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4 Years Later, ‘Smart Growth’ Is Still Elusive at Hospital Site
04.02.2007
Janny Scott
New York Times
WINGDALE, N.Y., March 26 — The remains of the state mental hospital languish in this bucolic stretch of the Harlem Valley like a ghost town, an eerie compound of empty dormitories and overgrown fields that was once a community of 10,000 with its own bowling alley, baseball diamond, ice cream shop, fire company, farm and train station two hours north of New York City.
When the state closed the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center in 1994, town officials set out to turn the 850-acre campus into a model of enlightened development. With a compact town center a short walk from the train, the new neighborhood would be an antidote to sprawl, the sort of “smart growth” that planners say the region must embrace if it is to remain livable.
But nearly four years after a development company paid $3.9 million for the property, the town and the developer have yet to agree on a plan for what would be the largest residential development ever in Dutchess County. The town says the developer is stubbornly resisting its vision; the developer says the town board is stubbornly denying hard economic facts.
The long struggle over the project illustrates many of the difficulties in carrying out smart growth at a time when the region’s population is expected to grow by three to four million over the next 25 years — a trend that provoked calls for a reduction in the region’s reliance on single-family homes in favor of something more pedestrian-friendly, dense and compact.
“If it’s hard to do it here, it’s hard to do it anywhere,” said Joel Russell, the town’s planning consultant, who believes the site is well suited for the project because it already has buildings, sewer and water lines and access to transit. “To me, it represents an ideal site with appropriate zoning for this kind of development.”
The site lies in the hamlet of Wingdale in the town of Dover, population 8,600, a former farming community giving way to subdivisions full of people who commute as much as two hours to work. The closing of the hospital, with 5,000 residents and 5,000 employees at its peak, left a crater in the local economy, creating both a need and an opportunity for economic development.
So, in redoing its zoning in the late 1990s, the town focused on the hospital campus around the station for growth. It created incentives to encourage higher-density, mixed-use development and to protect open space. Offices and stores would be intermingled with housing in careful balance; the business tax base would grow, offsetting the rising cost of services.
By concentrating the development and reusing many of the 80 existing red-brick buildings while allowing some lower-density housing, like single-family homes, in outlying areas, the town hoped to protect the forested slopes that rise to the east as well as large areas of wetland, a breeding ground for a threatened species, the bog turtle.
The Benjamin Companies, a Long Island development company that has redeveloped two other former psychiatric hospital sites in New York, bought the property in October 2003. It submitted its first site plan a year later — a plan that Roger P. Akeley, the commissioner of planning and redevelopment for Dutchess County, calls “a pattern for sprawl. It had little cul-de-sac roads all over the site.”
“They started off on the wrong foot because the vision was so out of step with what the zoning ordinance had outlined,” said Mr. Akeley, commissioner for the past 23 years. “I think there must have been certain assumptions about the town and its willingness to compromise rather quickly on its principles. They just didn’t read the town right.”
Over the next two years, the developers and the town board met constantly; environmental and economic consultants were brought in. At the town’s insistence, the developer hired a well-known urban design firm, Torti Gallas & Partners, experienced in developing walkable, transit-oriented, mixed-use communities in keeping with the design philosophy known as New Urbanism that the town board had endorsed.
By late 2006, the town, the developer and Torti Gallas were holding monthly technical workshops, developing an alternative that was presented on Dec. 19 and amended in January. While the new plan went a long way toward meeting the town board’s requirements, the board informed the Benjamin Companies in February that it did not go far enough.
“We were very disappointed, very frustrated,” Michael D. Zarin, a lawyer for the developer, said in an interview. He said: “You can’t come into this thing with preconceived notions. You can’t say, ‘We did zoning in 1999; this is what we want,’ and leave it at that. A partnership means you work together, you clean the slate some, you engage in hard, good planning and then you do what you need to do to make a successful and feasible project.”
But Jill Way, 50, a lifelong resident who has served as the elected town supervisor since 1996, said, “The town board owes it to citizens to try to get what they’re asking for.”
Ms. Way, who presides over a five-member board that includes two Corrections Department employees, a college professor and the owner of a tree service, said the current plan, with nearly 1,400 housing units (more than half would be within a half-mile of the train station), includes too much housing and not enough commercial space to attract the “destination retailers” and economic benefit the board has in mind.
She said too few of the housing units are reserved for older people — who, without young children, cost towns less. The plan includes too many “hamlet centers,” splitting the community in parts, she said. A long, looping road fragments the wildlife habitat; there are homes on slopes, and too many of the old buildings would be demolished rather than reused, she said.
Mr. Zarin countered that clustering even more of the housing around the train station would produce a neighborhood that would be too dense. He said market analyses showed there is not enough demand to support more commercial space yet, and there is neither the population size nor the demographic characteristics needed to attract destination stores.
Market analysis also showed there is insufficient demand for “three-story walk-up townhouses” to justify renovating more of the existing buildings, said Russell A. Mohr, vice president of real estate development for the Benjamin Companies. Nor is there enough demand among people over 55 to justify increasing the percentage of the housing that would be age-restricted, he said.
One big fear on the part of the town board is that the developer might start with the easiest part, building single-family homes in outlying open space, then quit before doing the rest. The developers, however, say the infrastructure costs for the open areas are so high, they cannot “make a penny” until they redevelop the center, too.
The developers have repeatedly taken their case to the public in meetings, open houses and color brochures, most recently featuring a dreamy scene of life at what they call the Knolls of Dover. The announcement of a meeting in late February at the high school cafeteria began, “Dear Neighbor: We know you are very frustrated with the slow progress in redeveloping the former Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center in Wingdale. So are we.”
Ms. Way, up for re-election this fall along with two other members of the town board, said, “There is a concerted effort to apply public pressure and political pressure to this town board right now because we have a huge election coming up.” She accused the developer of trying to divide the town, a place where she said she intends to continue living long after the developers leave.
Barbara A. Clay, a lawyer for MasterCard International who moved to Dover in 2001, said public opinion is mixed. Meetings about the project have drawn hundreds of residents.
“The bulk of people don’t understand and want answers,” she said. “Some people are on the side of the developer because no one has done anything in 10 years. The developer is definitely playing the public. The town board is afraid they’ll get run out of town. I feel bad for them. Because they’re holding the line.”
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