Richard Asche, the co-chairman of the land use committee of Community Board 7 reported last night at a meeting of his committee that Fordham University had agreed to a reduction of more than 200,000 square feet of space in its ambitious expansion plans for its site just south of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Community Board 7 recently voted to oppose the plans, but Mr. Asche said that negotiations with the university were continuing. Mr. Ashe also said that the university has recently agreed to study the feasibility of using below-grade space in its expansion plans.

Mr. Asche suggested that while it was important to examine massing and building heights, it was just as important to look at architectural quality especially in such an important urban center as exists at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and he suggested that perhaps the city should revive its "Housing Quality" zoning bonuses in considering guidelines for development.

The Borough President is expected to make a recommendation on the plans soon prior to hearings before the City Planning Commission. The plans recently called for two tall apartment towers, one of which was to be developed by Douglaston Development, but an article in the February 23, 2009 edition of The New York Observer by Eliot Brown indicated that Douglaston had withdrawn from the project in part because of "market conditions." No developer had been selected for the second tower and several members of the committee at last night's meeting noted that no renderings of the proposals have been presented even though the university is seeking a variety of public approvals.

"'Given the status of the national and local economy, it is impossible to close any real estate transactions at this time,' a Fordham spokesman, Robert Howe, said in the article in The New York Observer, adding that the university expects "the deal will be resurrected when the economy improves."

The community board maintains that the proposed new buildings and too bulky and too large and would severely impact traffic in the area and that it should not be able to sell two plots to residential developers because they had been acquired by the university for the purpose of education through eminent domain.

The plans would add about 2.35 million square feet to the existing campus, which consists of the Schools of Business, Education, Social Service that was designed in 1962 by Voorhees, Walker, Smith, Smith & Haines, and the School of Law that was designed in 1969 by Slingerland & Booss.

The latter structure was described by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman in their great book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial," as "a long, narrow slab running parallel to Sixtieth Street, the building featured thin vertical strips of windows that, as the editors of Progressive Architecture reported, 'one source describes as an attempt to complement the white travertine mullions of the Metropolitan Opera House.'"

It is, in fact, much more attractive, but its visibility in the neighborhood would be severely encroached upon by the proposed new construction.