Chester, N.Y.'s Dilemma: What Would You Do?

[fskimospy]

The failure is placing the burden of solving the housing crisis on small local communities. Chester is a small former dairy town in a part of NY that is very rural. Why should Chester have to absorb the planning failures of Albany and NYC? The Hasidic community probably got pushed out to Chester due to the Nimbyism of the more affluent communities between it and NYC.

I agree, we should be encouraging new development EVERYWHERE, not just in Chester.

 

[Bitek]

Good ol' liberals. Kings of NIMBY.

Fighting oppression by being what they proclaim to condemn.

It's easy, just price people out of the market.

Lol, you have no idea what you are talking about

 

[Bitek]

The failure is placing the burden of solving the housing crisis on small local communities. Chester is a small former dairy town in a part of NY that is very rural. Why should Chester have to absorb the planning failures of Albany and NYC? The Hasidic community probably got pushed out to Chester due to the Nimbyism of the more affluent communities between it and NYC.

It's not that rural. It's close enough there are still tons of commuters that go into the city, Rockland county, North Jersey or Westchester for work, but it's lower cost of housing.

Eg, many FDNY/NYPD guys live up there.

Buses of foreign shoppers come up from NYC to shop at Woodbury Commons the other town over in Monroe.

It should be noted, Chester is just a town over from Kiryas Joel. I know we've had other threads her about it, but cliffs are it's a sprawling Ultra-orthodox community that been trying to further expand for years. It's also the largest consumer of welfare in the United States (amongst many other controversies.)

Here is another one, where they sued the state for funds to build a park, then built it gender segregation strictly enforced, color coded playground equipment and everything. Like a little slice of the West Bank in the USA.

So no, lots of reasons you wouldn't want that creeping into your town when you wanted to live in America.

 

[Victorian Gray]

Good ol' liberals. Kings of NIMBY.

Fighting oppression by being what they proclaim to condemn.

It's easy, just price people out of the market.

Someone didn't read the article.

 

[Meghan54]

Someone didn't read the article.

Are you surprised.....at all?

 

[Victorian Gray]

Are you surprised.....at all?

Nope, not in the least. 🙂

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

So to be clear you're saying the infrastructure costs of new development exceeded the long term tax receipts from the residents there? That seems... unlikely.

Infrastructure costs are one time expenditures with modest ongoing maintenance. New taxpayers are eternal revenue sources. I mean think about it, if it were true that adding new residents was a net burden then communities losing residents would be better off financially than those gaining them. Does anyone really think that's true?

Then perhaps the tax hike was random?

 

[Starbuck1975]

As someone who lives near both large Islamic communities and large ultra orthodox communities I would take the Muslims any day.

Does halal food have anything to do with that preference? 🙂

 

[Perknose]

Good ol' liberals. Kings of NIMBY.

Fighting oppression by being what they proclaim to condemn.

It's easy, just price people out of the market.

Of all the reactions here, yours might well be the most non-contributory to the discussion. You could do better. Try to. Seriously. If you have a point of view, try to convey it in a way the rest of us can respect, even if we don't agree. That's what community is all about.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Does halal food have anything to do with that preference? 🙂

That’s pretty funny.

 

[pauldun170]

It's not that rural. It's close enough there are still tons of commuters that go into the city, Rockland county, North Jersey or Westchester for work, but it's lower cost of housing.

Eg, many FDNY/NYPD guys live up there.

Buses of foreign shoppers come up from NYC to shop at Woodbury Commons the other town over in Monroe.

It should be noted, Chester is just a town over from Kiryas Joel. I know we've had other threads her about it, but cliffs are it's a sprawling Ultra-orthodox community that been trying to further expand for years. It's also the largest consumer of welfare in the United States (amongst many other controversies.)

Here is another one, where they sued the state for funds to build a park, then built it gender segregation strictly enforced, color coded playground equipment and everything. Like a little slice of the West Bank in the USA.

So no, lots of reasons you wouldn't want that creeping into your town when you wanted to live in America.

More about Kiryas Joel
They were sued and one of thhe things that came up was "As part of the public records request, the NYCLU and ACLU submitted news articles in which Kiryas Joel officials acknowledged both the existence of the park and the Committee on Modesty. "

Followers of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum began coming here from Brooklyn in the 1970s, hoping to create the sort of cohesive community some recalled from Europe, with large families a big part of it. Under tradition, Kiryas Joel girls marry young and start having children immediately, fueling long-term population growth. While the average Kiryas Joel family has six people, it’s not uncommon to see couples with as many as 10 children. An average of three babies are born in the village each day.

“For us, family is part of faith. It’s not something we choose,” said Malka Silberstein, a principal of a girls’ school who settled here with her family 35 years ago.

Kiryas Joel is among the fastest-growing places in New York state, nearly doubling its population since 2000. It also has made headlines in The New York Times and elsewhere as the poorest place in the nation. Current data show more than half the population living in poverty, a function of modest salaries supporting large households.

