As a membership coalition serving the design, construction and real estate industry, the New York Building Congress is pleased to offer its support for New York University's ambitious and important NYU 2031 expansion plan.
As an urban campus, NYU is perennially challenged by space limitations. Academic programs and faculty offices are constrained in small, out of date facilities. Student programming – like health and wellness facilities, flexible meeting spaces and residential halls – is also limited for the same reason. Like all of the City's major universities, the ratio of square feet per student is among the lowest in the country.
To remain competitive with the nation's leading universities, NYU must provide facilities that attract the best and brightest minds and facilitate learning. NYU has identified locations close to its Washington Square home, as well as in downtown Brooklyn and Governors Island, where it hopes to build enough space to accomplish these goals.
In a larger context, NYU's proposed expansion is a critical response to changes in the City's economy and the world's economy. State and local government and civic leaders have led important efforts to move the City away from a reliance on the financial sector to more diverse, knowledge-based industries such as medicine, technology, higher education and the arts.
NYU and its sister universities are incubators for much of the talent that ends up entering and then leading these industries. Our universities are therefore critical links in the cycle of education, innovation and economic development.
In fact, NYU is already a major contributor to the City's economy, employing more than 16,000 faculty members, administrators and staff, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual economic activity.
The scale of NYU's proposal has provoked some concern about how it will impact the Greenwich Village neighborhood. NYU has looked carefully at creating satellite campuses that will place much of the proposed square footage in other parts of the City. In the meantime, the proposal would modernize its existing Washington Square buildings and develop much of the new square footage on properties it already owns. Therefore, the actual "footprint" of NYU will not grow in a way that overwhelms the historic neighborhood.
New York City's leaders must take the next step by ensuring the City remains an inviting home to the investors and professionals who will drive the industries of the future. An expanded, diversified, modern New York University is a key to this vision.
The Building Congress urges the City Council to approve NYU's planned expansion as proposed by the City Planning Commission.
