structural pattern systematically leaves communities the most vulnerable to not getting what they originally sought from agreement negotiations. This inherent temporal and power asymmetry, combined with the tendency to deny community oversight during agreement implementation, means communities may fail to receive promised benefits—even after a benefits-sharing agreement gets signed.

Thus, what can be done to incentivize developers to remain responsive to community interests long after the agreement is signed? Without solutions, the ability of benefits agreements to redistribute real resources and power through the economic development process will remain constrained.

The WHCBA represents an example where benefits delivery was hampered by an implementation plan unresponsive to the needs of neighborhood residents. The agreement was the product of a coalition of residents from diverse political interests and socioeconomic backgrounds united to contest Columbia's state-driven expansion into the neighborhood. After the campus plans were greenlit by the New York Supreme Court, the primary objective was to extract concessions from the university. These concessions were reflected in the WHCBA, which requires Columbia to invest $150 million in grants and services into West Harlem over a period of twenty years. The responsibility for delivering community benefits was outsourced to the newly created West Harlem Development Corporation (WHDC). ² I find that effective benefits delivery was thwarted for two primary reasons. Firstly, the public lacked any substantive input or oversight role in long-term implementation. The core reason for this was the lack of public knowledge of the agreement itself. And secondly, the WHDC's dependence on developers limited its capacity to meaningfully address the largest concern among residents, which was the neighborhood's housing affordability crisis.

Research Methods

This research utilizes qualitative research methods to understand two specific dimensions of the implementation of the WHCBA. First, I sought to learn more about how the agreement was designed. How much discretion did the WHDC have in dispersing CBA dollars? What was Columbia's role in the implementation process? And how did decisions over agreement design influence implementation? To this end, I conducted four semi-structured, anonymized interviews with persons involved as participants and observers of the WHCBA over time. Among those interviewed was a senior administrator at Columbia University who now works regularly with the WHDC and other community stakeholders. This interviewee was also involved in negotiating the benefits agreement. Other interviewees include a local reporter who covers Columbia-West Harlem relations, a journalist who specializes in New York City politics, and a business reporter who focused on economic issues in New York City. Each interview was transcribed using speech-to-text transcription software and also recorded. I triangulated these interviews with archival materials. Included in these archival materials were meeting minutes of public hearings and reports of board meetings from Manhattan Community Board 9 (CB9). Furthermore, I utilized financial reporting documents such as audited financial statements and grant forms. Moreover, the WHDC bylaws and the WHCBA itself were critical to better understanding how powers, responsibilities, and expectations were distributed between Columbia and the WHDC. Lastly, I relied on newspaper articles, publicly available interviews with elected officials and community activists, and recordings of roundtable discussions with members of the WHDC to complement these primary sources.

Rebranding New York through Development Policy

In November 2004, Deputy Mayor Doctoroff unveiled an ambitious plan for New York City to host the 2012 Olympics. The plan—known as “NYC2012”—proposed a series of transformative development projects to accommodate the Summer Games. It envisioned a new stadium for the Yankees in the south Bronx and an “Olympic Village” to house athletes and guests in Long Island City, Queens. The project also planned the Atlantic Yards (now named “Pacific Park”) mixed-use megaproject that included high-end residential housing and commercial space, as well as the Barclay's Center. The heart of the proposal included a $1.2 billion expansion of the Javits Convention Center, a new Madison Square Garden, and the 80,000-seat West Side Stadium (Stein 2019, 83). To effectuate NYC2012, the Bloomberg administration (2002–2013) pursued an aggressive rezoning strategy that would affect 11,000 blocks, a magnitude not seen since the city's zoning maps were redrawn completely in 1961 (Stein 2019, 85–86).

