In a recent NY Times article, In 15 Years, 80,000 Homes in the New York Area May Be Lost to Flooding, Mihir Zaveri and Hilary Howard are focused on the impact of flooding on NYC housing, but the fundamental story is that they are no plans on the table that actually would solve the lack of NYC housing.

The story’s subtitle — The metro region’s housing shortage is acute. But by 2040, dozens of neighborhoods and suburbs are likely to have lost thousands of homes to floods, a new report found — is misleading.

The headline is not indicative of the true story. Should be more like 'Stupidity of NYC region's Zoning Laws Makes Housing Even More Of A Problem In The Future Than Today Because of Climate Change Floods'.

All the plans being floated are inadequate to meet current and future housing needs. There seems to be no advocate who champions housing development to meet actual needs, because the gap is too large.

Links to a slew of reports which backstop the housing crisis with data.

Subscribe now

The bottom line: slower traffic speeds save lives.

A body of evidence from a variety of European countries summarized by Geraldine Herbert makes it clear that reducing speed limits leads to higher road safety:

A comprehensive review of 30 km/h [18.5 mph] limits in European cities found a 23pc reduction in crashes, a 37% drop in fatalities, and a 38% decrease in injuries. In addition, emissions fell by 18%, noise pollution dropped 2.5 dB, and fuel consumption improved by 7%.

This is the major factor in the US push for ‘20 is plenty’ in dense urban settings.

Country by country:

On rural roads, France saved 349 lives in the first 20 months after reducing the speed limit from 90km/h to 80km/h [from 56 mph to 50mph], while Sweden saw a 41% reduction in fatalities after lowering rural road speed limits.

What about the impact on travel time?

Research findings show that slower speeds do not have a significant increase in travel times.

Research in Switzerland found that 30km/h limits improved overall traffic efficiency by reducing stop-and-go congestion. France’s decision to lower the speed limit from 90km/h to 80km/h on some two-lane rural roads faced backlash from drivers fearing longer journeys. However, data shows the actual impact was minimal – to lose five minutes, a driver would need to cover 300km [Around 185 miles].

Perhaps the most important fact is that drivers consistently overestimate time lost due to lower speed limits, and time ‘saved’ by speeding. At the same time this is one of the most consistent points of contention when arguing about lowering speed limits.

What about the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable road-users?

Those not encased in thousands of pounds of metal, glass, and rubber are significantly better off if speed limits for motor vehicles are lowered. As Max Krupnick explains,

In 1990, one-quarter of new cars purchased by Americans weighed more than 4,000 pounds. In 2023, more than three-quarters did. Those unable to upsize, like bikers and pedestrians, suffer the most: pedestrian deaths have doubled since 2009.

Car bloat is causing the surge in pedestrian deaths in the US, as laid out by David Zipper:

A growing number of studies have linked car bloat to the surge in deaths among American pedestrians and bicyclists, both of which recently hit 40-year highs. University of Hawaii economist Justin Tyndall attributed 1,100 pedestrian deaths in the U.S. to the shift from cars to SUVs in the period from 2000 and 2019, a figure that did not include effects of pickup trucks or the expansion of model sizes. Notably, most other rich countries, where large cars are not as widespread, have seen a recent decline in crash fatalities, while the American death toll has surged.

Herbert sums up the benefits of lower speeds for the vulnerable:

Studies show that reducing speeds gives drivers more time to react, lessens crash severity, and creates a safer environment for pedestrians and cyclists.

But those in a position to do something about this — legislators, state and local traffic safety boards, and others responsible for setting speed limits and regulations on vehicle sizes and weights — are not doing enough on this front in the US, as the recent fatality surge shows.

But US traffic fatalities — estimated to be 40,990 for 2023 — are double what we see in other economically advanced countries, and US pedestrian crash deaths are at a 40-year high.

The last objection to lower speed limits.

I’ll simply observe that many drivers seem more than willing to accept lower safety for themselves and others in exchange for the hypothetical ‘saved' time’ they gain by higher speed limits and exceeding those limits, and increasingly in gigantic bloated pickups and SUVs.

What other explanation is there?

Subscribe now

A UK insurance comparison site, confused.com, has quantified the effect of lower speed limits in the UK, reports Rupert Jones in the Guardian:

This week a leading price comparison website reported the biggest annual drop in UK car insurance prices in more than 10 years, with the average cost of cover falling by £161 – or 16% – in the past 12 months.

After a turbulent couple of years during which many drivers were hit with record premium hikes and some saw their costs double, that represents some much-needed good news. But car insurance still typically costs a lot more than it did: the average UK premium is 33% higher than it was two years ago, just before the huge rises that took effect in 2023.

Confused.com, which released the data, says drivers can now expect to pay an average of £834 for comprehensive car insurance. That is down from £995 a year earlier, and is the lowest price recorded in 18 months.

£834 equals $1,029.02.

While some of that reduction might be attributed to insurers competing or increased safety in vehicles, many are pointing to the reduced speed zones that have been introduced in many locations, such as populated areas in Wales, London, and others.

In England, cities including London have been rolling out 20mph zones. Transport for London says almost 165 miles (265km) of its roads are now subject to this speed limit, with more schemes in the pipeline. This week, it was reported that a 20mph limit is expected to be introduced on roads in residential areas across Manchester as well as in the city centre.

The first indications that 20mph zones could bring down the cost of car insurance – as well as cutting speeds and reducing road casualties – came in June last year, when the car insurer esure reported that vehicle damage claims in Wales fell by a fifth after the default limit was introduced.

So along with the reduction in collisions (and mortality) coming from the lower speeds, there is a real payback to those not directly involved in fender benders (or worse): the average driver is seeing tangible benefits to their pocketbook.

Of course, you can only get those benefits if you drop the speed limit to 20 mph.

Last year I drafted a long piece (on commission) about wildfire vulnerabilities in the Hudson Valley. For various reasons it was not published. In light of the recent flare up in wildfires in the region, I decided to publish the draft now.

Subscribe now

Is the Hudson Valley Prepared for a New Era of Wildfire Vulnerability? | Stowe Boyd (2023)

Wildfires and other climate-related disasters are daily headlines. Canada is still on fire, all across the country. The wildfires raging across Canada this year ‘burned a land area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries’, according to David Wallace-Wells, and filled the skies of Canada and the U.S. with dense and harmful smoke. 

Any sane person is aware of the increase in the incidence of wildfires: a rapidly warming world leads to more drought, higher winds, and other conditions that increase the size and intensity of wildfires. And the world is warming everywhere.

The inability of Canada to curtail that destruction -- much like what has happened in many locations across the U.S. -- led me to begin researching our readiness here in the Hudson Valley to deal with wildfires. Paradoxically, we’ve had a relatively wet and mild summer here. But that hasn’t been true elsewhere, as in Canada, Greece, The Canary Islands, and, of course, Maui.

The Maui wildfire -- an enormous tragedy -- is instructive. After a long, dry spring, high temperatures led to so-called ‘flash drought’ conditions where possible fuel for fire -- mostly invasive grasses that dominate former agricultural lands -- becomes tinder-dry. Former wetlands had been filled in for farms and homes. Hurricane Dora passed near the island, yielding no local rain but leaving a pattern of high winds. Sparks -- apparently from downed power lines -- led to the outbreak of at least one, and maybe multiple fires on the edge of Lahaina. As the winds blew, the fire spread rapidly, and undermanned fire departments were spread across a broad area, and then the water system collapsed. The town burned very quickly, as most people did not receive any warning, and 115 were confirmed dead: the deadliest U.S. wildfire in recent history.

How Big Is The Problem Nationally?

Ned Sullivan, the President of Scenic Hudson, wrote

According to the U.S. Forest Service, 80 million acres of its lands alone are at risk from devastating fires or abnormal levels of disease from insects and other pests. 

Joyce El Kouarti of the US Forest Service wrote about the future risk of wildfires: 

According to Senior Research Forester and Project Leader Jeff Prestemon, who led the Forest Service team charged with conducting the analysis, “The wildfire area burned is expected to more than triple in the next 80 years.”

An Associated Press compilation of wildfire projections sets the stage for the future of the Hudson Valley [emphasis mine]: 

Wildfires in the U.S. on average now burn about 12,000 square miles (31,000 square kilometers) yearly, about the size of Maryland. From 1983 to 1987, when the National Interagency Fire Center started keeping statistics, only about 3,300 square miles (8,546 square kilometers) burned annually.

