For Nick Sprayregen, a businessman with extensive property holdings in Yonkers and New York City, all is too quiet on one business front this summer and too disquieting on another.
In downtown Yonkers, his development company”™s several commercial properties stand vacant or operating in status quo while Sprayregen waits for daylight on the buried Saw Mill River there and the city”™s mayor anxiously waits to see the acquisitive Manhattanite”™s redevelopment plans.   Â
In Manhattanville on the western edge of Harlem, Sprayregen is waging a costly one-man fight to save his family”™s self-storage business properties from a juggernaut of public and private forces led by Columbia University and the Empire State Development Corp. For him, it is a “crusade” fought in courts to permanently halt the state”™s use of eminent domain in the interest of large private corporations. In the city”™s private sector, Sprayregen finds himself a lawyer-armed David standing up to Columbia”™s well-connected Goliath. The university is New York City”™s seventh-largest private employer.
“I shouldn”™t be forced to hand over my property to another private entity merely because they”™re bigger and stronger than me,” Sprayregen said one recent morning in his cluttered office without windows at Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage on Broadway, the family owned company his father started 28 years ago and which Sprayregen runs as president. It is a legal argument that Sprayregen, whose team of attorneys is led by Norman Siegel, the former New York Civil Liberties Union director, is prepared to take to both state and federal courts “so that other people don”™t have to go through this,” he said. He has spent nearly $1 million in legal fees in the last four years and expects to spend another $1 million to $2 million “to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court,” he said.
From one West Harlem warehouse, the family business has grown to include about 15 commercial buildings and 1.2 million square feet of space in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. But Tuck-It-Away stands to have four of its five buildings in Manhattanville and West Harlem, about 350,000 square feet of commercial space, taken away through condemnation by the state to make way for Columbia”™s planned $6.28 billion campus expansion. Up to 16 university buildings with up to 6.8 million square feet of space are expected to rise from a leveled neighborhood of restaurants and gas stations, auto body shops, storage companies and an electric utility station, apartment buildings and small churches.
Already approved by the City Council, the project is expected to create 14,000 construction jobs and 6,000 new university jobs. Columbia has agreed to provide $76 million over 12 years to fund community benefits and mitigations; $20 million for an affordable housing revolving loan fund; $20 million for community development and planning; $4 million for tenant legal services; annual scholarships for area residents, including public-housing tenants; and a mobile dental center and disease education center for children.
Of 30 to 40 property owners in Manhattanville, only Sprayregen and a gas stations owner have refused to come to terms with Columbia on the sale of their properties, he said. The West Harlem Business Group, an opposition group formed in response to Columbia”™s announced plans and headed by Sprayregen, has dwindled to a group of one.
“Even if eminent domain is not allowed, they still have been unbelievably successful wielding the threat of eminent domain against all these other property owners,” Sprayregen said of Columbia officials.
A Columbia spokesperson said the university has worked to negotiate “fair deals” with affected private landowners and “remains committed to reaching mutually beneficial agreements” with Sprayregen and the other holdout property owner “if they will agree to do so.”
Columbia has agreed to fully pay for the relocation costs of displaced residents and businesses. But Sprayregen is not sure that relocation is viable for his family”™s business.
“Self-storage really is a retail business,” he said.”You can”™t just pick it up and go a few miles away. The vast majority of tenants here are in this neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods.  You have to start all over again.”
On the previous day, Empire State Development Corp. (ESDC) directors, as expected, approved Columbia”™s plan and agreed to schedule a public hearing this fall on the proposed expansion. ESDC officials also agreed with its consultants at AKRF Inc. ”“ the same New York City firm hired by ColumbiaColumbia. for its expansion planning, an apparent conflict of interest being legally challenged by Sprayregen ”“ that the Manhattanville area is blighted with “aging, poorly maintained and functionally obsolete industrial buildings.” That finding opens the way for condemnation proceedings by the state on behalf of
“We intended to vigorously fight the blight designation in the courts,” Sprayregen said. “The reality is that this area is not blighted. It”™s not even close to being blighted. This blight designation is a farce.” The neighborhood”™s only vacant buildings are owned by Columbia, he said. His lawyers will argue too that Columbia, “with its dirty hands,” should not be the main beneficiary of the blight designation.
Sprayregen said his fight for his family business should not affect his business interests in Yonkers. Since 2006, Rising Development-Yonkers L.L.C., of which he is managing member, has completed 18 real estate deals and invested approximately $30 million to acquire more than three acres of commercial and residential property in and around Larkin Plaza.
Sprayregen”™s effort to lock up the lease and purchase option to another property for his downtown assemblage, the Gazette Building at 59-61 Main St., has been stalled by a lawsuit brought in June by DaMaRo Restaurant Group, owner of Zuppa Restaurant and Lounge, against the building”™s leaseholder, Gazette Realty Holdings L.L.C., and its city landlord, the Yonkers Downtown Waterfront Development Corp. The restaurateurs claim that Gazette Realty, owned by developer Joseph Spiezio III, cannot legally assign the building lease to Sprayregen ”“ a deal already approved by the city agency ”“ and that the restaurant owner should have all lease rights, including the option to buy the building. The case was scheduled for hearing last week in state Supreme Court in White Plains.
Sprayregen said he hopes to present design plans for his redevelopment properties by late summer or early fall to Mayor Philip Amicone. He has backed away from initial plans to build large-scale offices and instead wants to create “a town center” with a few floors of cultural attractions, retail shops and restaurants topped by housing units. “We want to treat that space as the hub of the whole area,” he said.
At City Hall, “We have yet to see any kind of design plans for the numerous properties he owns,”™ mayoral spokesman David Simpson said last week. “We are anxiously awaiting that.”
Sprayregen said he is waiting to see progress on the city”™s plan to uncover the Saw Mill River at LarkinPlaza and create a more inviting public space there. The daylighting project, which would be publicly funded and would enhance the value and potential tenant appeal of Rising Development”™s properties there, is included in the proposed $1.6 billion redevelopment project of Streuver Fidelco Cappelli L.L.C (SFC).
Sprayregen said the city should move ahead with the daylighting project while the SFC project awaits City Council approval. “I think that will be the most effective and least expensive way to highlight the city”™s revitalization effort.”
Simpson disagreed. Including the daylighting in the SFC project as part of public infrastructure costs “would be the most cost-effective and time-effective way of doing it,” he said.
Sprayregen said the Larkin Plaza daylighting is viewed by many as “the little orphan of the SFC project. That”™s a mistake. I think to tie the Larkin daylighting into the SFC project unnecessarily delays it.” It could instead bring “vibrancy and positive energy to downtown sooner rather than later.”