In the end, the bid failed. However, scholars emphasize its enduring impact as a catalyst for the city's rapid political and spatial transformation. In fact, rather than actually hosting the Games, some suggest that the real intent behind the bid was primarily to achieve this result. To this point, Moss (2011) explains that NYC2012 was most directly a plan to obtain the resources and establish the foundation for development projects that would have a “long-term positive impact on the city whether or not the IOC [International Olympic Committee] chose New York City to host the Games.” In testimony to City Council, the newly empowered Doctoroff articulated these plans and the important philosophical basis that undergirded them:

New York … represents everything the Olympics are all about… if you really step back and think about the Olympics, and you think about what New York lives everyday, they’re the same things, whether that’s bringing the world together in one place, whether that is competition—anyone who sets foot in New York knows this is the most competitive place on earth … Ultimately I think what really draws most people to the Olympic Games is the athletes … pursuing their dreams against incredible odds … So, too, New York more than any place on Earth is a magnet for people with dreams. People come here from around the world and have for 400 years to pursue dreams of getting rich, becom-ing a star, or most commonly, just a better life for themselves or their families. (emphasis mine) (quoted in Brash 2011, 52)

At a cursory reading, Doctoroff's testimony is a celebration of what he sees as a truly unique and exceptional place. But, at a deeper reading, it reveals a conception of social justice deeply intertwined with development policy in the city. According to this articulated vision, the values of competition, cosmopolitanism, and meritocracy constitute the just city, and development policy would be the indispensable tool to realize it.

It is important to emphasize that the Bloomberg administration's efforts to rebrand New York for “the world's best and brightest” did not go uncontested (McGahey 2023, 76). Some critiqued them for what they meant for the city's least well-off residents. Lander and Wolf-Powers (2004, 1) contended that the “future city” envisaged by policymakers unevenly distributed the benefits of growth to its most privileged residents, “with too few real benefits of growth reaching the less wealthy 80% of the population.” Part of this unequal distribution centered around the roughly $20 billion in public funds that went toward financing these large-scale plans (Greenberg 2008; Lander and Wolf-Powers 2004). Others contended that, while explicitly championing the virtues of diversity and inclusion, the effect of many of these initiatives was to foster an “authentic” urban experience that would invariably prioritize the tastes of newer, younger, middle-class residents (Zukin 2010).

To be sure, policy efforts to turn the city into a recognizable brand predate Bloomberg's tenure (Harvey 2007, 43–47). However, a principal difference this time was the administration's open embrace of a corporate model of urban governance that celebrated the virtues of top-down executive leadership. This belief translated into the centralization of the city's main economic development agencies to an extent unrivaled since the days of Robert Moses (Brash 2011, 95). From the standpoint of development policy, these reforms enabled more coherent planning according to a consistent vision of justice across the organs of government. These issues, and the political forces that propelled them, culminated around the contentious politics surrounding Columbia's expansion into West Harlem.

Residential Resistance to the “Great Urban University”

In the 2002 Inaugural Address to the Columbia community, President Lee Bollinger (2002–2023) put forth a formative vision for the university as it entered the new century. In the speech, Bollinger highlighted the most urgent problems facing Columbia and ultimately prescribed physical expansion as the solution:

Columbia as the quintessential great urban university is the most constrained for space. This is not even a close question … This state of affairs, however, cannot last. To fulfill our responsibilities and aspirations Columbia must expand significantly over the next decade. Whether we expand … is one of the most important questions we will face in the years ahead … we will need to continue working collaboratively with the Governor, the Mayor, and our neighboring communities and their leaders. We must be guided by a comprehensive vision for the university's real needs. (emphasis mine) ³

The following year, concrete plans for Columbia's expansion materialized. They called for the construction of a 6.8 million gross square feet satellite campus in the Manhattan neighborhood of West Harlem. Situated a half mile north of the Morningside Heights campus, the educational mixed-use development would be bordered by West 125th Street on the South, West 133rd Street on the north, Broadway on the East, and Twelfth Avenue on the West. Among other items, it included new buildings for its art and business schools, several science research laboratories, and facilities to accommodate student and faculty housing, recreational spaces, dining halls, and classrooms (Empire State Development Corporation 2008).

