Here’s A Bad Idea! – Putting a Multi-Generational Housing Development To A Public Referendum
Especially In A BANANA (Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) Community Plagued By Fear & Prejudice
In the County where I live, one of the Towns owns a former psychiatric hospital on about 25 acres. The hospital had been abandoned by the State in the late 1990s, and the building and grounds have been sitting idle for more than 20 years.
Every building on the property (stone faced and stately, and sometimes the subject of ghost stories), save one, has extensive asbestos and lead paint contamination, roof leaks, and outdated infrastructure. The buildings are also connected by underground tunnels, which also have extensive environmental remediation needs. Every building needs to be demolished and the contaminated debris carted away to an approved landfill. A big expense for any developer and one the town had been avoiding addressing for many years, allowing the contamination to fester and the structures to degrade.
The Town had been trying, off and on, to lure a developer over the years, but without success. A proposal to divide the property and put on a gas station and convenience store was rejected by the Town. The abandoned hospital sits just below the Town’s award-winning golf-course and club house, and a stone’s throw from a scenic parkway, about a 30-minute ride to Manhattan.
A prior effort to develop the property included the sale of the town-owned golf course, and voters forced a referendum on the sale and voted the proposal down by a slight margin – about 120 votes out of many thousands.
Town officials were ready to surrender and leave the property fallow, but the confluence of certain events changed the landscape. In the County where I live, demographic changes coupled with a dire shortage of housing (both affordable and otherwise) combined with the possibility of some tax credits for the environmental clean-up suddenly made redevelopment possible.
In the town where the psychiatric hospital sits, according to the recent census, the overall population decreased 1.6 percent to 14,183. And, while its adult population increased 2.9 percent, its youth population plunged 16.3 percent.
“It’s due to the lack of affordability,” said the Town Supervisor. “I see it with my own adult children. It’s difficult for young people to buy a house, and the town is made up of mostly single-family homes. There are not a lot of rental opportunities or attractive communities for younger people.”
Also, it wasn’t just a change in population demographics. Over the past decade, the County I live in added only 5,500 total housing units, approximately 5 percent of its total housing stock, while its population increased by almost 9 percent in the same period.
On top of all of that, the Town had adopted a zoning overlay for the hospital property that not only allowed residential development, it encouraged it as a matter-of-right.
And, money was cheap (the deal was negotiated before the Fed started bumping up interest rates).
It was a perfect rainbow. Housing need, a thirst for additional tax revenue, cheap land, cheap money, tax credits, high demand from seniors and millennials, and the zoning overlay.
But, stand by, dear reader. The perfect rainbow was about to become a perfect storm.
The developer I brought in was experienced and had developed numerous similar communities, built thousand of units of housing, and had his finances and partner network in place. He came forward with a neighborhood plan of townhouses, apartments, condos, senior living, and assisted living with a memory care element. All told, about 450 residential units, none larger than three bedrooms, most a generous two bedrooms.
The plan included walking trails, open space, a community pool, clubhouse and fitness center, yoga and cycling studios, theater, coffee bar. He offered to build the town a new recreation center, relocate its courthouse and improve its golf course. He accepted the financial obligation, whatever it was, of remediating and carting off the contaminated structures. He was going to put in new infrastructure --- water, sewers, roads, electric, gas, high-speed internet. He would set up a homeowners’ association to run the development, and bring in an experienced operator to run the assisted-living facility.
Sounds great, right.
Not so fast. The town board, having had a prior development for the sale of the town golf course go down in a referendum by a small margin, thought it would be a good idea to put the sale of the hospital property to the developer to a public referendum. After all, what could go wrong? The golf course was not included. The town would finally be relieved of the obligation of maintaining what remained of the structures from the psychiatric hospital. It would shift the remediation expense to the developer. And, it would get a new courthouse, recreation center, improvements to the golf course, walking trails and millions of dollars in new tax revenues for the town and the local school district from the development. The vacant hospital was not a taxpayer – it was owned by the town, there was no revenue, only expense.
So, here’s where two concepts come together in the County where I live.
The first I call BANANA mentality which I define as a citizenry adverse to anything new and that lives by a philosophy of “Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.” It is different than NIMBY-ism because very few town residents actually live anywhere near the former psychiatric hospital. BANANA-ism is an aversion to development of any type, anywhere — it is a fear of the “new” or “unknown”.
The second, is as old as time. It’s called anti-Semitism. A fear and hatred of Jews. In the County where I live and in the County just to the north, there is a large orthodox and Hasidic Jewish population. Where I live, the Jewish population is about 30% of the county, and a powerful voting bloc. A long history of slow simmering (to now boiling over) anti-Semitism is beyond the scope of this piece, but Google “Rockland County and Anti-Semitism” for a primer on the depth of anti-Semitism in the community. Groups form under acronyms that appear on their face to “protect our communities” or to “preserve the town or village” but these are often just fronts and breeding grounds for anti-Semites.
It has come to pass that many residents are less concerned with what is going to be built than with who is building it and who might live there. Phrases like “high-density multi-family housing” are buzzwords and winks for anti-Semitism. Developers can only propose one or two-bedroom units, lest residents fear “large families” or “conversions to houses of worship”.
Even the moderator of the local Facebook group with thousands of members freely writes anti-Semitic tropes. When he writes, “we don’t need Kyrias Joel 2.0!” he is saying, we don’t want Jews. Kiryas Joel is a 1.5 square mile village where the vast majority of its residents are Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews who belong to the worldwide Satmar Hasidic sect.
Nobody challenges him. Instead, they “like” his post and pile on. People thought of as respected members of the community (think your local accountant and tax preparer) openly share those beliefs.
Local environmentalists, under the twisting of their own beliefs, seem to prefer the contaminated structures fouling the ground water over a planned neighborhood because there might be a threat “high-density housing” or that the project might get flipped to the “wrong people” or whatever buzzwords they use to mask their real issues.
And, everyone suddenly became a lawyer, and with false claims of expertise and a series of prevarications, began incorrectly interpreting the meaning of the Memorandum of Understanding the town board executed with the developer, and sharing those “interpretations” on social media.
But the truth is: The project was doomed as soon as a decision was made to submit the multi-generational project to the BANANAS and anti-Semites in the referendum. Despite the need for more housing, senior housing, units for millennials, and assisted living and memory care, it never had a chance of getting approved.
So, in the end of the day, the project went down in a landslide vote against the sale. Voters defeated the proposal by a 70% to 30% margin, with the “No” votes totaling 3,926 and the “Yes” votes totaling 1,716.
The developer was out tens of thousands of dollars in architectural fees, environmental assessments, website fees, direct mail, advertisements, consultants and legal fees. The “No” crowd celebrated the “preservation” and “protection” of their community, despite being saddled with a multi-million dollar environmental clean-up, loss of tax revenue for the local schools, police, fire and highway departments, unmet housing needs, fewer senior housing opportunities, and an earned reputation as nay-sayers and worse.
From the experience, it is unlikely that any housing developer will approach the Town again with a large project, knowing that it would be throwing away good money preparing a plan that the populace will never accept.
Submission of development projects to public referenda creates a disincentive to development.
So, where does this end? Just where it started. Nowhere. The former psychiatric hospital will sit idle, as it has for the past 20 or more years.
And, putting a multi-generational community to a public referendum? It was just a bad idea.