Affordable Housing, Community Development, and “The Art of the Possible”: A Discussion with LISC Senior Vice President for Affordable Housing Michael Skrebutenas

View from the Law Bridge on Columbia University’s campus. Photo provided by Jesse Levine.

Michael Skrebutenas is the current Senior Vice President for Affordable Housing at LISC, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which dedicates itself to building “resilient and inclusive communities of opportunity across America.” Mr. Skrebutenas is an alumnus of Columbia College (‘86) and the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (‘95). He has served as an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs where he taught courses on affordable housing. I interviewed Mr. Skrebutenas on Columbia’s role in Morningside Heights and Harlem as it relates to the future of community development. 

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Columbia University has an established, contentious relationship with Harlem and the Morningside Heights community. For example, in 1968, there were protests that occurred as a result of a plan to open a gym that would discriminate against members of the Morningside Heights community. Could you explain what occurred and expand upon how you see the effects of these protests now?

When I was a student at Columbia, I was there 14 years after the uprising. 1968 was a particularly challenging time in American history. In April, when the gym plan occurred, a remarkable series of events had just unfolded. The Tet Offensive, which overtook the American forces in Vietnam, was in January of 1968. [Lyndon B. Johnson] in March had withdrawn from running for the presidency. On April 4th, Martin Luther King was murdered. It was a free for all—American society was torn apart, torn asunder. It was a unique historical moment, certainly for America and Columbia. 

To contextualize what happened, Columbia started to expand over this boundary of Morningside Park. Morningside Park was really a barrier erected by city planners as is an impenetrable moat for many years. The gym was shocking — the public entrance to the gym, which was going to permit members of the public to enter, was in a rear door that was on the northern end of the park that was difficult to locate. [Columbia University] was going to use a public park. Getting approval today to convert a public park to a private use, which was what occurred, is almost impossible. The political might and force required to get the approval, to [use] a publicly designated park for private use, and to create only a small sliver of access for the community is astonishing. It’s almost unthinkable today. 

The past is prologue here, and [Columbia University] should really recognize the fact that it was a colossal error of judgment to have expanded into Morningside Park 50 years ago. Hopefully, they don’t replay the same mistakes they made previously [and act] overly aggressively and exert certain power in that neighborhood. [Columbia] is the dominant player. It’s a multi-billion dollar institution. It’s got a lot of authority, benefits, and privileges as a tax-exempt entity. It’s a monstrosity of an entity.

Regarding the tax-exempt nature of the vast majority of Columbia’s land [holdings], do you think the fact that Columbia isn’t paying property taxes on most of its properties means that it should have extra responsibility in terms of providing community benefits for those living in Harlem and Morningside Heights?

That’s a wonderful point—this town-gown friction occurs in many locations. I previously lived in New Haven, which had a really acute town-gown relationship. [Yale University] was enormous relative to the size of the city. New Haven was [Yale’s] host city, and the institution was much more powerful and much more wealthy. 

Here you have Columbia, which is certainly a major institution, but it’s in the most powerful and wealthy city in the world — certainly the largest in the United States by population. There should be a community benefits agreement recognizing the cost of its expansion given the current market conditions of New York. As New York’s strength has increased, Columbia has only gotten more attractive as an institution [for prospective students]. Making sure that its host city remains prosperous, successful, and an attractive place to study benefits the university. So with that said, I think you make a point: as a tax-exempt entity in a neighborhood that has experienced a long-term disinvestment, it should abide by some community benefits agreement to meet the goals and objectives of an agreement negotiated validly and in good faith with community leaders.

[Columbia is] a big institution and has its own institutional mandate. It is not the purpose of the university to finance community development or to meet the needs of the community. Its purpose is to meet the needs of its students. It has got to build dorms and create space. Years ago as a student, I remember seeing an important data point that the university, relative to its peer institutions, had far fewer cubic feet of library space, study areas, and laboratory space. For it to grow and maintain its position in a very competitive, traditional environment, it knew it had to expand. But, it’s got to do it in a responsible way. I think it should apply the Hippocratic Oath. It should do no harm. 

You mentioned that you recognized Columbia’s difficult relationship with Harlem and Morningside Heights as a student. You’ve had a lot of different relationships with Columbia, both as a student and as an adjunct professor at SIPA. Over the course of your experience with Columbia, have you seen the university attempt to make any positive change in the community? 

While I was a student, I was very active with a community sponsored soup kitchen and homeless services provider. It was a sponsor of a very successful organization called Columbia University Community Services that was run through the School of Social Work to provide help and housing assistance for the special needs population, including the homeless. There was a lot of civic interest on the part of students in Morningside Heights to participate in afterschool education, public services, and a wide variety of other activities. These activities mostly harness the activism and interest of a youthful population, but it’s legitimate and authentic. I don’t want to characterize [Columbia] as the big, bad university stepping on the community. It’s an important institution embedded in the city. It’s worth noting its descriptor: Columbia University in the City of New York. That’s its full legal title and makes it fully immersed in the city as an urban partner.

The work you do at LISC deals mostly with affordable housing. What have you seen to be the most effective methods in ensuring affordable housing for communities like Harlem or Morningside Heights that are often overlooked, forgotten, and actively divested in?

