We are working from the following mission statement with the hope that community residents will give us additional feedback about how students can best support the needs and concerns of people who would be affected by the proposed West Harlem expansion:

University expansion and gentrification are processes that affect everyone in our community. As students we recognize our unique position in relationship to the university and community at large, and simultaneously, the necessity of our action in support of an equitable and just conclusion. To this end, we are unified in our commitment to continue to work and stand in solidarity with those most affected by the process of gentrification, and in our commitment to educate and mobilize the student body towards a goal of greater university accountability.

Inside a wooden shack set in a garden on East 117th Street, a group of Puerto Rican men, many of them in their 70s and 80s, are playing a spirited game of dominoes on a rainy winter afternoon. A painting of a woman wearing a burgundy shawl over a flamenco-style dress hangs on a wall, and in the garden, tomatoes, peppers, corn and culantro, an herb used in Caribbean cooking, grow in the summer.

But outside their little retreat, a thick dust, the pounding of hammers and the shouts of construction workers inundate the block, signaling the transformation of East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio (the neighborhood). Many see it changing from the Puerto Rican enclave it has been for decades to a more heterogeneous neighborhood with a significant middle-class presence, luxury condominiums and a Home Depot.

It is a familiar story of gentrification in New York City, but this one comes with a twist: the many newcomers who are middle-class professionals from other parts of the city are joining a growing number of working-class Mexicans and Dominicans.