When a town has to fight for TOD

Even in the hinterland, communities are becoming enthusiastic about placing compact, mixed-use development around their train stations. In Dover, New York, a Dutchess County town of 8,900, local officials spent the past several years laying the groundwork for a mixed-use village they would like to see around a station that already offers commuter service into Grand Central Station in Manhattan, 70 miles to the south. Dover’s Wingdale station sits in the middle of the defunct Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, an 80-building, 850-acre mental hospital campus that had been the town’s economic engine until it was closed by the state in 1994. Joel Russell, a new urbanist planning consultant, helped the town plan for redevelopment that would concentrate retail, office, service commercial, and some of the housing within walking distance of the station. Development close to the Metro North line would be balanced by preservation of natural areas farther away, including the ecologically significant Great Swamp, second-largest wetland in the state. sprawl proposed The town stipulated in its zoning that at least 50 percent of the floor space of the project must be nonresidential. “They want it done in a mixed-use fabric that preserves many of the older historic buildings,” Russell notes. However, the Benjamin Companies, a Long Island-based developer that paid $3.9 million for the former psychiatric campus in 2003, submitted a redevelopment plan that some local officials considered “a pattern for sprawl,” with “little cul-de-sac roads all over the site,” according to The New York Times. To resolve the issue, Benjamin Companies, at the town’s insistence, later hired a new urbanist firm, Torti Gallas & Partners, to advise on how to develop the property. “The town would like to have almost all of the development within a 10-minute walk,” Erik Aulestia, principal in charge for Torti Gallas, told New Urban News. Benjamin Companies has continued to insist there isn’t enough demand to support the commercial development and the higher-density housing that the town would like to see near the station. Meanwhile, the developer is asking to construct 1,400 housing units, many of them in scattered in clusters of small lots on previously undisturbed portions of the property, not within walking distance of the station. As a result, the developer and the town remained at loggerheads recently. Greater New York’s population is forecast to grow by three to four million in the next 25 years, a trend that smart-growth proponents say calls for compact, pedestrian-oriented development. “This is an ideal site for a new urbanist TOD,” Russell says. “If the developer wanted to do this kind of project at the outset, it would likely be under construction by now with the full support of the Town.” Says Aulestia: “My guess is that as municipalities are demanding better design these issues will come up more and more.”