The story of community development organizations similar to LISC began in the 1970s. This was a time when New York City, along with many other cities across the country, were in full-scale collapse. We had widespread de-industrialization. White flight to the suburbs and migration from the South created powerful, complex dynamics, particularly with poverty. New York lost its tax base, which had carried the city from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century. Brooklyn Navy yards, needle trades—all those businesses had started to leave. Low-income people or people of moderate means who worked in industry and trades were following jobs elsewhere. 

So what did you have left in New York City? Community development organizations and nonprofits, not unlike LISC, helped to create affordable housing on a small-scale basis to reclaim central Brooklyn, central Harlem, and areas of the Bronx. Redevelopment house-by-house, block-by-block. These organizations worked with then Mayor Ed Koch on the single largest municipal appropriation for affordable housing in history. Over a 10 year period, the city of New York committed over a billion dollars in housing resources. As a municipality, it leveraged federal dollars and state money to help drive community development.

We don’t really talk about [affordable housing] as a public policy issue, but it’s something worth unpacking for this story. It’s a fascinating history built by LISC, which was opened and started in New York City, and by other organizations like Enterprise, Community Preservation Corporation, all of which provided desperately needed capital to rebuild the city.

Fast forward to what we are experiencing right now: we have a city that is in some ways choking on its own success. The community development movement was so successful in reclaiming the city to make New York so desirable and so attractive. But by rebuilding neighborhoods, we priced ourselves out of that market. Organizations like LISC are starting to come to terms with the idea that it’s not just financing or capital needed to make affordable housing work. They have to think more broadly about the demand side of the equation rather than just the supply of housing. 

What are we doing with residents? We have a complex, some would say exploitative, labor market, particularly of people of color and people who are low income. We can meet the needs of residents not just by throwing up units of housing, but making sure they have sufficient income to live and thrive in New York City. It’s a complicated problem.

Bringing it more back to the present moment, how can Columbia be a positive force in Morningside Heights and Harlem?

The student economy around the university has a profound impact on market rents. What’s happening with properties? For the most part, students of a higher income bracket are driving up rents in the community and probably displacing tenants. I get that the university’s primary interest is to maintain and create an environment that’s conducive for students and attracts people from all over the world to study there. But it must do this in a way that’s responsible and also recognizes the needs of the community.

The university will only continue to grow given the complexities of the education system and the market and demands for lab space and gymnasiums. All these powerful drivers require it to expand, like it did historically. Thus the question is, how will it do so responsibly and recognize authentic community leadership? That’s the struggle. The university has to come to the table in good faith. That sounds like a platitude and a generalization, but Columbia is part of the city, not beyond the city. Recognizing its place relative to the community has got to be a key, critical function of its existence. 

It requires some level of mutual leadership from authentic community leaders and the senior leadership of the university to say that we have to recognize and acknowledge our partners here who are multi-generational. In exchange for its nonprofit exemptions and its status as a charitable enterprise, the university should be sure to negotiate in good faith with its neighbors. 

There’s been a lot of discourse on campus about Columbia’s role in Morningside Heights and in Harlem, especially with the recent opening of the Manhattanville campus. It’s clear that the university was attempting to make an effort to involve the community in the Manhattanville campus by incorporating spaces intended for public use into the campus, but this development and expansion into Morningside Heights has raised concerns among the student population at Columbia. You mentioned that when you were a student at Columbia you worked in a soup kitchen and were involved in other community oriented activities. How would you recommend that students  at Columbia now make an effort to reckon with this difficult history and rectify Columbia’s problematic actions?

There’s no shortage of opportunities to get involved in New York City affairs. As a student, I worked in an afterschool program in the Upper West Side and was very active in a soup kitchen at a time when mass homelessness was really emerging. It may almost sound trivial today to have a soup kitchen, but at the time we were looking at the deinstitutionalization of lots of low-income people. 

Community development, which is what I’ve been working on, has a lot of components. When I’m an adjunct [at SIPA], I always say that we need the best and brightest to tackle some very complicated issues. Affordable housing and development in the United States is certainly a problem that has been elevated to a federal policy issue, which has not always been the case. This is the first time in my career that it is so prominent as a public policy area that it needs a federal response. 

Housing equity lies at the intersection of the hardest issues of American life: race, class, income inequality. If you really want to study something that is interesting and stimulating, will occupy you for your whole career, and you’ll never solve, come join me. It’s good work. 

Finally, to reference an article you wrote for Columbia College Today, the alumni publication for graduates of Columbia College, you wrote that “community development is the art of the possible.” What do you think is possible for Morningside Heights and for Harlem?

 It’s common ground. As students, you’re sharing this terrain, this important, special neighborhood, with multi-generational families. In order for New York City to thrive, grow, and prosper, it needs tradespeople, it needs dry cleaners, it needs nurses, it needs firepeople—it needs a range of skills and talents to make it work. Making sure that the Upper West Side just doesn’t become another precious neighborhood for only the very wealthy is something worth striving for. Making sure it’s equitable and creating a variety of housing options, both affordable and ownable takes hard work. There’s the art of the possible. Making sure that future development is equitable, not only for the preservation and for the success of the city, but also for its residents so they can grow, thrive, and prosper.

Jesse Levine (BC ‘25) is a first-year student at Barnard College looking to study political science. She can be found coping with stress by reading Sally Rooney novels and curating Spotify playlists for her friends.