During the past five years, including a record low 2020, Canada has averaged 12,279 square miles (31,803 square kilometers) burned, which is three and a half times larger than the 1983 to 1987 average.

The type of fires seen this year in western Canada are in amounts scientists and computer models predicted for the 2030s and 2040s. And eastern Canada, where it rains more often, wasn’t supposed to see occasional fire years like this until the mid-21st century, [Canadian fire scientist Mike] Flannigan said.

*If the Canadian east is burning, that means eventually, and probably sooner than researchers thought, eastern U.S. states will also, Flannigan said. He and Williams pointed to devastating fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that killed 14 people in 2016 during a brief drought in the East.*

We’re seeing the explosive increase in wildfire severity, a hundred years earlier than projected from climate models. And the Eastern U.S., which has been at fairly low risk for centuries, will likely follow the lead of Eastern Canada.

What About The Hudson Valley?

New York state is 61% forested - forests cover 18.6 million acres of 30.2 million total acres in the state. The Hudson Valley is 7,228 square miles, or 4,625,920 acres: approximately 15.5% of the State. Unlike other areas -- like the Adirondacks -- Hudson Valley forests are smaller, and located closer to towns and cities. Areas like the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, and other elevated areas contain a great deal of the forested land in the Valley.

The Hudson Valley has been spared monumental wildfires in the past hundred years, due to restrictions on open fires and a relatively wet and cool climate. Still, the region has had frequent wildfires. And in recent years, drought conditions have led to fires that were difficult to extinguish or just had to be waited out, such as the West Point Ground Fire (1999), the Overlooks Fire (2008), Sam's Point Fire (2016), the Breakneck Ridge Fire (2020), and The Minnewaska Fires (2022). 

Through mid-May of 2023, ‘there were 60 wildfires that burned approximately 1,024 acres across the state, according to data from the DEC. In 2022, 160 fires burned about 1,287 acres’, according to Chloe Bennett of the Times-Union. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association projects the Northeast will warm by 4.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080. The Nature Conservancy estimates a 10%-20% increase in the risk of forest fires in New York above the historic baseline due to increased temperatures and an increase in drought likelihood. Others would say that range is low. Scenic Hudson compares the climate in New York in 2100 to that of today’s Southeastern U.S.:

The result of continued warming will be dramatic in New York. Even if, as a global community, we aggressively reduce our greenhouse emissions, we can still expect that New York’s climate will resemble Virginia’s by the end of this century. However, based on our current emissions pathway, we may experience something more like the climate of Georgia by 2100.

The level of concern about these wildfires -- which generally burn themselves out after a few days -- has not really been reconsidered based on climate change. Consider the accelerated change in Eastern Canada. A few groups have rescaled their estimates of wildfire probability, but most State agencies estimate risk based on historical data, not projections driven by climate change. 

What Is The State of Readiness in the Hudson Valley?

There are few good examples of preparedness in the Hudson Valley. 

Northern Shawangunk Ridge

The best prepared seem to be a coalition of groups who have been motivated to adopt an aggressive stance toward wildfires in the Northern Shawangunk Ridge in the Catskills that runs through Orange and Ulster Counties. This group includes 

The Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC) and NYS Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation (NYS OPRHP), Mohonk Preserve and the Open Space Conservancy1  (OSC) own approximately 30,000 acres of land managed as Minnewaska State Park Preserve, Sam’s Point Preserve, Mohonk Preserve and Witch’s Hole State Forest.  The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is responsible for the management of Sam’s Point Preserve under agreement with NYS OPRHP/PIPC and OSC.

The Northern Shawangunks landscape covers approximately 90,000 acres along a 20-mile stretch between the town of Rosendale and Route 52 in the towns of Wawarsing and Shawangunk. This landscape also includes portions of the towns of New Paltz, Gardiner, Rochester and Marbletown, and the village of Ellenville. 

The 2011 Shawangunk Ridge Fire Management Plan provides a comprehensive assessment of the conditions and challenges, and a plan to counter the risk of wildfires and an emergency plan for dealing with fires as they occur. It’s format is comprehensive, island starts with purpose and needs:

Much of the vegetation that exists on the Shawangunk Ridge today is highly flammable and prone to periodic wildfire.  Many of the natural communities of plants and animals that now inhabit the ridge ecosystem evolved with fire over thousands of years, and depend on a regular cycle of fire in order to thrive.  Over the past 50-100 years, fire has been effectively excluded from most portions of the ridge as fire suppression techniques have improved.  This has led to the degradation of significant natural communities, as well as the accumulation of flammable forest debris.  This abundant available fuel has now increased the potential for more intense wildfires to occur.

I contend that this is the case for any Hudson Valley forests.

The goals of the plan:

The following goals are based on the missions and policies of the various organizations and have been developed to maintain consistency with, and be complimentary to, the other planning documents for the major parks and preserves in the Shawangunks. 

• Maintain and improve firefighter and public safety 

• Maintain the health and integrity of Shawangunk Ridge forests, and the wildlife and plant habitats they provide, by restoring fire as an ecological process 

• Reduce the risk of damage from wildfire to wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities adjacent to managed lands in the Shawangunks 

• Implement fire management activities using a science-based approach that incorporates knowledge and understanding gained through monitoring and the adaptive management process 

• Conduct outreach and educational activities related to fire ecology and management to promote understanding and collaboration among stakeholders 

• Maintain a cooperative, partnership-based fire management program that is consistent with New York State laws and partner organization and agency policies.

I will focus on only a few sections, most pertinent to the response to a wildfire. Note, however, that any plan has to include a great deal of work to be done before actual fires occur, like building fire roads, prescribed burns to diminish underbrush, community outreach, and integration of fire departments and firefighters from other agencies in preparation for the inevitable wildfires.

From the plan:

Wildfire Response 

Many actions described in the Northern Shawangunk Ridge Fire Management Plan are designed to reduce the risk of intense wildfire; however, wildfires—both human and naturally ignited—will inevitably occur.  All wildfires will be reported to the Ulster County Emergency Communications Center (911) and suppressed or contained in an appropriate fashion given the nature of the individual incident.  As incidents grow in size and complexity, a unified command structure should be established, including representatives from all responding agencies as well as park/preserve managers. 

While every wildfire is unique, maintaining firefighter safety and protecting human life and property in the wildland-urban interface are the highest priorities in any wildfire incident.  To the extent possible, protection of ecological, recreational, and aesthetic resources should also be recognized as a priority during wildfire suppression operations and weighed against the need to minimize acreage burned. 

The plan has a very extensive analysis of the various sorts of trees and topographic details of the Ridge, as well as detailed maps for the wildland-urban interface (WUI) where people live surrounded by the woods. Any group undertaking a fire management plan or just seeking to understand the many facets of wildfire prevention should study this plan in detail. Note: It’s been over ten years since it was drawn up, so its assessment of threats may need to be updated to reflect climate change acceleration.

Dutchess County

Dutchess County published a Hazard Mitigation Plan in 2000 that ranked wildfire at the highest level of risk, and they laid out a detailed assessment of that risk while identifying certain steps to counter those risks. However, as far as I can determine, that assessment has not been updated, and no emergency management plan for wildfires has been developed.

Their assessment includes these critical points, all drawn from the document:

- Many areas in the State, particularly those that are heavily forested or contain large tracts of brush and shrubs, are prone to fires. New York State has over 18 million acres of non-Federal forested land, along with an undetermined amount of open space and wetlands. The Adirondacks, Catskills, Hudson Highlands, Shawangunk Ridge, and Long Island Pine Barrens are examples of fire-prone areas.

- Estimating the approximate number of wildfires to occur in Dutchess County is difficult to predict in a probabilistic manner. This is because a number of variable factors impact the potential for a fire to occur and because some conditions (for example, ongoing land use development patterns, location, fuel sources, and construction sites) exert increasing pressure on the WUI zone.  Based on available data, wildfires will continue to present a risk to Dutchess County.  Given the numerous factors that can impact urban fire and wildfire potential, the likelihood of a fire event starting and sustaining itself should be gauged by professional fire managers on a daily basis.

- Fire is determined by climate variability, local topography, and human intervention. Climate change has the potential to affect multiple elements of the wildfire system: fire behavior, ignitions, fire management, and vegetation fuels. Hot dry spells create the highest fire risk. With the increasing temperatures occurring in New York State, wildfire danger may intensify by warming and drying out vegetation.  When climate alters fuel loads and fuel moisture, forest susceptibility to wildfires changes. Climate change also may increase winds that spread fires. Faster fires are harder to contain, and thus are more likely to expand into residential neighborhoods. 

