A plan to house university students from around the city in a new 23-story development in the East Village has brought long-simmering community anger over a lost arts center to a raging boil.

A developer is proposing to tear down the old PS 64 building on East 9th Street and build in its place an 811-bed, multischool dormitory – to which no colleges have yet signed on. The schoolhouse was abandoned for years before CHARAS/El Bohio, a community arts organization, occupied it in the ’80s.

The city sold the building at auction to the developer Gregg Singer for $3.15 million in 1998, and CHARAS was forcibly evicted in 2001.

“The community saved that building,” said East Village City Council member Margarita Lopez. “It is a resource for the community, and we will never be happy as long as an attempt is being made to steal it from us.”

A group of East Village activists, calling themselves Stop the Dorm, is gathering signatures and organizing local business against the plan.