By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
EAST VILLAGE — When it comes to New York University's long-term expansion plans, the college apparently has more supporters across the Pacific than it does across Broadway.
The school detailed its proposed 20-year growth plan in Greenwich Village Monday night, giving members of Community Board 3's land-use committee a rundown of its desired expansion of up to 2 million square feet on two Greenwich Village "superblocks" just below Washington Square Park.
After peppering Alicia Hurley, NYU's vice president of government affairs and community engagement, with questions regarding how the school's growth could affect the East Village, committee members jokingly asked her if she gives the same presentation at the college's forthcoming Shanghai campus.
"I'd love to," she replied. "They welcome us."
NYU's growth has been greeted warily in the East Village — where no projects are currently planned, but where the controversial construction of a 26-story dorm on East 12th Street in 2009 earned local ire — due to concerns that any new development in the Village will have a ripple effect on the neighborhood.
While NYU's presentation to the committee wasn't mandatory, because the site of its current plan sits outside Board 3's boundaries, members still wondered how a proposal to concentrate construction at one specific site could impact the future population of the East Village and Lower East Side.
"Sometimes I feel this neighborhood has been steamrolled over by NYU," said committee member Herman Hewitt, adding later that he fought the school's expansion as a student there 15 years ago, when he thought the college was simply "a real estate company with classrooms."
Others expressed worry about any leftover square feet as part of NYU's stated 6-million-square-foot expansion, which includes sites in Kips Bay, downtown Brooklyn and Governor's Island, somehow spilling over to the East Village.
"This certainly takes the pressure off," Hurley said of the recently unveiled Village plan, after acknowledging to the board a year ago that the school "oversaturated" stretches like Third Avenue with dorms and other buildings.
Nonetheless, some members approached the topic cautiously, noting that NYU students tend to flood the East Village and Lower East Side when moving out of campus housing, leading to displacement of longtime residents.
"We have a transient population that keeps coming into the community," said committee public member Damaris Reyes, noting that the area has lost about 10,000 units of rent-stabilized housing in the last decade.
"It's something for us to be alarmed about."
Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a vocal opponent of NYU's expansion plans in the Village, countered the school's claims that the East Village is more or less off the table as a possible development area by questioning NYU's ultimate intent.
"There is absolutely nothing to hold them to that promise at all," he said, adding he doesn't think the college is being "completely honest."
"Community Board 3 is chock full of similar superblocks."
Berman and other committee member also quizzed Hurley about possibly expanding to the Financial District, a neighborhood that would welcome the school. She responded that NYU has already settled on its chosen sites, but that "we have no allergy to being downtown."
However, committee public member Michael Zisser noted that many major universities have pursued similar expansions in the face of community opposition, and that those examples should be looked at to encourage broader dialogue.
"Neither the neighborhoods nor the universities would have survived" without those expansions, he said, adding that the committee shouldn't "demonize" growth.
Committee members discussed creating an ad-hoc committee to explore how Board 3 could take an active role in the process, admitting that it would be difficult to weigh in with no part of the project falling within the board's boundaries.
Still, the visceral reactions to NYU's current presence in the area were enough to keep the board on alert.
"We want to walk down Second Avenue on Saturday night," one member said, "and not feel like we're at an after-football party."