Neighbors riled as insular Hasidic village seeks to expand

KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y. (AP) — A quickly crowding Hasidic Jewish village that is working to expand its boundaries faces opposition from neighbors who fear more urban-style development by the insular community could overrun their slice of suburbia. "It's going to become like New York City, like the...

apnews.com

 

[Starbuck1975]

It's not that rural. It's close enough there are still tons of commuters that go into the city, Rockland county, North Jersey or Westchester for work, but it's lower cost of housing.

Eg, many FDNY/NYPD guys live up there.

Buses of foreign shoppers come up from NYC to shop at Woodbury Commons the other town over in Monroe.

It should be noted, Chester is just a town over from Kiryas Joel. I know we've had other threads her about it, but cliffs are it's a sprawling Ultra-orthodox community that been trying to further expand for years. It's also the largest consumer of welfare in the United States (amongst many other controversies.)

Here is another one, where they sued the state for funds to build a park, then built it gender segregation strictly enforced, color coded playground equipment and everything. Like a little slice of the West Bank in the USA.

So no, lots of reasons you wouldn't want that creeping into your town when you wanted to live in America.

I am familiar with the area. It may not be true upstate, but its nowhere near the density of Westchester let alone areas like Yonkers.

All of the arguments against this community mirror the same concerns often voiced against Muslim communities. Assuming this community gets built, what happens when the Hasidic population pushes for say kosher food in the schools or gender coded playgrounds?

 

[pmv]

1) The people in the community definitely benefit from the new units, it makes their housing more affordable.
2) The people who move in to those units pay taxes which in the end far exceed the costs of new infrastructure.

The right approach in almost all cases is that infrastructure is made the way it always is, with tax money.

That "in the end" reminds me of the "in the long run we are all dead" quote. What happens in the many decades before that "end"? It also depends how affluent are the people who move in. Tax income for an area also depends on business activity there.

I dunno - town planning and that sort of thing seems an immensely complicated issue, both practically and politically.

I'm tempted to say one answer is just don't live in a small town (that can be seriously changed by single events like this). I rarely venture beyond the M25, myself. (It seems like it's full of angry Brexiters and baby boomers out there.)

 

[pmv]

Seems to be lots of evidence that very conservative hard-line religious communities have much higher population growth rates than do more moderate religious ones or non-believing ones.

There are other reasons to wonder what the effects of that might be, beyond just town-planning arguments. It's a global issue, not just a local one (e.g. the substantial growth in numbers of Haredi jews in Israel)

It seems like there are multiple different issues mixed up in this sort of argument.

 

[pmv]

Seems like the community-growth-rate issue for conservative religious groups is very complicated. Will people defect faster than they are born?

Haredim are leaving the fold, but the community is growing

***

www.haaretz.com

 

[fskimospy]

That "in the end" reminds me of the "in the long run we are all dead" quote. What happens in the many decades before that "end"? It also depends how affluent are the people who move in. Tax income for an area also depends on business activity there.

I dunno - town planning and that sort of thing seems an immensely complicated issue, both practically and politically.

I'm tempted to say one answer is just don't live in a small town (that can be seriously changed by single events like this). I rarely venture beyond the M25, myself. (It seems like it's full of angry Brexiters and baby boomers out there.)

Well sure but towns are effectively immortal. I mean these are long term investments that pay enormous dividends over time. It’s kind of like asking what the effects of saving for retirement are on your current bank account.

 

[pmv]

Well sure but towns are effectively immortal. I mean these are long term investments that pay enormous dividends over time. It’s kind of like asking what the effects of saving for retirement are on your current bank account.

I may be muddling up this particular example with other cases, but the point to me is that developers can sometimes just dump large numbers of people in an area with no thought to the lack of intrastructure for them.

That the area might _eventually_ raise the taxbase to build such facilities is not much use for both the existing residents and the incomers themselves, who have to struggle on in an under-resourced community for a lifetime first. And then there are likely to be all sorts of knock-on problems, particularly with increased road traffic through the areas between them and the facilities they might need.

Plus there's no guarantee that tax money will ever be sufficient to provide what is needed as areas without facilities can go into a tail-spin.

Edit - I guess it also depends very much on the specific nature of local government funding in your system. No good having lots of taxpayers if most of their tax goes to central government that spends it on other national priorities. Worse still if they don't properly count the numbers of people in areas.

I dunno, it's damn complicated. The flip-side would be areas that build lots of expensive new housing that then sits vacant to be used as property investments by foreigners.

When it comes to the issue of cultural change, I think one is better off in a city, where such turnover is expected and normal. You know the influx of culturally-different people today will be replaced by another lot tomorrow. If this culture is not to your taste, just wait for the next one to come along.

 

[fskimospy]

I may be muddling up this particular example with other cases, but the point to me is that developers can sometimes just dump large numbers of people in an area with no thought to the lack of intrastructure for them.