Bollinger's adumbrations concerning physical expansion were met with mixed reaction. Many of the city's elected officials were receptive to the plans. Council Speaker Christine Quinn welcomed them. “I am proud that we are voting on a plan that will not only preserve [Harlem's] history,” Quinn argued, “but will also pull old manufacturing areas out of the shadows and into the light of thriving cultural and academic centers.” ⁴ Unsurprisingly, Doctoroff saw Columbia's expansion as crucial to the city's broader rebranding strategy:

Simply put, facilitating of growth of New York City's renowned research and teaching centers is one of the single most important things we can do to enhance the long-term health of our economy, and Columbia University's expansion is a prime example of that … [It] will result in vital, new academic facilities, thousands of new jobs, greatly enhanced cultural and commercial activity and new public open space. I’m thrilled that … we arrived at a plan that yields such promise for the University and the surrounding area. ⁵

In contrast, West Harlem's working-class residents whose lives and livelihoods depended on the affected area expressed fear for what the satellite campus portended for themselves. While some did not oppose the expansion in principle, they resented Columbia's uncompromising stance on using eminent domain to acquire space. During a public meeting concerning the rezoning of the district, community activist and Chairman of CB9, Jordi Reyes-Monteblanc captured this sentiment:

Personally I welcome the expansion of the university into West Manhattanville. I believe that Columbia University can be a major benefit to our community and that our community will be a great resource for Columbia University … The community must get over its suspicion and dread of the Columbia expansion and Columbia must overcome the feelings that they know better what is good for West Harlem and our people … The use of eminent domain or even the threat of eminent domain must be removed … We will support any owner of properties that refuses to sell and stand with them against eminent domain use for the private benefit or another private entity. ⁶

CB9 rejected the rezoning proposal by a 17 to 1 vote. While they serve an important role for residents to develop a more enlightened understanding of public issues, the results of community board decisions are strictly advisory. Therefore, the vote had little impact on final decisions.

Lastly, many raised concerns that the expansion would exacerbate the already existing problem of gentrification in West Harlem. These worries predated Columbia's announcement, but public relations campaigns aimed at transforming the social fabric of the neighborhood reignited them. They intensified after Columbia was urged to brand its expansion as a “White Harlem Renaissance” (Baldwin 2021, 92). In response, residents became doubtful that their voices would go heard in the face of profit potential for the neighborhood's powerful stakeholders. One resident decried the rezoning, arguing that it represented a “surgical invasion of Columbia University and all their investors in this community” who “will spare no mercy, nor money in its efforts to steal this land and it's heritage from our people.” ⁷ From this perspective, university expansion violated the “occupancy rights,” or the taking of land that morally belongs to long-time residents (Stilz 2013).

Unpersuaded by these objections, Bloomberg asserted that CBAs would not be supported by the administration. Responding to efforts to bind a CBA to Citi Field, the pro-development mayor claimed that, “Every development project in this city is not just going to be a horn of plenty for everybody that wants to grab something” (Sandomir 2006). Despite widespread support from elected officials, residents continued to push Columbia to negotiate with their demands. From their standpoint, the expansion represented another instance of the affluent and largely White institution imposing itself on this historically Black and Puerto Rican community. For many long-time residents, these circumstances reinforced the mistrust that historically pervaded the Columbia-Harlem relationship. For decades, the university routinely used its power to evict its poor and non-White tenants to satisfy the discriminating preferences of White faculty and students to live among “people like themselves” (Bradley 2012, 28). “The idea was that in order to alleviate the unsightliness, vice, and waste of the ghetto,” explains Bradley (2012, 29–30), “institutions and businesses would invest in the inexpensive land and property of the ghettos to revitalize the economy.” Thus, Columbia's expansionary ambitions were predicated on the underdevelopment of the broader Morningside Heights neighborhood. In 1968, tensions peaked when Columbia planned to purchase two acres of public land in Morningside Park to construct a private gym. In an effort to quell uproar, university officials agreed to make two of the ten floors available to the public. These overtures were rejected, and the project was scrapped after sustained protest. The legacy of “Gym Crow,” however, was indelible and strained Columbia's reputation for the foreseeable future.