In response to my questions about an emergency wildfire response plan for Dutchess County I received this reply, and I emphasize one paragraph:

McMann, Sean  - 10:49 AM (37 minutes ago)

Mr. Boyd,

Thanks again for your inquiry. The following response comes from the County’s Department of Emergency Response:

Dutchess County’s emergency planning efforts utilize an all-hazards approach through the county’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, navigating a cycle of preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation.

Threats and hazards are identified and prioritized using a systematic approach though a County Emergency Preparedness Assessment (CEPA), facilitated by the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

Although not identified as a high hazard or critical threat within Dutchess County, based on historical data and statistical analyses, Dutchess County Emergency Management is acutely aware of the unprecedented wildfire activity occurring across the country. 

Through existing fire mobilization and mutual aid agreements, all fire departments in Dutchess County have established preplanned alarm assignments to respond to and combat all fires. In addition, the Dutchess County Department of Emergency Response, all local fire departments and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation continue to partner and coordinate to ensure optimal readiness.

In addition, Dutchess County has provided grant funding opportunities to local fire departments in an effort to support the purchase of specialized all terrain utility vehicles and equipment designed to improve response to grass and brush fires.

The County’s Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan is currently under revision and we will be particularly focused on proactive measures to prevent wildfire conditions. In addition, the County’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan is currently undergoing its annual review and grant funding has been appropriated to begin revising this plan in 2024.

I hope that helps. If I can be of any more assistance, please just let me know.

Have a great day,

  Sean

Sean T. McMann

Assistant Communications Director

Dutchess County Government

22 Market Street, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601

Phone: (845) 486-2000  Fax: (845) 486-2021

So, as I interpret that: yes, Dutchess County has no plan like the Northern Shawangunk Ridge Fire Management Plan, but maybe they will start developing one next year, if grant funding is found.

Given the degree of threat, that seems to be overly cautious.

I had no response from the Fire Chief in Beacon about the threat of wildfire in the City. 

My conclusion is that the increased likelihood of significant wildfires, given increased heat and the chance of extreme weather, has not been reflected in planning in Dutchess County, and perhaps in other counties as well, excepting the Northern Shawangunks.

A Scenario for a Future Wildfire in the Hudson Highlands

The following is wholly conjectural but is based on the events that led to the Lahaina Maui disaster.

Following a long Spring drought, where the Mid-Hudson Valley received less than a third of its usual rainfall, in early July of 2025 a period of extreme heat and zero rainfall began, leading to 'flash drought' conditions. Efforts were made to discourage hikers and other visitors, and other potential fire ignition sources were being closely monitored. 

However, when tropical storm Bernice transitioned into hurricane status on 14 August 2025, with sustained winds above 100 miles per hour, concerns grew. As the hurricane moved to the Northeast away from New York and made landfall in Eastern Connecticut, however, the winds in the Hudson Valley picked up dramatically, while none of the storm's rainfall fell in the Hudson Valley.

At 6:47 am 15 August, Bart Billingsly of Beacon NY called the City about a brushfire across the street from his home at 65 Howland Ave, where he reported an electric line had fallen due to the wind. Within minutes, firefighters arrived and extinguished the fire, and Billingsly left for work around 8 a.m. At around 9:15 a.m., his wife called and said there seemed to be smoke coming from the woods on the side of Mount Beacon, the tallest point in the Hudson Highlands. He returned home when the firefighters returned, and the winds were gusting to 50 or 75 miles per hour. One firefighter mentioned that they had several reports of fires in other parts of Beacon, and he'd heard that at least one fire alarm had been called in nearby Fishkill.

By 2 p.m., the authorities were alerting those living in the 'wildland-urban interface' (surrounded closely by woods), like the Billingslys, to evacuate, as various wildfires were spreading across the Hudson Highlands, and the authorities could not contain the fire. Note: 84% of Beacon and 100% of Fishkill residents live in the wildland-urban interface zone. The wind gusts made using helicopters to drop water difficult, the Highlands did not have many fire roads, and the local fire fighting companies did not possess many wildland fire fighting vehicles. 

By that evening, 17 homes at the edge of the Mount Beacon Park in Beacon were damaged, seven of which were destroyed by fire, with one fatality. In Fishkill, four homes burned, with no fatalities.

Over the next two days, until a short but heavy rainfall emerged to save the day, the wildfires burned unchecked, even after State park rangers, federal agencies, and the National Guard joined the fight. Approximately 5000 acres had burned. After the rain, many questions remained. What was the proximate cause of the fire? A downed power line? A dropped cigarette by a hiker? 

Others also asked what measures should have been taken in the preceding months and years. Had the authorities in Beacon and Fishkill taken steps to prepare their citizens for this eventuality? Why had no warnings been issued until the fire itself was burning? Had Dutchess County taken steps to minimize the inherent danger of wildland and housing so intertwined along the Highlands? Had the County and local fire departments planned for this sort of disaster? What were the plans, and were they followed?

And most of all, what if the rain had not providentially appeared or if the wind had blown even harder? Could the fire have broken out and burned across Beacon and Fishkill? Embers from wildfires can travel a mile and a half, meaning that around 85 percent of Beacon is located in the wildfire-urban interzone. The embers could have started an urban firestorm, like that of the Marshall Fire in Colorado in December 2021, where 1,000 homes were destroyed and thousands evacuated. 

Yes, New York is not Colorado or Maui, two locales prone to drought. However, temperatures are rising everywhere, and in New York, as well. 

The key takeaway is this: the Hudson Valley is unprepared for the growing likelihood of increasingly severe wildfires. Better planning be undertaken, and significantly more material and human resources need to be allocated, trained, and maintained. Or the Hudson Highlands scenario -- or a much worse one -- will become inevitable.

Kingston is moving forward to lower speed limits:

Mayor Steve Noble announced Wednesday, July 3, that he is proposing a 25 mph speed limit to the city’s Common Council.

“After speaking with our staff, various City commissions, and many concerned community members, I am recommending that the City of Kingston adopt a 25-mile-per-hour area-wide speed limit, Noble said. “In the three ward meetings that I’ve had so far, the number one concern has been speeding in neighborhoods. I want Kingston residents to know that I share this concern.”

Noble said the speed limit reduction is one of many steps the city is taking to reduce crashes and increase safety while improving infrastructure.

Noble cited a study by the Governor’s Highway Safety Association that there was a 29% decline in the odds of speeding for vehicles traveling faster than 35 mph with an 8.5% drop for vehicles going faster than 30 mph and a 2.9% drop in vehicles driving over 25 mph.

Noble’s office also cited AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety findings that found a pedestrian struck by a vehicle traveling at 25 mph has a 25% risk of sustaining a serious or fatal injury with the risk of serious injury or death jumping to 50% at 33 mph and 75% at 41 mph.

“I look forward to applying evidence and the newly-granted authority contained in NYS law and the guidance in the recently updated Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) to set logical and appropriate speed limits in the City of Kingston,” City Engineer John Schultheis said.

Noble’s proposal will go to the Common Council’s Public Safety and General Government Committee in July.

In January 2022, the Beacon City Council passed a resolution urging state lawmakers to lower speed limits below the mandated 30 mph lower limit:

Municipalities can make changes to individual roads — New York City last year reduced the speed limits on 45 miles of high-crash corridors in four boroughs — but the state prohibits municipalities from setting default limits below 30 mph. Several bills have been introduced in the state Senate and Assembly that would lift the restriction. 

Dan Aymar-Blair, the Ward 4 council member who last year suggested lowering the limit, says it’s time for the change. “For three years I’ve heard from many people that they’re worried about safety,” he said. “We need to take action.”

I was quoted in my then-role on the Main Street Access Committee:

Beacon’s Main Street Access Committee, a volunteer group that Kyriacou created in 2020, last year recommended that the city drop the limit on Main Street, where there are no speed limit signs. 

“Our position was 20 mph on Main, because it is the densest and most-used road in Beacon, particularly in the summer months, when it’s packed with pedestrians,” said Stowe Boyd, the committee chair. “We were concerned that it is inherently dangerous to have cars tooling along at whatever the speed limit is in people’s heads, which is somewhat more than the city speed limits are, and occasionally it is ridiculously fast.”