That the area might _eventually_ raise the taxbase to build such facilities is not much use for both the existing residents and the incomers themselves, who have to struggle on in an under-resourced community for a lifetime first. And then there are likely to be all sorts of knock-on problems, particularly with increased road traffic through the areas between them and the facilities they might need.

Plus there's no guarantee that tax money will ever be sufficient to provide what is needed as areas without facilities can go into a tail-spin.

Edit - I guess it also depends very much on the specific nature of local government funding in your system. No good having lots of taxpayers if most of their tax goes to central government that spends it on other national priorities. Worse still if they don't properly count the numbers of people in areas.

I dunno, it's damn complicated. The flip-side would be areas that build lots of expensive new housing that then sits vacant to be used as property investments by foreigners.

When it comes to the issue of cultural change, I think one is better off in a city, where such turnover is expected and normal. You know the influx of culturally-different people today will be replaced by another lot tomorrow. If this culture is not to your taste, just wait for the next one to come along.

I really don’t think it’s complicated at all, the research clearly shows that new development pays for itself many times over. As for the need for new roads and other facilities, build them. Nothing in life is ever guaranteed but that’s hardly a reason to continue down the catastrophic path of non-development we are currently on.

The problem we currently have is DRASTICALLY too little development across the board, in every kind of town. Let’s quintuple our current rate of development for the next ten years or so and then re evaluate.

 

[pmv]

I really don’t think it’s complicated at all, the research clearly shows that new development pays for itself many times over. As for the need for new roads and other facilities, build them. Nothing in life is ever guaranteed but that’s hardly a reason to continue down the catastrophic path of non-development we are currently on.

The problem we currently have is DRASTICALLY too little development across the board, in every kind of town. Let’s quintuple our current rate of development for the next ten years or so and then re evaluate.

Yes, but who is going to 'build them'? That depends on the funds being available to do so. And that depends on the larger political and governmental structures that you have in place. With those structures being as they are, it can work out that people in poorer communities are used as dumping grounds, while the wealthier areas get far greater power to segregate themselves.

Then you get all sorts of bad social consequences.

Just because a lack of development is bad, doesn't mean all development is good. It needs to be the right kind of development.

(And I'm not just ambivalent because I've had multi-story blocks go up on all four sides of me in the last decade, cutting off most of my sunlight,. while wealthy folk out in the "green belt" get to continue to protect their country-views!)

 

[fskimospy]

Yes, but who is going to 'build them'? That depends on the funds being available to do so. And that depends on the larger political and governmental structures that you have in place. With those structures being as they are, it can work out that people in poorer communities are used as dumping grounds, while the wealthier areas get far greater power to segregate themselves.

Then you get all sorts of bad social consequences.

Just because a lack of development is bad, doesn't mean all development is good. It needs to be the right kind of development.

(And I'm not just ambivalent because I've had multi-story blocks go up on all four sides of me in the last decade, cutting off most of my sunlight,. while wealthy folk out in the "green belt" get to continue to protect their country-views!)

But what primarily happens is that development specifically happens in poor areas because the government prohibits building in rich areas. That’s what we need to stop.

 

[IronWing]

More growth is god nonsense. It would be funny if the attitude didn’t lead to so much destruction.

 

[jmagg]

But what primarily happens is that development specifically happens in poor areas because the government prohibits building in rich areas. That’s what we need to stop.

This doesn't make sense to me. Should we build low income housing in high tax base areas. Somehow it seems that net tax revenue would go down due to rich flight. In the Albany and tri city area, development is booming in all areas over the last 2 years (except low income areas), enough that commutes have become a nightmare at best. Try shoving 60 tons of shit down a pipe engineered for 10.
There's plenty of room for development in South Albany and points south that would help with housing costs, but Mario chooses to build wasteful walking paths etc, to showcase a once bustling but now dead downtown.
Developers build for maximum profit, not altruism. Government needs to address lower middle class housing costs in NY, but they dont.

 

[fskimospy]

This doesn't make sense to me. Should we build low income housing in high tax base areas. Somehow it seems that net tax revenue would go down due to rich flight. In the Albany and tri city area, development is booming in all areas over the last 2 years (except low income areas), enough that commutes have become a nightmare at best. Try shoving 60 tons of shit down a pipe engineered for 10.
There's plenty of room for development in South Albany and points south that would help with housing costs, but Mario chooses to build wasteful walking paths etc, to showcase a once bustling but now dead downtown.
Developers build for maximum profit, not altruism. Government needs to address lower middle class housing costs in NY, but they dont.

One of the best things about encouraging new development is that it gives you much more tax revenue, which we could then use to build subsidized housing for the poor and lower middle class.

 

[Ichinisan]

I don't understand the aversion to Hasidic Jews. Why do they "fear" the new development will be filled with Hasidic Jews? Why not welcome them?

 

[Ichinisan]

As someone who lives near both large Islamic communities and large ultra orthodox communities I would take the Muslims any day.

What factors influence your preference? Did these Hasidic Jews do something bad? I don't know anything about them.