Nearly sixty years later, Columbia leaders condemn the institution's historical role in perpetuating segregation in Harlem. “I have done everything I can to put the ghost of the gym behind us,” said Bollinger, “Columbia is a different neighbor now. It's absolutely critical to Columbia's future that there be areas for the university's expansion. We want to stay here and be a great world university and part of building the community” (Bagli 2004). While advertising the public benefits of expansion, Bollinger was reluctant to embrace any moral obligation on behalf of the university to promote the broader welfare of West Harlem. “We are not a profit-making institution looking out for our own advantage,” claimed Bollinger, “We are trying to do things that help the world more broadly. The community is not everything” (Eviatar 2006). Regardless of this mixed messaging, university leaders knew that their hopes for a new campus depended on a minimal level of public support. It was out of this context that the WHCBA was conceived.

Dilemmas of Implementation

Despite Bollinger's assurances of the broad benefits of expansion, residents grew increasingly suspicious about its disruptive effect. These concerns were amplified when state's supreme court approved the use of eminent domain, the most controversial part of the expansion, to acquire and transfer private property to Columbia to make room for the new campus. Notably, however, the city's land-use policies gave residents power to delay the plans. By requiring that zoning changes be approved by City Council, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) gave local residents leverage to pressure Columbia to negotiate. ⁸ Further, one New York City political journalist explained to me the crucial role of legislative norms that undergirded ULURP:

The City Council member who represents that district has basically veto power …other members of City Council will defer to that council member … [Council Member Robert Jackson] would, if he thought that his community was not benefiting enough from this deal, he would be able to say no, and then every other council member would vote against it.

Thus, prevailing norms endowed Council Member Jackson a strong hand in negotiating the WHCBA. Jackson's accountability to a larger constituency than the Columbia-West Harlem dispute led the council member to tout the economic benefits of expansion. Jackson reasoned that the most effective means to unlock these benefits was to bring Columbia and community leaders together to negotiate an agreement (Been et al. 2010, 18).

In May 2009, these efforts culminated in the creation of the WHCBA. In it, Columbia committed to delivering $150 million in grants and services to West Harlem over a twenty-year period. ⁹ Most notably, the agreement led to the creation—by a vote from Community Board 9—of the WHDC, which was tasked with managing and administering CBA dollars. The largest pool of Columbia dollars went to the Benefits Fund that contributed $76 million for housing, employment and economic opportunity, education, environmental issues, arts and culture, community facilities, and historic preservation. The CBA also set aside $20 million toward an Affordable Housing Fund and an additional $4 million for a Housing Legal Assistance fund for residents. Further, the agreement committed Columbia to contribute $30 million to help create a public elementary school in the neighborhood.

While civic leaders celebrated the Columbia-West Harlem partnership, many leveled criticisms over its failure to translate university funds into tangible community benefits. Some lambasted it for its lack of transparency and failure to spend funds without consulting the community (Mays 2011). Others accused its decisions to prioritize housing development over curbing the homelessness and eviction crises as out of touch with the real needs of residents. “They’re moving to help CB10 when CB9 is on fire,” said one Harlem housing activist, “we already have enough landlords … What's the point when we haven’t even taken care of our own backyard?” (Garrison 2019) Part of what propelled perceptions of the disconnect between the WHDC and West Harlem residents was that its Board of Directors ¹⁰ lacked “deep roots” in the neighborhood (Sherlock 2020). To this point, WHDC bylaws did not require that Board Members live in the neighborhood. Rather, they could demonstrate “significant commitment” to area by either owning a business or working there. Thus, while residents explicitly supported greater demographic continuity between those who serve as Directors and the community, its bylaws did not substantively advance that end.

