The debate over housing in Croton has gone on for decades. There are two related but distinct issues: availability and price. The search for solutions has been mostly non-partisan; in fact it began during the tenure of Roland Bogardus (R), Mayor of Croton from 1983-89. Working with Nance Shatzkin (D) and the Croton Housing Network, there was a realistic effort to balance the need for housing with the impact on village character.
We are in more contentious times, and so it is not surprising to read trustee Nicholson’s statement in a Chronicle op-ed that “If the opposition’s preferred strategy is to restrict new housing, it would do significant harm to our community and our local economy.” Ms. Nicholson is starting from a premise which we all know is false.
In Croton and across the United States, a key responsibility of local government is indeed to restrict new housing. It is why we have zoning. It is why we have a Comprehensive Plan, and various sub-level groups such as zoning, planning, and visual advisory boards. Ms. Nicholson would have a hard time finding a homeowner in Croton that would want to have unrestricted new housing. The debate is not over the existence of restrictions, it is a debate as to what restrictions shall be imposed.
I realize that politicians are prone to view everything in terms of the next election. But that is not productive if we seek to achieve the best long-term outcome for Croton.
Ms. Nicholson criticizes the Voice of Croton (VoC) candidates for “unfounded fears.” That is a convenient way of avoiding answering questions. The concerns raised by VoC go back long before VoC existed, and the concerns will still be valid on the morning after Election Day.
One of the best summaries of those concerns is former Deputy Mayor Bob Anderson’s letter: “Top 10 Rezoning Questions for the Croton Board of Trustees” (The Gazette, June 13/19, 2019). The very first question was “What is the Board’s target number for Croton’s future population.” Mr. Anderson goes on to raise matters regarding the number of apartments, the impact on energy infrastructure, impact of climate change on the village floodplain, etc. More than six years later, and we are not much closer to answers.
The one thing we do have an answer to is the critical first question. For decades, Ann Gallelli simply refused to answer that question. To their credit, Ms. Nicholson and the current trustees have given us an answer (of sorts): Croton “is pursuing an average of 1% annual housing growth to qualify as a Pro-Housing Community under New York State law.”
That law has no limit, and mandates annual re-certification. So the answer is that new housing units will grow to infinity.
Population growth is an imprecise proxy for housing stock growth, and that has important implications. But it a useful metric for some of the problems which Ms. Nicholson will not address. And while the past is not determinative of the future, the past does have voluminous census data which will illustrate some of the concerns about Croton’s housing plan.
Let’s take the half century from 1970 to 2020 (the last year full data is available). If Croton population had grown at a compounded 1% rate, the population by 2020 would have been 12,373 people instead of the actual 8,327. So my question for Ms. Nicholson is: where would we have put those additional four thousand people? Ms. Nicholson says we should be “grounded in facts, not fear.” I agree with her. Let us start with facts and not with a dismissive attitude.
Ms. Nicholson says that failure to build new housing “would mean fewer customers for local businesses, leading to a declining tax base, lost state funding, and a less diverse community as families and seniors are priced out.” I do have some sympathy for the kitchen sink argument: a lot of the problems and consequences are related. But if we really seek collaborative dialogue, we need to break this down.
Start with the local business issue. There are long-term trends which are unlikely to reverse. Indeed they are accelerating. Online is here to stay. It is true that zero customer growth would lead to a decline since each current customer is buying less and less from local merchants. But putting up a lot of apartment units at the train station is unlikely to solve that. New Rochelle is a terrific example of a community which has held down rental prices by building significant numbers of new housing units, but merchants are grumbling that customer traffic has not grown because the new residents shop in Manhattan and order online. Bronxville has a wealthy populace with a strong tradition of shopping local, but retail is struggling even in that community. As a village we can publicize our local merchants and encourage a sense of community, but we need to be realistic about the headwinds.
The tax base issue can be divided into two parts. Capitation-based distributions to villages in Westchester (such as sales tax) are based on the population of the municipality and school district. So zero population growth would not lead to a declining tax base, although a growth rate in a sub-set (such as Croton) less than the universe (Westchester county) would result in a negative shift in the percentage allocated to Croton even if the nominal distribution increased.
The big kahuna is property taxes (funding the village, town, school, and library), and Ms. Nicholson may have a point here. These taxes are technically based on assessed value, which in theory should be related to the market value of the housing unit. To the extent that there are fixed and semi-variable government expenses, more apartments would mean a bigger pool to assess and a concomitant reduction in property taxes for the existing residents.
Of course this assumes that the new housing units are a net monetary contributor, and that is not necessarily the case. Tax abatements and subsidies can make apartments “affordable” to the occupants but if they don’t cover their share of the expenses, the taxpayers of Croton and the CHUFSD will see their taxes increased and some of those abatements can last for 50 years.
Ms. Nicholson says that without new construction, Croton will have “a less diverse community as families and seniors are priced out.” I am not sure how she comes to that conclusion. The problem of affordability is one which is widespread across the globe. Much of that is due to loose monetary policy fueling distortion in asset prices. The United States as a matter of bipartisan policy has strongly encouraged home ownership by means of easy access to low-equity or even negative equity mortgages. We also have given tax advantages to encourage ownership. That is fine if you are building new supply, but that has not been the case in many parts of the country. In Westchester, single-family construction is expensive and in many communities (including Croton) there is virtually no vacant land.
Seniors are normally not purchasing new single-family homes in Croton. They often do want to “age in place” and when “seniors are priced out” it is normally due to high property taxes that cannot be supported on a fixed income, or the high cost of living in Westchester. If Croton is concerned about seniors being able to downsize or move here to be near their adult children, then construction of senior restricted multi-family such as Springvale is the way to go since there are government programs available for such developments. Empty-nesters and widowers having the ability to remain local would benefit them and increase the supply of single-family homes vacated by the seniors.