I hope the City Council will follow Kingston’s push in this area, and going further, make Main Street a 20mph zone.

Subscribe now

Benyamin Applebaum tells the unique story of Palisades Park, New Jersey, a NYC-area town that has enjoyed a small renaissance over the past few years.

The town’s 1939 zoning laws, due to a legal quirk, allow two homes to be built on single-family lots. Over the past few decades, this has led to many duplexes being built, replacing older single-family homes and leading to what planners call ‘light-touch density’.

Edward Pinto, a co-director of the housing center at the American Enterprise Institute said to Appelbaum,

You don’t need a renewal plan. You don’t need subsidies. All you need is the right to build duplexes.

Appelbaum relates the well-known sequence of failures by the Hochul administration to relax zoning in NY state to allow greater density as a remedy to the ongoing housing crisis. He also points to other locales where zoning has been relaxed to allow more than one house on a single-family lot, like California, Montana, Maine, Washington, and the cities of Minneapolis, Charlotte, and elsewhere.

Beacon has a relatively new zoning law that allows for Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs. These can take the form of an accessory apartment built into or onto the primary residence or can be freestanding, like a converted garage or a backyard small house. However, very few have been developed to date, perhaps because any property owner wanting to build one must take the plan before the planning board for approval instead of considering an ADU development as just needing to meet defined standards through the building department.

I spoke to one neighbor who visited the building department to discuss converting part of a carriage house to an ADU. They were provided the forms for a one-to-five apartment house development and hefty escrow fees associated with such a project. At present, it does not seem like there is a well-defined process to develop an ADU. Try searching at the city’s website for ‘building an ADU"‘ or even ‘accessory development unit’. The only hits I got were notes from the City Council discussions of the ADU zoning law.

If Beacon wants more light-touch density and to create a housing market where our children, elders, and essential workers can afford to live, it would be great if the city would make the ADU process easier. Meanwhile, adding a provision to our zoning laws to permit a second home on a single-family lot — such as duplexes — would also allow the city to grow more housing without developing high-rise apartment buildings or slow-to-develop major housing developments that take years to come together.

If you have thoughts, please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Our primary main street in Beacon is, er, Main Street, and we still suffer from the razing that we suffered in the late 20th century:

In many cities such as Beacon, Main Streets often were similarly disrupted by this wave of razing. This is why Main Street in Beacon to this day has vast parking lots, holdovers from three-story, largely brick-fronted “shophouses” with retail below and apartments above that are now gone. 

In Beacon, the plan was to build wider streets parallel to Main Street — such as Henry Street — to turn the thoroughfare into a pedestrian mall. The failure of a similar project in Poughkeepsie averted that initiative but Main Street, despite its rebound as a tourist destination, retains the scars of urban renewal in the form of an extended middle section with architecturally undistinguished one-story retail buildings that are out of character with the historic east and west ends. 

The city’s Comprehensive Plan is channeling development toward the historic and denser form of shophouses, but at the current pace, it will take decades to realize that vision.

We think less about secondary main streets, which in Beacon’s case is Rte 52/Fishkill Ave:

These thoroughfares will be familiar to the small-city resident, notes Reif Larsen, the founder of The Future of Small Cities Institute, based in Troy. “They are a byproduct of the automobile — often they can be found on feeder state roads that lead into cities and are marked by absence — a series of gas stations, underpasses, condemned factories and vacant lots eviscerate any kind of box-like containment.”

Here’s an annotated copy of Reif Larsen’s article on the subject.

Subscribe now

I’ve been writing a column for the Highlands Current called Wide Angle, where I explore how global trends are impacting the Highlands area.

Share

This week my most recent column — The High Cost of Free Parking — was published. In that, I propose paid parking on Beacon’s Main Street, falling in line with plans in Coldspring:

If we are to balance the needs of local residents and visitors, free parking on Main Street satisfies no one’s desires. Why? Because it produces the wrong results. A survey conducted by Beacon’s Main Street Access Committee last Oct. 15, on a sunny 60-degree Saturday, demonstrates the high demand for parking along the city’s commercial artery.

I am advocating instituting paid parking on Main Street, with careful attention to the needs of residents.

…

In May, I wrote The Trouble With Toilets, detailing the lack of public access to toilets:

When I was serving as chair of the City of Beacon’s Main Street Access Committee, one of the longest discussions we had — after issues related to pedestrian safety, parking and dangerous intersections — was the problem of public toilets. 

We heard complaints from homeowners that visitors used their backyards and public spaces to pee. We’d also heard from Main Street businesses about visitors demanding to use employee restrooms, despite posted policies.

[…]

The problems are not limited to Beacon. Take a walk down any Main Street USA and you will likely see “No Public Restroom” or “Restrooms for Customers Only” signs in many storefronts. Aside from being inhospitable, the policies behind these signs, at least in New York state, appear to be illegal.

The New York State Plumbing Code, Section 403.3, appears to my reading fairly clear about access to restrooms in buildings open to the public, such as stores and restaurants. It reads:

“Customers, patrons and visitors shall be provided with public toilet facilities in structures and tenant spaces intended for public utilization.”

You might think that a regulation like that would keep merchants from putting signs in the window. But it does not, in large part because the state cedes regulation to municipalities.

In Beacon and Cold Spring, clearly, the interpretation has been that non-customers can be shut out.

The solution is that the City should compel merchants to follow the letter of the law, after some reasonable warning period.

…

There are earlier columns related to repurposing local decommissioned prisons and a three-part series on the housing crisis.

Subscribe now

I wrote a three-column series for the Highlands Current on how the U.S. housing crisis is playing out in New York and specifically the Hudson Valley. See Priced Out, Priced Out, Part II, and Priced Out, Part III. The biggest takeaway is that the region (and the nation) is suffering from the consequences of decades of underbuilding and recent surges in housing costs partly driven by the Covid-accelerated migration of well-paid professionals from New York to the suburbs and exurbs here at the periphery of the metropolitan area.

Governor Hochul has proposed a plan to build more than 800,000 new housing units over the next 10 years, which she admitted is inadequate, perhaps meeting only 10 percent of the housing shortfall in the State. However, the State legislature is balking, specifically because her proposal would override local zoning control in municipalities that do not meet ambitious goals to create new housing.

Share

In the New York Times, Luis Ferré-Sadurni recounts the legislature’s rejection of the proposal, and their alternative approach, which is all carrot and no stick:

Altering Hochul’s housing plan

Lawmakers significantly picked apart Ms. Hochul’s ambitious plan to curb the state’s housing shortage and high living costs by constructing more than 800,000 new units of housing over the next 10 years, or about twice what New York has built in the last decade.

The governor’s plan is centered on getting municipalities to meet specific housing targets: Localities downstate must increase the number of homes by 3 percent over three years, while places upstate have a target of 1 percent. Ms. Hochul proposed certain mechanisms to coerce cities, towns and villages to ease restrictions that have stunted housing production in the state, especially in the New York City suburbs.

The governor’s plan would mandate the construction of more housing along public transit lines. And if a municipality does not meet its target, the state could allow developers to override local zoning rules, a provision that provoked backlash among both Republican and Democratic officials in the suburbs.

Responding to the suburban opposition, Democratic lawmakers rejected Ms. Hochul’s plan to encourage transit-oriented development, as well as the state’s ability to override local zoning.

Instead, lawmakers proposed a $500 million fund to award incentives to localities that meet the housing targets, a move that was decried by supporters of Ms. Hochul’s housing plan as lacking enough teeth to boost housing production in neighborhoods that have blocked it for years.

“We believe that building housing is important, we believe affordability is important and we believe we can get there with incentives, principally, and community involvement,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader who represents Westchester, parts of which have routinely opposed new housing.

The Governor’s housing proposal is strangely progressive, by which I mean she’s pushing beyond what the moderate Democratic-dominated legislature is willing to do about housing, and that progressivism is out of sync with her advocacy of conservative Hector LaSalle as the State’s head judge. That she would go so far as to attempt an end run past the NIMBYism baked into the metropolitan suburbs and exurbs has led to this break with her Democratic colleagues.

As much as I believe in density and more inclusive housing, her approach clearly is not going to work. She — or someone else — is going to work hard, and for a long time, to build a movement dedicated to tackling the housing crisis in New York. There seems to be no such movement taking root in the Legislature, or else it is a small and quiet one.

Subscribe now

At any rate, it looks like Gov. Hochul in the near term is going to have to work on a compromise, and it will likely not include the zoning override threat built into the current proposal, and maybe not even the emphasis on transit-oriented development.

