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Remember when to gather signatures for a petition you had to stand around with a clipboard accosting strangers on the street? Web-based petitions have done away with all the discomfort, and now rallying support for a cause is as easy as setting up a letter on one of the several petition sites and watching the number grow.
The latest one we’re aware of (after these two) urges the City Council to deny the University’s 197-C plan (the one with lots of big shiny buildings) for Manhattanville until it satisfactorily reflects the Community Board’s 197-A plan (the one with affordable housing and light manufacturing). At last count, it’s up to 188 signatures, although the whole “student petition” moniker may be slightly inaccurate. That’s the problem with online activism–harder to keep the wackos out.
Read our midsummer Manhattanville roundup here, and relatively jargon-free testimony on the 197-A plan here.
– LBD
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9 Comments
@Ugh The text of that counter-petition is the most verbose playing of the race card I’ve ever read. Wow.
@just kidding does Bwog have an actual stance on this issue? You joke around a lot and mock the university, but you never seem to say outright what you think, so it’s hard to pin you with any criticism.
@Lydia To clarify: Bwog has no official stance on the Manhattanville expansion. Rather, we try to digest the mass of information out there and regurgitate it in a (hopefully) more understandable way.
If you’ve got ideas on how we could do this better, please let us know.
@Go community! 5,000 gone is dead wrong!
http://www.stopcolumbia.org
@Go Columbia! and the 197-c plan for that matter. Hopefully, the 197-a plan (and this silly petition) will fail. There’s no stopping the university now, and any resistance is futile.
@wirc to clarify, the property owners already there, Columbia, Anne Whitman, and Spreyregan, ConEd, and the MTA are exempted from most of the effective regulations.
This includes the MTA, who will never change their station to CNG in time, and will kill the proposal.
@wirc This is crap, Lydia.
The 197-a plan is so restrictive nobody would actually be able to build anything successful.
Which leaves Manhattanville as unsustainable and unsuited to the 2000 residents who will be pushed out by the area as a result of the obscenely strict zoning laws, and the pricey restaurants move in because they’re the only ones who can afford to accommodate the no-waste rules.
And do you know who doesn’t have to deal with the rules at all? Nick Spreyregan, and his toss-off 5% affordable housing and 95% condos.
Communities live and die, but Bwog remains as naïve as it ever was.
@yes the opposition is all a conspiracy by spreyregan.
nice try… bill lynch
@wirc Haha, I can read the spec too. Columbia and other’s astroturfing is outrageous and shameful. But the misinformation on the other side is just as bad. And I have been focusing on that man too much.
But I’ve hated Spreyregan since long before Columbia hired Bill Lynch shot to shoot itself in the foot. Unlike the CPC, WEACT and other grass roots groups, his support is quite clearly just business.
Walk up frederick Douglass Boulevard and tell me those condos are a) Columbia’s fault, and b) something Nicky won’t cash in on.
Affordable housing has been a Trojan Horse that has fooled neighborhood groups again and again, and belies their lack of understanding of the principles of urban planning and the housing market.
Harlem is screwed. Better they