Hunter College’s most affordable dorm option, Brookdale Campus, also known as the current home for many Macaulay Honors and Hunter College students, is being demolished to make way for SPARC Kips Bay: a “first of its kind,” 1.6 billion dollar life sciences campus.
The new building is slated to house “Hunter’s School of Nursing and Hunter research labs, the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Public Policy and Borough of Manhattan Community College health programs,” and a new public school. The development is projected to add thousands of new jobs and generate over 25 billion dollars in revenue in the next 30 years.
But the almost 700 students who will lose their affordable housing do not appear to be mentioned anywhere in the announcement from the Mayor’s Office. The Chancellor’s statement states that he “expect[s] the dorms in the Brookdale campus to remain open until 2024,” but this wording shows no guarantee that housing will be available the next academic year.
SPARC Kips Bay was announced on Oct. 14. No communication from Hunter administration was made to Brookdale students until almost a month later, on Nov. 11, via email. Though it contained no further information, this email did provide an invitation to a listening session on Nov. 15, led by Dr. Denise B. Maybank, the CUNY Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, and Salimatou Doumbouya, the chairperson for CUNY University Student Senate (CUNY USS).
Having arrived at the meeting around 7:05, I was surprised to see merely 10 students in attendance, if even that. By the end of the meeting, there were a little over 30. At full capacity, Brookdale boasts 650 residential units — even if not all housing spots were filled this semester, 30 students out of hundreds is an embarrassingly low percentage.
The reason for the poor turnout became clear later in the meeting: many of the students who arrived late did so because they were only notified about the meeting through their Resident Assistants (RAs), who sent out emails to their residents as the meeting was occurring. A large number of students either did not receive the email regarding the listening session or it ended up in their spam folder as it was marked “dangerous.”
The emailing issue appears to be just the tip of the iceberg regarding the main problem of SPARC Kips Bay: residents do not know what is going on and CUNY seems to have little investment in fixing that, even on an issue as important as housing.
One student mentioned that she first learned about the SPARC development through a Tweet by the Mayor’s office and was upset by the lack of acknowledgment of the forthcoming displacement of Brookdale residents. Ariana Ahmed, the President of Hunter USG, quoted in City & State NY, states that she was “only given the communication that [the press conference] was about a new campus, a new science building for Hunter and BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Nothing else.”
As a Brookdale resident myself, I wanted to know whether CUNY was planning on taking steps to improve its engagement with residents since most of the information around Brookdale’s demolition has come from student organizations and individuals. In response, Dr. Maybank shared that CUNY was planning to host “focus groups” regarding the issue of affordable housing in New York City at large, but that project was still in its beginning phases and she was uncertain about the concrete impact it would have.
In addition, Ms. Doumbouya, the chairperson of CUNY USS, emphasized the importance of students advocating for themselves and sitting in on the Board of Trustees, budgetary or other committee meetings. However, this is not a meaningful engagement process; there is no element of participation from students, as they do not have the opportunity to voice their concerns or even know whether the administration is listening.
Ms. Doumbouya and Dr. Maybank also emphasized that students could make their voices heard through other channels, such as by emailing CUNY Central — however, a student pointed out that CUNY is perhaps infamous for the impossible-to-navigate bureaucratic processes baked into nearly all communications. All of these “engagement” suggestions also put the primary onus on students instead of administrators, regarding an issue that majorly impacts students’ lives. They also fell flat considering that even when students did show up and testified in protest at the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting the Monday after the SPARC announcement was made, the Board forged ahead with an affirmative vote.
Dr. Maybank emphasized that she could not give students a timeline about when Brookdale housing would no longer be available or whether building more affordable housing was even on the administration’s radar. Another USS representative stated that it was most likely that Brookdale would remain open for the 2023-2024 academic year but clarified that he was not 100% sure.
More than halfway through the meeting, one student asked what the point of the meeting was if there were no answers to any of the students’ questions. The response was that the purpose of the meeting was for concerns to be communicated to the CUNY administration but there was a sense of skepticism among the students I talked to afterward that simply voicing concerns would have any impact. The meeting seemed to be haphazardly planned and I doubted that Hunter had a pre-existing outreach plan in place.
Since the listening session, there has been no other communication from Hunter or CUNY at the time of writing, even though it was stated that there would be a follow-up email. Once again, any further communication came from students: Aysha Khan, an RA at Brookdale and junior at Macaulay Hunter, sent out an email with notes from the listening session and a link to a petition, which at the time of writing, has amassed 307 signatures from current Brookdale students, Hunter alumni and other CUNY community members. My RA also sent an email linking the USS statement, the petition and the notes.
The failed emails, the question of what the meeting was for and the absence of any follow-up communication ultimately show one thing: affordable housing is not on the administration’s priority list, despite the obvious urgency of the situation. The importance of Brookdale, Hunter’s only affordable housing option, and the cost of losing it, must be emphasized. Across the country, college students are struggling to find affordable housing on and off campus and are oftentimes severely rent-burdened (sometimes by their own institutions).