This conflict in the State Democratic party underscores a weakness of State governance: why does New York State not have a planning department, and why did Hochul get so far out ahead of the Legislature on the housing issue? Shouldn’t there be a commission on housing led by the (non-existent) NY State Planning Department, experts, and members of the Legislature that could have worked to come up with a plan that could be turned into law?

In the final analysis, the Governor seems to be operating without close integration with the Legislature, an approach that will lead to policy failure and perhaps political failure for her when reelection comes around.

Ross Barkan dissects the current disarray in the New York Democratic party. He relates the losses in last fall’s election, where Patrick Maloney lost to Republican Mike Lawler in the newly configured congressional district 17, and three other seats, yielding control of the US House to the GOP.

At the core of this mess is the tug of war between right-of-center Cuomo Democrats and decidedly more left-wing progressives.

Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)

The behind-the-scenes jockeying goes on between Cuomo Democrats and the progressives:

And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster [I signed it]. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.

And he has not.

“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”

And what are the chances of that change? Consider the controversy surrounding his snubbing India Walton in 2021:

In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”

Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.

But Hochul continues to support Jacobs:

Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff.

Remember that New York has no planning department, either.

All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”

That is a legacy of the Cuomo years, and now the split between progressives and centrists — including the questions about Jacobs’ handling of the State Democratic Party — looms over everything:

The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).

Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office [Jacobs’ day job is running a day camp origanization]. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.

The longer that Hochul allows the State organization to reject the activities normally associated with state-wide organizing — like research, marketing, choosing and developing candidates — the longer we will be dangling in the wind, and perhaps losing even more congressional districts to the Right.

Governor Kathy Hochul

In New York Voters Put Democrats on Notice. Was the Message Received?, Mara Gay is pretty accurate about the self-inflicted damage the New York State Democrats have caused. But in some cases she goes too far, and in others, not at all far enough. I quote Gay here at length, with comments interspersed:

For politicians in some places in the United States, election losses tend to prompt a kind of soul-searching. In Albany? Not so much.

Just two months after New York voters delivered New York Democrats a drubbing at the polls, it’s not clear if the message is penetrating the party’s thicket of dysfunction and hubris.

Except the NY Democrats won all statewide offices, and still control both houses of the State legislature, which she might have noted at the outset.

The hubris made an appearance over the holiday, when the governor approved a 29 percent pay raise that the State Legislature gave itself in December.

Note, however, that the same bill caps the amount of money State legislators can make from outside sources at $35,000, which is a reasonable and long-awaited restriction on conflicts of interest.

And the Democratic Party chairman, Jay Jacobs, remains in his post, never mind the shellacking his party received in November, in which Republicans flipped four House seats and came surprisingly close to taking the governor’s mansion in a heavily Democratic state.

This is a travesty. Jacobs basically pushed Democratic candidates to adopt the Republican framing of issues he deemed were critical in national races, as opposed to the approach Dems effectively used in other states, highlighting issues like abortion and voting rights, and the creation of new jobs through new federal initiatives.

Share

Most concerning, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature, which began its new session this week, appear prepared to return to business as usual, which means cautiously tinkering with policy while they are fixated on crises of their own making.

Turning to the present, Gay is dead-on here.

The first questions before the Legislature include whether to approve Ms. Hochul’s choice for chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, whom liberals oppose because of his conservative-leaning rulings in labor, abortion and criminal justice cases — as well as more mundane headaches, like whether to remove a newly elected Republican assemblyman who is facing questions about whether he lives in the borough he was elected to serve. (Lester Chang, the assemblyman in question, says he does.)

Governor Hochul’s selection of Hector LaSalle as her nominee to lead the State’s highest court, the New York State Court of Appeals, is going to be a black eye because she doesn’t have the votes in the Legislature. It appears that nomination might not even get out of committee.

Subscribe now

Back in the real world, New York is suffering.

A crisis in confidence over public safety in the state, made worse by persistent concerns over gun violence and hate crimes, continues, even as it’s clear some progress is being made.

See Major Crimes Rose 22 Percent in New York City, Even as Shootings Fell.

Unemployment in the state remained higher than the national rate in 2022, and it is especially high in New York City, where unemployment averaged 6.2 percent, according to an analysis from the state’s comptroller. Among Black residents in New York City, that figure was more than 10 percent.

Note my comments on job creation, earlier. But New York City has a swirling vortex of problems, and they aren’t in the hands of any elected officials to solve. The pandemic-driven remote work revolution has led to a huge fall in workers commuting into the city, so midtown Manhattan buildings are only 57% occupied. See The Donut Effect.

More and more, living in New York is out of reach not just for working-class or middle-class residents but nearly anyone without a trust fund. If the governor and Legislature tried apartment hunting in New York City right now, they would discover that the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New York City this January is $4,890 — more than 20 percent higher than this time last year. Little wonder then, that 67,000 people slept in city shelters this week, more than 20,000 of them children.

What is required from Albany is not business as usual, but bold, swift action on the issues that residents in the state are confronting in their daily lives.

That means finding new and creative ways to expand the state’s economy and improve public safety, including by further strengthening its gun laws. Among the bright spots last year was a measure that Ms. Hochul pushed for in the wake of the mass shooting in Buffalo, which made the red flag laws barring individuals who may pose a risk to themselves or others from obtaining a firearm more effective. In the six months after the law was changed, judges approved more than 2,000 such orders, a significant increase from the year before, according to the Albany Times Union newspaper.

New York needs Ms. Hochul and the Legislature to deliver that kind of relentless focus on housing. The way to begin is to do everything possible to spur housing production.

Like passing the bill she sidelined last year on Accessory Building Units, see Why Are Accessory Dwelling Units Stalled In Albany?

For one thing, this means coming up with a new kind of tax incentive for developers that encourages more truly affordable housing. The state’s previous program, known as 421a, mostly created units for high-income people even as it cost taxpayers $1.7 billion per year. Albany allowed it to expire last year without replacing it.

That bill was badly structured, and long before Hochul was on the scene. Also, the State could start building by itself: She doesn’t have to only depend on developers chasing tax breaks.

In December, the governor said she would build 800,000 units of housing in the state over the next decade. That’s good, but the harder task is to push for zoning and tax changes across the state that will allow the region to build the multifamily housing needed to truly end the crisis and let New York grow.

Actually, Gay gets this totally wrong. Hochul admits that the 800,00 units are only 10% of what’s needed, so it starts out with a target that is a failure. Not good at all.

Voters will know Ms. Hochul and the Legislature are serious about the housing crisis when they start fighting — hard — to build multifamily housing in suburban areas like Long Island, where it is decades overdue. The governor backed off similar proposals last year, wary that doing so might alienate voters in Long Island, where multifamily housing has historically been unwelcome. In the end, Long Island voted Republican anyway.

A really bad call by Hochul, there.

Share Beacon Streets

Ms. Hochul and other Democrats should discard this tepid, safe approach to policymaking. It is failing the state, as well as the party. Ideally, the governor can work with local communities to build support for zoning changes to permit multifamily housing. But the governor can also make clear that infrastructure dollars for Long Island are contingent on welcoming the housing the region needs.

Or to pass laws to require municipalities that lack affordable housing to create it, or lose State funding, like other states have done.

The failure to boldly address central issues like housing is in part why, while Democrats outperformed expectations nationally, the outcome in New York was just the opposite.

New York Democrats bungled their shot at congressional mapmaking last year, then went on to lose four House seats, a series of events that was not only embarrassing for the state party, but played a pivotal role in delivering the [US] House into Republican hands. Democrats lost several State Assembly seats, too, though they held on to their supermajority, thanks to a more than 2:1 advantage in registered voters that Democrats enjoy in New York.

In spite of that overwhelming advantage, Governor Hochul won re-election with just 53.2 percent of the vote in November. For comparison, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan motivated voters in a decidedly less Democratic swing state and was re-elected by a much larger margin.

Actually, Gay gets this wrong. Hochul did not win reelection. She took over from Cuomo when he stepped down, as Lt. Governor. This was her first (and maybe last) election as governor.

In this new year, New York Democrats have a chance to deliver on the issues that truly matter to people who live in the state — and give their voters a reason to show up at the polls.

Here’s what Hochul should do if she’d like to clean up these messes:

1. Get rid of Jay Jacob as head of the State Democratic Party, and find someone more progressive, like Mondaire Jones (who might be looking for a job).