This brings us back to the limits of conflating population growth with housing stock growth. Population growth locally over the period 1970-2020 has been far less than the national growth of 63 percent: about 11 percent in NYS, 12 percent in Westchester, 11 percent in Croton. And yet from 2015 to now, Gov. Hochul says that rents are up 40 to 60 percent and home prices up 50 to 80 percent.
There is a sharp divergence between population increase versus housing affordability. The main reason for housing demand increasing more rapidly than population is that families are shrinking, and many people are divorced or never married. In 1970, 56 percent of families had children under 18 but that dropped to 40 percent by 2020. Average household size shrunk from 3.2 to 1.5 and the number of single-person households increased from 17 percent to 28 percent.
If we agree with Ms. Nicholson that village housing plans should be grounded in facts, census trends have significant implications for Croton.
Croton has a small land area, and much of that is parkland which as a practical matter cannot be developed. There is almost no vacant land or commercial property suitable for conversion. Putting up ADUs is not going to make much impact, and is already a contentious issue for homeowners living next to the units. So growth must come from razing existing structures. And long-term social trends mean that future demand is increasingly going to be from one and two-person households.
Following the facts leads to increased demand for apartments. “Pro-Housing” requirements are for an annual rate of 1 percent growth in housing stock and continuation of decades-long trends imply a reduction in average household size. That means that with a 1 percent increase in housing units, the population growth would be less than 1 percent, and the school population would increase by less than 1 percent (though school growth may be higher due to the desirability of the school district among prospective residents).
While this implies that concern over CHUFSD overcrowding may be overblown, it also means that the impact of each new housing unit will be greater in terms of vehicle traffic. We pretend to ignore reality by saying that “transit-oriented development” means that new residents won’t need cars as much as current residents. This is ridiculous. Yes, people living at the train station can walk to the morning train to Grand Central. But when they come home and want to have dinner at Yuka’s or get a treat at the Blue Pig… they are going to need a car. A few might take e-bikes in the Croton winter or walk, but nobody is going to be waiting for the hourly Bee-Line bus. A few might buy a granny cart and walk to ShopRite, but my guess is that most people are going to drive.
Ms. Nicholson says VoC has “raised unfounded fears about ‘high-density developments’ and projects that do not exist.” She speaks of a “considered strategy for addressing” Croton’s housing needs.
The concerns raised by VoC are not new, nor are they grounded in fear. Rather they are grounded in basic math. There is no space left to build single-family homes, nor is that where the demand for affordability can be met. This is not news: apartment construction along Riverside was the centerpiece of the infamous charrettes and the $75,000 consultant report years ago.
The low-hanging fruit is already being picked. Katz became Maple Commons, Lot A is on the way, and BestWeb is already marketing condos. Throw enough money at the civil engineers and they can keep back the steep slope behind Straddles, but that is rumored to be very pricey for a 49 unit building. The backlash to Finkelstein drove support for VoC, leading to Brian Pugh’s friends in White Plains doing him a solid by giving the trustees a face-saving out. Is there anyone who really believes that the tire warehouse is long for this world?
The state law allows for limited front-loading of new housing for purposes of meeting the 1 percent quota, and that has bought Ms. Nicholson and her colleagues a couple of years. In that time, VoC may fizzle out but the math doesn’t lie. There will be high density developments. In fact it would make sense to put up 300 units at Finkelstein rather than ten buildings with 30 units each. If you don’t have “high-density developments” then you must have a lot of low-density developments. Croton does not have the land.
Ms. Nicholson says that VoC has raised concerns about “projects that do not exist.” Umm… isn’t that the whole purpose of a Comprehensive Plan? Isn’t the role of Croton’s elected trustees to have a vision of our future village?
Ms. Nicholson says that VoC “deprived the public of an honest conversation” but it seems to me that it is Ms. Nicholson who has used the excuse of a contested election to avoid an honest conversation.
It is true that 68 other Hudson Valley municipalities are applying for “Pro-Housing” designation. That does not change the reality that our specific Hudson Valley municipality of Croton has very little area in which to put the thousands of new residents contemplated by Ms. Nicholson and her fellow trustees. That is going to necessitate many apartment buildings being built, presumably along Riverside. I don’t object in principle to multi-family construction. And it may be true that a community of single-family homes is an anachronism reeking of classism and discrimination. Perhaps we should celebrate the new apartment-centric future of Croton.
Even if all of us agree to vote “Line A All the Way” in November, it will not create new land in Croton. It will not increase the capacity of our roadways or our water and sewer pipes. It will not create new capacity in the classrooms.
Can we fit more apartments in Croton? Yes. Can we fit even more apartments in Croton by building them higher and denser? Yes. Is that going to mean a more urban Croton? Yes.
There is nothing objectively good or bad about the direction Croton is being taken by Ms. Nicholson and the trustees. And it is smart strategy for Ms. Nicholson to use partisanship to shut down residents who ask questions. That does not make those questions any less legitimate, nor does shutting down debate make basic math any less legitimate.
I hope that after Ms. Nicholson is safely re-elected, she will start having that “honest conversation” about where these apartments will be put up. I hope that she will discuss those “projects that do not exist” but which must come into existence in order to fulfill the requirement to continuously build at least 1 percent per year of new housing units. Transparency in Croton is not a common trait among elected officials, but Ms. Nicholson could give it a shot.
--Paul Steinberg, Croton-on-Hudson
Another excellent letter from Paul! Thank you!—Jess
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