State Attorney General Tish James should be digging into the $100 million pit of waste, lost opportunities and likely self-dealing that is the West Harlem Development Corp., but she’s too busy posing for cameras and losing lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Columbia University funded the WHDC in 2009 as a payoff to local powerbrokers as it got the state to use eminent domain to help it swallow a huge chunk of the neighborhood.
The nonprofit was supposed to invest those tens of millions of bucks in Harlem economic-development projects, with $20 million earmarked to build affordable housing.
Instead, the WHDC became a spout of political patronage, handing out grants to small local Harlem arts or youth organizations, paying fat salaries to politically connected insiders and — bizarrely — allegedly helping to formulate the Council on American Islamic Relations’ “strategy on responding” to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks and hostage-taking.
Economic development and affordable housing? Not so much at all; just a conduit for money, power and influence in the hands of highly connected insiders like current Chair Milton Tingling and Executive Director Zead Ramadan, a board member of CAIR-New York.
Tingling, a retired judge, was just named to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Jew-free advisory panel on judicial appointments.
Ramadan is the central figure in a federal lawsuit against the WHDC, brought by its terminated director of housing development, Vincent Morgan, who taped his boss Ramadan’s allegedly racist rants about Dominicans, African-Americans, Zionists and Jewish control of New York City. (Ramadan has denied any wrongdoing.)
The dysfunction at the WHDC is well-known among uptown pols, who won’t go on the record about the noxious organization; Columbia has washed its hands of the whole thing after years of peeping about the waste and abuse.
But where’s crusading AG James, whose duties include policing New York tax-exempt charitable organizations?
She hasn’t been shy about suing groups with whose positions she dislikes, from the NRA to the Catholic Church, but declines to lift even an eyebrow about the scandalous WHDC.
The West Harlem Development Corp. is a poster child for the neglect and deep-rooted waste that defines so much “economic development” in New York, and the “community benefits” blackmail surrounding most large projects.
And that, no doubt, is why Tish James won’t do a thing to liberate the tens of millions still in the WHDC hoard for the actual good of the community.
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