2. Find a more progressive nominee for the State Court of Appeals.

3. Push more aggressively on housing. Much more aggressively. It is also a job creation project which could employ tens of thousands [of registered voters] statewide.

4. Reach into the wish list of the New New York report (see 2023, The New New York, The New New Beacon) and actually push to bring the best ideas forward and into being.

But I wonder if Hochul is too hamstrung by the weight of her ‘moderate’ positions — which means the Cuomo-like almost-a-Republican stance on many issues. Can she turn the corner on these messes and get going? I’m not so sure.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2022

The good news is that I have tested negative for Covid after 10 long, long days. My appetite is back, and I have stopped wheezing. My partner, Sarah, is still testing positive, so we aren’t planning any special activities, family visits, going out to celebrate, etc. And I am not back to 100%, yet, anyway.

I’m not one to make resolutions, generally, but I am planning to write more in the new year. I have several ongoing engagements for writing, such as my Wide Angle column for the Highlands Current, contributions to Chronogram (a piece I wrote on housing for TheRiver is being republished in Chronogram this month, for example), as well as writing for Reworked and Sunsama’s weekly newsletter. Scribble, scribble, scribble.

In October, I joined the board of BeaconArts, and hope to make a contribution in several areas, starting as an IT guy.

Earlier this month I was appointed to the Beacon Zoning Board of Appeals and will attend my first meeting in January.

Share

The New New York

In a recent issue of Beacon Streets I wrote about The New New York report released by Gov Hochul and Mayor Adams. I summarized the plan:

The Plan has three major goals, the first being ‘Reimagine New York’s Business Districts as Vibrant 24/7 Destinations’, with four strategies leading to 17 initiatives. The other two goals are ‘Make It Easier for New Yorkers to Get to Work’ and ‘Generate Inclusive, Future-Focused Growth’.

The plan is insanely large, but New York City has immense challenges. I want to focus on initiative 33, Develop Regional Strategies That Foster Mutually Beneficial Connections Between NYC and the Surrounding Region.

The authors of the report start with an overstatement, forgetting to update the pandemic’s impact on the City:

New York City’s ties to the surrounding region are myriad and deep. Twenty percent of the city’s workforce lives outside of the five boroughs. Hundreds of thousands of others commute into the city on a regular basis, whether to take advantage of its cultural and culinary offerings, obtain medical services, or access transportation hubs.

The twenty percent mentioned is pre-pandemic 2019, and since that time commercial real estate occupancy in NYC is down to 47%. So, the authors start on a false note, which I think skews everything that follows. For example:

The region and NYC are in fact one interconnected housing market. The availability of regional housing options supports the growth of business-district jobs. However, across the region, job growth has outpaced housing growth with approximately 273,000 more jobs than new housing units created from 2001 to 2019 (~1.3 million new jobs vs. ~1.0 million new housing units).354 This, in turn, drives up prices and makes moving from across the metro area, the state, the US, and the world more costly for those seeking to become part of the NYC economic engine.

I think it would be better to say that ‘the region and NYC can be considered a group of partially overlapping housing markets’, not one interconnected one. Just as the most obvious issue, NY, NJ and CT have different housing laws and jurisdictions. And a city like Beacon cannot be lumped together with Staten Island and the Bronx as some undifferentiated ‘greater NYC’, just because we are on the Metro-North Hudson Line.

And then they show why they want to minimize the differences between the five boroughs and the surrounding region: they want the outlying regions to help make the New NYC a success:

In short, it is essential that efforts in the city’s recovery consider and address the ways in which the surrounding region both contributes to and has a stake in the city’s success. This work will include developing regional growth strategies that foster mutually beneficial connections between New York City and the surrounding region.

And of course, with Gov Hochul pushing an agenda dedicated to that cause, it is entirely possible that policies that hypothetically benefit NYC would be advanced even if they don’t actually benefit the surrounding areas. For example, the discussion in this section of the report about ‘Explore “live-work-play” development models to adapt to new modes of working’ seem focused only on workers outside NYC commuting into NYC:

New transit-oriented development should build housing close to reliable transit, as this access is more important than ever in a hybrid-work world where workers may be in New York City part of the week but working from home the rest of the week.

What about workers who don’t work in NYC at all, but may want to use transit to move across the surrounding region? We have a transit system dominated by NYC as its nexus, and this plan suggests that isn’t changing.

There is an area that I am more hopeful about, although it seems short on details: ’Leverage regional assets and talent to attract and promote the growth of key industries’. It would be great to attrack various manufacturing industries to the region, like life sciences, clean tech/green tech, film, tourism, and industrial manufacturing. This vision is compelling:

Manufacturing and industrial: Work in partnership with regional businesses and research institutions to grow R&D and small batch manufacturing activities in NYC and scale regional ecosystems. Local businesses are creating the next generation of essential items on a daily basis in New York City and offshoring or near-shoring larger productions runs outside of the city. The City and State have an opportunity to help local businesses scale their operations and connect them to local talent, decreasing our reliance on overseas manufacturing and reducing supply chain strains during times of crisis.

Again, it seems very NYC-centric, but the opportunities are there.

Conclusions

It’s far too early to draw any real conclusions from what is a 159-page wishlist with little behind it. I note that New York State government doesn’t even have an official planning department, but still has dozens of commissions writing reports like these. The report is at best a point of departure, but could in fact turn into a shadow play, especially if the two protagonists, Gov Hochul and Mayor Adams, turn out to be one-term wonders, which could well be the case.

Hochul’s recent missteps — like her massive gaffe with nominating Hector LaSalle to serve as the state’s highest judge — suggest that she may be facing a primary challenge at the end of her current term. Mayor Adams isn’t looking much better

Subscribe now

The New New Beacon

Just as the pandemic has led to enormous societal impacts on New York City, the same is true out here in the Hudson Valley. A small city like Beacon cannot take on a 150-page report-writing project in a six month sprint like the State did, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to wait years before starting to think through the most critical issues for the City and our place in the region.

One thing I will be pushing for in 2023 is the setting of a date for a new planning cycle for the City. Beacon needs to take a more active role in laying out its own use of land and resources, like the long-dormant Camp Beacon area, working toward denser and more affordable housing, and starting to consider paid parking along Main Street.

I also hope to champion car-free Sundays occasionally on Main Street — Second Sunday? — in the New Year, and will probably work through BeaconArts to get that started.

I hope the City Council is taking notes.

Share

Gov. Kathy Hochul and mayor Eric Adams unveiled a reimagined vision for a “New New York” Wednesday, while acknowledging that the pandemic has fundamentally changed New York City.

The plan, titled “New New York: Making New York Work For Everyone,” suggested that reinvigorating the city’s commercial districts by transforming them into 24 hour live-and-work spaces was key to the city’s future.

The ‘24-hour live-and-work spaces’ theme is only one aspect of a staggeringly long and dense report but is the sort of sound bite that catches the attention, more than the many pages dedicated to rezoning, details about various business districts, what sorts of advanced manufacturing should be sought, and the need for better childcare, as just a few examples.

Share

The Plan has three major goals, the first being ‘Reimagine New York’s Business Districts as Vibrant 24/7 Destinations’, with four strategies leading to 17 initiatives. The other two goals are ‘Make It Easier for New Yorkers to Get to Work’ and ‘Generate Inclusive, Future-Focused Growth’.

In my view — and I have only read through the report once and quickly — the three goals can be thought of as having near-, medium-, and long-term life horizons, and the real payoff will come in the third.

• Establish New York City as a hub for future industries and innovation — The report identifies a variety of industries that would potentially replace the office workers who have fled the city as companies have accepted remote work as their new mantra. Instead of workers typing on laptops, the city wants to attract industries where the workers need to show up, like biotech, advanced and green manufacturing. It would also be smart to attract more educational institutions to create NYC hubs (or move there altogether) repurposing empty office space for classrooms, libraries, labs, and dorms.

• Ensuring that workers have access to housing by dramatically increasing our supply, with a “moonshot” goal of meeting the need for 500,000 units over the next decade — I think you are dooming yourself by calling a goal a moonshot (although the last time around we did get to the moon), but clearly housing is in a crisis, and creating more of it will lead to a reduction in prices. If the City is to attract skilled manufacturing workers for the new industries, there will have to be more affordable housing.

• Ensure that growth and access to opportunity are fair and equitable — One standout is an initiative toward affordable, high-quality childcare.