However, implementation suffered from more than just a legitimacy problem. Compounding it was the lack of widespread public knowledge of the benefits agreement itself. Practitioners of participatory democratic reforms emphasize that opening up formal opportunities to increase citizen participation mean little without continuous public outreach that makes such opportunities meaningful (Fung 2004, 74–76). In an interview, I asked a Columbia-West Harlem reporter about the issue of public participation in benefits delivery. “For one, I don’t think most residents know about the CBA,” they noted, “those who do know about it are officials or leaders on Community Board 9.” Thus, from an accountability perspective, there are two overlapping problems. The first is rooted in democratic legitimacy: Those most affected by decisions made by the WHDC should be responsible for deciding (or at least giving meaningful input) how to best implement community benefits. Here, the organization's bylaws do not ensure that residents’ interests are substantively represented in decision-making. The second is the issue of limited public knowledge, which perpetuates this circular problem. If residents are unaware of what they are entitled to in the first place, then they cannot be reasonably expected to participate, or give any input at all, in benefits delivery.

But the WHDC is not wholly to blame for residents’ limited knowledge of the benefits agreement. This issue was also caused by Columbia's preferred approach to implementation. When I asked a senior Columbia administrator about the institution's role in implementation, they reflected:

[O]ne of the challenges … from the university's perspective has been our very intentional, and by design, hands off approach to implementing this. There was, understandably, the desire within the community, to be sure that the community really had the authority to implement and spend this money the way they sought without Columbia telling them what they should do with Columbia's money. [This decision] created a very bright line between the university and the [WHDC] … we have absolutely no authority to tell them how to do anything … most of these decisions are up to the community, as represented in this organization.

Cautious about public perceptions, Columbia leaders sought a strategy that minimized the publicity of its role in long-term implementation of the agreement. Efforts to keep Columbia's participation anonymous went as far as obscuring itself as the funder of the various grants and services the WHDC provided. That same senior administrator told me: “[O]ur name is not on anything. Its not in the announcement. We’re not at the press release, on the flier, or we’re not anywhere to be found anywhere.” While intended to protect the public's confidence that the WHDC was acting independently, this “hands off” approach obfuscated Columbia's involvement in implementation. The effect of this decision was to limit the ability of West Harlem residents to apprehend the true innerworkings of the benefits agreement. As a consequence, residents were unable to assign blame and mount pressure when benefits failed to materialize.

As a whole, the decision to charge the WHDC with implementing the agreement produced mixed results. The organization's financial reporting showed success in administering its Benefits Fund, which distributes small- to medium-sized grants to a range of local artistic, athletic, cultural, and educational organizations in and around West Harlem. This funding is crucial, especially for small organizations that lack funding sources from elsewhere. However, on the affordable housing front, the WHDC's efforts at distributing funds were stymied. For example, nine years into implementation, just 1% of Columbia’s $10 million affordable housing commitment was spent (Kim 2018). And, in comparison to other spending categories, its spending on housing is substantially smaller. WHDC financial reports indicate that in 2022, the WHDC spent $522,000 on thirty-five different grants to the arts and culture sector, $836,000 on forty-one grants to youth programs, and $99,000 on five grants for seniors. ¹¹ That same year, just one $10,000 grant was made to an advocacy group supporting the cause of affordable housing. A similar spending pattern is reflected in 2023 reporting. That year, the organization spent over $1 million on youth-related grants, $400,300 on arts and culture, $191,720 on health and human services, $140,000 on older adults, and, identical to the previous year, $10,000 on advocacy efforts toward the goal of affordable housing. ¹²

