Pandering 101

Anumber of Greenwich Village elected officials are raising hackles over the lack of space for a supermarket in a complex under construction by New York University on Mercer St., blasting NYU for supposedly reneging on a commitment to relocate a nearby Morton Williams to that site and leaving the area without an affordable supermarket.

They would be better off faulting the School Construction Authority, which took nine years to declare interest in building a public school at the NYU-owned Bleeker St. lot where the current Morton Williams sits, long enough for the university to have designed and begun construction on the Mercer lot. They might also want to look in the mirror, as they made the building of the school a political issue from the start, despite the SCA’s own apparent middling interest.

It appears they want to have their cake in aisle 9 and to eat it too, before getting to the checkout. The supermarket is set to be decommissioned to make way for the school they pushed for, but local leaders insist on having the Morton Williams, too. This would have been possible had the SCA declared its interest by 2014, as the original zoning agreement called for. However, the agency asked for two extensions to this deadline, which NYU graciously granted.

What NYU couldn’t do was put the entirety of its construction plans on hold for years while the SCA made up its mind, which is why it ended up starting construction on the Mercer building in 2017, nearly five years after that initial agreement, without the supermarket space, despite having initially indicated that the site might accommodate it. It seems that these electeds and community activists expected the university to construct a massive retail location — cutting into its own academic space — on spec, without any indication that the Morton Williams would even need to be relocated.

At this point, it’s impossible to accommodate the supermarket without scrapping its plans completely and restarting the building process. Is that what they want?