Share Beacon Streets

The report focuses on some trends that can be built on. Some business districts are seeing higher foot traffic now than in 2019, but Lower, South Midtown, and Midtown Manhattan are suffering the most:

Long Island City, Forest Hills, and Broadway Junction are considerably busier now than prepandemic. Presumably, because people aren’t traveling to Manhattan to work in those office towers. This is immensely important to the City since much of the tax revenue has come from Manhattan:

Why should New Yorkers across all five boroughs care if Midtown and Lower Manhattan are struggling, especially if they’ve seen their own local commercial corridors rebound and even thrive in the last year? Because even if an individual’s job is located somewhere else, Manhattan’s business districts are New York City’s hubs for global business dominance, generating 58.5 percent of the City’s office and retail property tax revenues and 18 percent of over-all citywide property tax revenue. This tax base powers the government spending on physical and social infrastructure that touches every New Yorker, whether it’s paving roads, providing public education, or running senior centers and libraries. Simply put, we must stabilize our Manhattan business districts so that we can continue to invest throughout the five boroughs.

The significance of Midtown and Lower Manhattan resonates beyond the city. Before the pandemic, Manhattan welcomed 664,000 regional commuters per day on average—the majority in Midtown, Midtown South, and Lower Manhattan. 200 These commuters, if they work from home, may spend their dollars in other states. Meanwhile, international business travelers rely on a central, convenient destination for meetings to make their trips worthwhile. Companies chose to locate in Midtown because they knew it would position them to compete globally, offer access to a concentration of industries across sectors, and attract workers from around the world.

The city’s infrastructure has been designed to support this influx of workers, with a combined 28 subway service lines, 25 commuter rail lines, 11 ferry routes, a dense bus network, and a robust Citibike system with over 1,500 stations. Much of this infrastructure is designed to connect people to the city’s Core Employment Hubs, which also makes them the most sustainable places to focus our commercial density.

Over the years, the extraordinary commercial concentration in Midtown and Lower Manhattan have generated abundant returns, fueling an ecosystem that supports the most far-flung business travelers and the local owners of a corner deli, while producing revenues to fund services across the entire city. That’s why, before the pandemic, when workers were simply required to show up in Manhattan’s business districts every day (and did), we could gloss over an inconvenient fact: a lot of people don’t really like it there. Now that workers have more choices, an overwhelming number—still more than 50 percent—are deciding not to make the daily trek into the office. The sleek but anonymous streets that empty out every night and weekend lack the life, interest, energy, and beauty that brought many to New York in the first place. In this new world of choice for many employers and businesses, we need to entice people to come by creating a place they want to be.

That means we cannot simply revive Midtown and our other business districts. We must reimagine them.

The report spends 164 pages attacking that problem from 40 tangents. From my perspective, they range from fanciful to practical, but most importantly, they lack any details about the cost involved. But saving a city that was guestimated at being worth a trillion dollars for real estate, alone, clearly, it’s worth investing many billions to retain the unofficial position as the capital of the Western world.

I plan to take a closer look at initiative 33, ‘Develop regional strategies that foster mutually beneficial connections between NYC and the surrounding region’, to see what might be in the offing for us in Beacon and the surrounding area.

More to follow.

Subscribe now

Here’s the core issue:

There is a housing crisis in the U.S., a tangled tale of many parts. At the highest level, we are short as many as 5 million “units” (i.e., homes, apartments, condos, etc.). This is especially acute at the lower end of the market. It has been caused, principally, by developers following the money — they build newer, larger homes to sell to wealthier and older people. The National Association of Realtors says first-time buyers account for the smallest share of the market in the past 40 years.

As a result, no state, including New York, has enough “affordable” housing, which is defined roughly as costing no more than about a third of a person’s income for rent or a mortgage payment. At the same time, restrictive zoning in the most populous and popular regions, such as the New York City metro area, has blocked or slowed the development of lower-priced rentals.

By one estimate, New York state will need 500,000 to 1.2 million housing units over the next 10 years to meet demand. Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed preserving or building 100,000 units over the next five years at a cost of $25 billion, which is inadequate by a factor of 10.

Share Beacon Streets

Gov. Hochul is open with the degree of the shortfall, but that is a small consolation.

The three factors:

1. Not enough housing units are being built, especially affordable, smaller units and starter homes.

2. We are in the periphery of New York City, a ‘superstar’ city, where the rise of remote work has led thousands of highly-paid professionals to migrate to the edge of ‘the Donut’ as economists call it. This new demand has pushed prices to historical highs and is pushing out those who can’t afford prices.

3. More older residents live in larger homes than they want, and more are living alone. If they sell, they find they can’t buy back in because of 1 and 2.

In the next few columns, I detail some ways out of this trap.

Subscribe now

The reality is—aside from a few progressive cities and towns, New York continues to block efforts to meaningfully enlarge affordable housing. In fact, New York is “an outlier regarding the degree of control it allows localities in land use regulation,” according to Noah Kazis of NYU’s Furman Center:

New York stands alone among its peer states—i.e. coastal states with high housing costs and healthy regional economies—in giving its local governments such broad authority over local land use…Essentially every one of New York’s peer states with respect to housing markets—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington, and Florida—have adopted state-level reforms to promote housing development in high-cost suburban areas, and the few similarly-situated states that have not are prominently debating the issue.

I interviewed Mayor Lee Kyriacou of Beacon:

I spoke with Mayor Lee Kyriacou about the year-long push and the result. (Interview edited for length and clarity).

Stowe Boyd: Could you summarize the long push involved to get to the new zoning rules on ADUs?

Lee Kyriacou: It took a long time, but we got to the right answer eventually. I made a list of potential zoning and planning changes to affect housing, about a year and a half ago, and we picked what we thought were the low-hanging fruit. We thought, oh, we’ll just do accessory dwelling units that’ll be quick and easy, because we already allowed them. We were just going to make it a little bit easier [to get ADUs approved], and it took a year! I’ve gotten a little frustrated by that. 

Go read the piece at The River.

I am going through some transitions in my community participation here in Beacon, and some words I read recently jelled some perspectives.

Here’s some of the transitions:

• After several years, the Main Street Access Committee — an ad hoc advisory committee formed by Mayor Lee Kyriacou intended to research issues related to the Main Street area in Beacon — is completing its final report, and will be disbanded following the delivery of the report to the City Council, in December or January. I’ve served as the chair for the past year and a half, since Sarah Pasti moved away, my former co-chair.

• In October, I joined the board of BeaconArts, the arts and culture non-profit, as an interim board member. I will be running for a full term in January.

• I also started writing a column for the Highlands Current in November, as I described in a recent post, Wide Angle: The Local Impacts of Larger Trends. (I continue contributing to Chronogram’s The River news service, looking at economic concerns, like housing and employment.)

I have always been drawn to involvement in community affairs but never done a great job of explaining why, except in the most anodyne way. But an interview by David Marchese with the musician, artist, and visionary Brian Eno hit the bullseye [emphasis mine]:

David Marchese: Insofar as you have a public image, it’s as an extremely cerebral figure. But even just in this conversation it’s clear that emotions and feelings drive a lot of what you do. So what’s an emotion or feeling driving you right now?

Brian Eno: I can give you a clear example. I recently found this gospel song on YouTube. Donald Vails1 is playing piano on it. Billy Preston2 is playing organ. They’re in a room with a mixed bunch of people with quite a range of ages. They sing this song, “You Can’t Beat God Giving.” It’s a great song, but what’s fantastic is seeing these people singing to one another. It’s intensely moving. Billy Preston is sort of sitting in as a star, but the rest of the people, I would assume, have normal jobs and normal lives, and they’re elevated by this community they’ve formed around this event.

That, more and more, is the feeling that I’m fascinated by: What happens to humans when they multiply their feelings together? We’ve been so atomized over the last 50, 100 years and told that we have to have our own completely independent lives and that the real human is the one who can stand alone. The real human, to me, seems like the one who can support his neighbors and work with them. That’s a feeling that I pursue. Whenever I see it, I want to encourage it.

So, that’s it, maybe. The real human is the one who can support their neighbors and work with them. Work with them to multiply our feelings, to find common cause, to counter the centripetal forces that pull us apart.

And, like Eno, that’s a feeling I pursue, and whenever I see that I feel I must encourage it.