Heretofore, implementation of the WHCBA has gone precisely according to plan. The agreement requires Columbia to make regular payments to the WHDC, while the development organization translates university dollars into social services for residents. However, excessive focus on the particular actions of Columbia and the WHDC ignores the structural foundations of the social inequalities that the agreement is tasked with addressing. Furthermore, it elides systemic critiques of neoliberal policy solutions to urban problems. Criticizing the “nonprofit industrial complex,” Gilmore (2007, 45) makes this point:

While the role of some [nonprofits] has not changed significantly, we have seen increased responsibility on the part of nonprofits to deliver direct services to those in need of them. What also distinguishes the expansion of social-service nonprofits is that increasingly their role is to take responsibility for persons who are in the throes of abandonment rather than responsibility for persons progressing toward full incorporation into the body politic.

Thus, rather than offering residents greater share in public power, dependence on nonprofits directs residents’ “rights to deliberate, participate, and express democratic preferences” through the contingencies of bargaining in the private sector (Dunning 2022, 14). In this case, the inability of the benefits agreement to advance housing affordability reflects more than discrete decisions in implementation. More fundamentally, it is the product of a local policy environment that privileges social forces emphasizing housing for the sake of economic value over those residents who see it as a social right (Bernt 2022, 3; Tapp and Kay 2019). WHDC Executive Director, Zead Ramadan, observed this conflict, in addition to the tensions between the organization's housing mandate and the displacement pressures that make West Harlem's low-income residents vulnerable to private reinvestment. “Most of the development that's happening in West Harlem has not been affordable housing,” noted Ramadan, “We’re chomping at the bit at supporting affordable housing in West Harlem” (deMause 2022).

As the largest private landowner in New York City, it is arguable that Columbia's interests in physical expansion and social justice were inherently conflicted. While it voiced public support for social justice initiatives, its actions implied a stronger commitment to institutional self-interest. As a result, implementation of the WHCBA was pervaded by disbelief among residents that Columbia would sacrifice growth to the broader welfare of West Harlem. “[T]he unsaid sentiment [is] that Columbia has had such a huge, just indescribably oversized impact on the neighborhood,” a Columbia-West Harlem reporter told me, that the WHCBA was “not quite sufficient in addressing what Harlem has lost.” Thus, the balance between social justice and university priorities was unsustainable. Therefore, rather than marking a new era of university-resident cooperation, the benefits agreement emblematized the pitfalls faced by CBAs in endowing residents with more resources and power over economic development.

Conclusion and Discussion

This article illustrates the limits of strategies of bargaining for community benefits in the face of elite-driven spatial transformation. Columbia's expansion was integral to the broader project among city officials to subordinate the city to a brand that was attractive to private reinvestment. Moreover, despite initial optimism, the leveraged position of neighborhood interests failed to generate real power over the expansion. Thus, the benefits of the Columbia-West Harlem partnership were skewed in favor of the university. This outcome contributed to the perception echoed by critics of benefits agreements, which is that their most pernicious impact lies in legitimizing undemocratic planning processes (Freeman 2007). Meanwhile, lacking a minimum level of public knowledge of the agreement and without the actual ability to effect implementation, the prospects of real accountability were undercut. Illustrating the inadequacy of the WHCBA, the low-income housing crisis—the central issue it was supposed to address—remains unabated (Sun 2023).

Further, this research shows the inability of CBAs to solve the long-term structural problems that confronted West Harlem residents. Importantly, however, not all of the obstacles outlined were due to structurally determined constraints. Instead, specific and identifiable choices also shaped the result. Among them was Columbia's decision to minimize the visibility of its role in the benefits agreement. By decreasing the practical ability for residents to make claims, pressure, and demand more effective benefits delivery, the lack of public awareness precluded more responsive implementation. Moving forward, scholars and policymakers should aim to find strategies for better informing residents of their entitlements under benefits agreements, particularly when implementation unfolds over multiple decades. Without such efforts, the effect of CBAs will be to frustrate, rather than enhance, the goal of greater community participation in urban development.