Brookdale costs $6,625 to $9,385 per academic year, a stark contrast to the other dormitory options that cost $15,000 to over $17,000. Macaulay Honors College students are given two years of free housing at Brookdale and a select number of students in the other Hunter honors programs (Athena, Daedalus, Muse, Nursing, Roosevelt, Yalow) are given one year of free housing.
Hunter USG made an Instagram post shortly after SPARC Kips Bay was announced — on it are over 40 comments that all express frustration with CUNY and the displacement of Brookdale residents. One comment states that “CUNY has long been opaque of what they are doing.”
During the listening session, a student shared that they knew of people who had to transfer schools and leave the city because they could not obtain housing at Brookdale and could not find other means of affordable housing. An RA shared that one of her students works night shifts to afford tuition and housing. With median rental prices in NYC having reached their most expensive at $4,050 in June 2022 — there is no question that renting market-rate housing is impossible for a large percentage of Hunter’s student body, many of whom receive some form of financial aid.
Perhaps what is most frustrating is that it was known that Brookdale would be redeveloped since 2012, when the Board of Trustees voted that “Brookdale Campus will no longer be used for senior college purposes, allowing it to be transferred to the City of New York.”
The possibility of sale and development existed even earlier: in 2006, President Raab expressed the desire to sell the site. In 2008, the site was put up for bid.
Ultimately in 2012, former Mayor Bloomberg announced that the dorms would be demolished in 2015 and converted into a sanitation facility. President Raab is quoted in an article from The Tab about the 2015 demolition, saying “she would continue to push for student housing at the residence for as long as possible, and is looking into other affordable housing arrangements for students.” The article also includes student testimony voicing the exact same frustration of students in 2022: residents were left in the dark about the uncertainty of their housing arrangements by CUNY and Residence Life.
Herein lies CUNY’s problem: it was known that Brookdale would be demolished and repurposed a decade ago. It was nearly redeveloped into a sanitation parking garage by the NYCEDC seven years ago. Within those seven years, no meaningful progress has been made on developing alternative means of affordable housing for Hunter students or an effective and transparent communication process with current residents: a clear embarrassment.
According to USS’s Oct. 24 memo, the administration has pledged they will “explore opportunities” to assist Brookdale students, an almost identical promise to Raab’s statement that she is “looking into” affordable housing in 2015. “Exploring” and “looking into” affordable housing is not enough; providing it is imperative.
No current student could have known about the precarious status of Brookdale without an unreasonable amount of research. The memo from USS outlining the history of the ownership of Brookdale was released on Oct. 24, 2022 after the announcement of SPARC Kips Bay. There was little to no coverage online regarding the development in 2015, besides the single article by The Tab that I could find after directly searching for it. There is nothing on CUNY’s own website and only a single article on The Envoy’s (Hunter’s student-run newspaper) archive website.
The lack of transparency is made more insidious considering that many students during the listening session shared that the availability of affordable housing was crucial to their decision to attend Hunter. Macaulay Hunter students receive two years of free housing in addition to their tuition scholarship, undoubtedly an important incentive for the program. Without this housing guarantee, one must wonder: where will the potential Macaulay Hunter students who rely on affordable housing go? What will Macaulay lose?
Students made their college decisions under the assumption that their housing would remain available during their time at Hunter, but there was no reason for them to question that — I doubt students enrolling at Columbia or NYU feel inclined to embark on research processes on whether their dorms will be destroyed and redeveloped with no alternative. For current freshmen at Brookdale, 2024 being the last year the dorms are open leaves them without an option for affordable housing for their remaining two years of undergrad.
Even more shameful is that disregard is what students expect from the CUNY administration. In a text interview, Aysha Khan said that “This is not surprising at all…Hunter continues to fail its students. The college is falling apart, slowly but surely…It doesn’t seem like the Hunter administration cares about the students.” At Brookdale, the elevators are constantly broken in a 13-floor residential complex. At Hunter’s main campus, students witness breaking ceilings and black mold daily — a lack of regard for students’ affordable housing is hardly surprising.
I have no reason to question that SPARC Kips Bay will deliver on the economic promises the Chancellor and the Mayor’s office have advertised; “$25 billion in economic impact for the city over the next 30 years” is an impressive statistic for the city and for budget-strapped CUNY. But the treatment of current Brookdale residents and the repeated failure to develop alternative housing offers within the past ten-plus years for students is short-sighted and inexcusable.
Destroying 650 units of affordable housing in the midst of a housing crisis irreversibly harms current and future CUNY students, erodes what little trust students have in the administration and only further seeds the sentiment that the administration does not care about the student body.
Eric Adams proclaims he is turning “trash into treasure.” It is no wonder that the city refers to Brookdale and its residents as “trash” — there is nothing from CUNY’s treatment of their students that would suggest otherwise.