Subscribe now

My first column for The Highlands Current is in print, E-Bike Encounters, where I look into the rules and regs around e-bikes. I was inspired by a close encounter with an e-bike on Main Street in Beacon, where I was almost hit in a crosswalk:

An e-bike is a bicycle with an electric motor and battery. In New York state, they are treated by the law as bicycles, rather than motorcycles; you don’t need a driver’s license or insurance. Some e-bikes only assist the rider while pedaling and others will run without pedaling, but all legal e-bikes max out at 25 mph. There are commercially available e-bikes that operate at higher speeds, but these are (nominally) illegal in New York.

The e-bike that nearly clipped me on Main Street seemed to be going faster than 25 mph, but who knows? At the least, he was breaking the law.

Although e-bikes have a lot going for them, we clearly need to be giving their drivers tickets when they break traffic laws.

In upcoming columns, I will be touching on other global trends impacting us in the Highlands.

I was astonished by the acrimony revealed in Nick Fandos’ interview with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who this week lost his reelection bid for the newly apportioned 17th congressional district, and seems to be directing the blame for that and other losses in New York state toward Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Maloney is the head of the Democrat’s campaign committee, and will presumably be stepping down from that role when he leaves office in 2023.

Fandos: There is a debate in New York right now about the New York Democratic Party, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some on the left are arguing its leadership is part of the problem here. Is that a conversation you are a part of?

Maloney: The last time I ran into A.O.C., we were beating her endorsed candidate two to one in a primary, and I didn’t see her one minute of these midterms helping our House majority. So, I’m not sure what kind of advice she has, but I’m sure she’ll be generous with it.

But let’s be clear, she had almost nothing to do with what turned out to be an historic defense of our majority. Didn’t pay a dollar of dues. Didn’t do anything for our frontline candidates except give them money when they didn’t want it from her.

There are other voices who should be heard, especially when suburban voters have clearly rejected the ideas that she’s most associated with, from defunding the police on down. She’s an important voice in our politics. But when it comes to passing our agenda through the Congress, or standing our ground on the political battlefield, she was nowhere to be found.

Let me get this straight. As head of the campaign committee, it was his job to ‘defend the majority’, right? AOC is a leader of the progressive side of the party, and Maloney clearly sees her as an impediment to his job. Is that justified?

Here in New York, how much do you think redistricting mattered in the end?

If the top of the ticket is getting smoked in the New York City suburbs, you’re going to lose seats because those districts always have a degree of competitiveness. Albany passed different maps and the commission passed different maps, so it’s hard to talk in generalities.

But if you look at the districts in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island, it’s fair to say that we would have always struggled in an environment where the governor’s losing by double digits in those areas. Different lines wouldn’t have made much difference.

Pat Ryan is running in a district that was easier than mine. I’m running in a district that was easier than my old one. It’s just when you have voters in the booth who are voting against the top of the ticket by double digits, it’s very hard, particularly for a first-time candidate like some of ours, to overcome that.

Look, that’s not the only reason. And again, I don’t think it’s Gov. Hochul’s fault. But we clearly had a problem in the New York City suburbs that just didn’t exist elsewhere in the country, and I’m sure there’s enough blame to go around.

So he is imputing blame to Governor Hochul, who handily won her own election, but he doesn’t take the blame himself, when he and a number of other candidates caved in on the rhetoric about crime that the GOP was pushing, despite the low levels of crime in New York suburbs.

Fandos also interviewed AOC, who attributes the blame on the ‘calcified apparatus’ of NY state Democratic politics:

Fandos: So why did Democrats perform so poorly in New York on Tuesday?

AOC: There were a lot of factors that went into New York’s underperformance relative to the rest of the country.

A lot of this has roots with Andrew Cuomo. A lot of what he did to the state and Democratic Party as governor led to this moment. But it’s not really about placing blame on him, but examining what the New York State Democratic Party looks like. It is not a small “D” democratic structure. As a consequence, we do not have the rich democratic culture and organizing that should be happening year-round, from the way that we select town councils and mayorships across the state of New York. The absence of that results in a lot of what we saw.

Fandos: What do you mean by that? How much is organizing and how much is messaging?

AOC: It’s no secret that an enormous amount of party leadership in New York State is based on big money and old-school, calcified machine-style politics that creates a very anemic voting base that is disengaged and disenfranchised.

There is also a narrative problem when you look at what New York did. This overreliance and insistence on leaning into Republican narratives on crime and safety hurt Democrats in the state of New York.

Instead of ignoring or even pivoting and commanding the narrative on crime and public safety, a lot of Democrats leaned into Lee Zeldin’s approach.

Fandos: Gov. Kathy Hochul did try to do that to an extent, right? She repeatedly tried to bring the discussion back to the proliferation of guns and gun safety.

AOC: She absolutely put in that effort, but it’s a team sport. When you have certain congressional candidates running ads on defund the police, when we have the mayor speaking from certain frames on crime and safety, I think it further drives these narratives.

Not once has the New York State Democratic chair ever called me. All he has done is antagonize myself and any progressive candidates. We need to get together as a team. This idea of pure moderate politics that seeks to defeat both a progressive grass roots and a Republican Party at the same time very often isolates itself and makes itself smaller.

Jay Jacob, the New York State Democratic chair, never called AOC. It is his job (and Maloney) to try to hammer out common ground between moderate (corporate) and progressive (socialist) Democrats running for office. And she thinks Mayor Adams’ position on crime and other issues helped the GOP, not Dems.

Fandos: A lot of Hochul’s messaging was about why not to vote for Zeldin. Did she do a good enough job laying out a proactive vision for the state?

AOC: We as a party benefit from being very assertive about our vision and explaining not just what the stakes are and not just the consequences of what would happen given Republican victory, but also to lay down a vision and be unafraid about what we will do with power.

We can be a state like California that puts things like public banking on the ballot. We have bills in the State Legislature right now like the Build Public Renewables Act that is profoundly motivating.

I don’t think it’s just turnout. Leaning into Republican messaging hurts persuasion, too.

AOC suggests that Hochul and others were being reactive to GOP messaging as opposed to making the case for Democratic priorities.

Fandos: Where did this election leave you?

AOC: New York politics especially in New York City is going through a very strong generational upheaval. Overall the performance is disappointing and this old-school machine politics could well have cost the House majority.

I don’t feel caught off guard. I don’t feel like my reality has been upended. Others may feel more surprised with this. I feel very cleareyed about what the path should be ahead. We should rebuild the New York State Democratic Party and if that is a structure that refuses to be reformed, we rebuild and replace.

Obviously it’s not a good outcome. But I think it is the difference between being sick and having a diagnosis and not having a diagnosis.

AOC is laying the NY state losses at the feet of the Democrats’ party machinery. It’s logically fallacious to say because she won and Maloney lost, her analysis is right. On the other hand, Maloney and Jacob were in charge of the Democrats’ push in the state, and that is where the Dems did worst, nationwide. Clearly, something is wrong.

Maybe both AOC and Maloney are right. Maybe the infighting between progressives and moderates about messaging was in fact a key element of what went wrong. But that split exists across the country, and only in New York is the party losing so many seats. So, that suggests there is something wrong locally.

Maybe all of it — Cuomo’s ghost, Hochul’s not-fully-evolved leadership, the rusty machinery of the party, and moderates and progressives fighting like badgers in a sack — all of it contributed to a bad end in this election. We can’t exorcise Cuomo, and we can only wait for Huchul to fill the role she’s been elected to. The progressives and moderates are unlikely to make peace, though, without a Democratic state party committee working to find common cause: to agree to fight the Republicans instead of each other.

These three intersections were among the ones discussed at a meeting between me — representing the Main Street Access Committee — and the City’s Traffic Safety board in 2021.

I checked the City code, and these were noted in Schedule VII: Stop Intersections, and the Cedar Street intersections had been among a group added by L.L. No. 8-2021, along with some others, like the Herbert intersection with Main.

Others we are still awaiting, like the remaining intersections on Dewindt, specifically with S Walnut.

Share

The good news is that these intersections are now all-way stops.

My neighbor, who resides at the intersection at Dewindt and South Cedar tells me that it has immediately become much quieter, with none of the regular brake-squealing from near misses that were a general nuisance and danger.

The plan worked out with the Traffic Safety board was to ear-mark four intersections for the first phase of a three-phase program to turn all intersections in the Main Street Access Area for two blocks on either side of Main into all-way stops (excluding intersections with Main). At that meeting, we did not work out which should be next, but it seems like a good time to revisit the discussion.

Subscribe now