Photo by wallyg, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

“Chin and Quinn did us in!” jeered over 50 opponents to New York University’s expansion plan from a balcony overlooking City Council’s chamber. “Shame on you!”

Greenwich Village residents, community activists and N.Y.U. professors filled the chamber to capacity yesterday to witness the full City Council’s final vote to approve hotly debated zoning and map changes that will allow the university to construct four new high-rise buildings over the course of 17 years, 2014 to 2031.

The opponents became increasingly vocal as the time to vote neared, and broke into chants just before it. Speaker Christie Quinn asked for silence and warned the opponents that they would be kicked out, but the chants continued, and security escorted the entire balcony out of the building.

The proposal passed by a 44-to-1 vote.

Prior to the meeting, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) commissioned a 32-page report that outlined the negative impacts of the expansion plan, and opponents wrote a letter to City Council that expressed the community’s dissatisfaction with the proposal.

“The NYU expansion plan will turn a residential neighborhood into a company town and subject it to twenty straight years of construction,” said GVSHP Executive Director Andrew Berman in a statement.  “The Council ignored the grave environmental impacts of this plan and the much better options that had been put forward for NYU to locate new facilities in the Financial District; this is a sad day for democracy in New York City.”

John Sexton, N.Y.U.’s president, however, said that the approval marked “a great day for N.Y.U. and for New York City,” and said that the expansion will provide the city with much-needed construction jobs and university positions.

His statement argued that the plan “strikes an important balance: permitting N.Y.U. to maintain academic excellence by meeting our educational- and research-space needs on our existing footprint over the next two decades, while at the same time addressing the concerns of our neighbors on such issues as improving access to open space.”

The opponents are now considering legal action. “We will be working closely with our partners in the NYU faculty and with our lawyers at Gibson Dunn to pursue every avenue available to us to remedy this tragic wrong which has been imposed upon the people of the City of New York,” said Berman.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christie Quinn announced on Tuesday that a study by the City Clerk’s office  and NYC & Company, the city’s tourism agency, estimated that same sex-marriages have contributed $259 million to the city’s economy since New York passed the Marriage Equality Act one year ago on July 24.

“Marriage equality has made our City more open, inclusive and free – and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Bloomberg said in the statement. “New York has always been a great place to get married and since the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, we’re welcoming more and more couples, their families and friends from around the country and the world.”

According to the survey, over 201,000 same-sex wedding guests visited from outside the city. They booked over 235,000 hotel rooms at an average rate of $275 a day, as well as paid for dining, celebrations, gifts and various other wedding-related purchases. Add this income to at least 8,200 gay-marriage licenses that were purchased in the last year (couples are not required to disclose their sexes) and $16 million in tax revenue from the marriages, and you start to get a sense of the same-sex wedding business’s size.

“Thirteen months ago our legislators did the right thing and voted to make same-sex marriage a reality, ensuring that New York State was among the leaders in equality,” said City Comptroller John Liu in a statement. “Today’s announcement is simply the icing on the wedding cake.”

In addition to New York, same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts led the charge in 2004, and found similar economic growth: gay marriage added an estimated $111 million to the state’s economy in five years.