Housing Plans and Zoning Amendments

At the Common Council meeting last night, Joe Czajka, senior vice president of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress and chair of the Housing Task Force convened last year by Mayor Tiffany Martin Hamilton to work "in tandem" with the DRI (Downtown Revitalization Initiative) process, presented to the Council the Strategic Housing Action Plan (SHAP), the work product of the Housing Task Force. The aldermen were given the first 30 pages of a 146-page document--a document that is available in its entirety online.

In presenting the document, Czajka outlined the four goals of the plan--(1) preserving housing; (2) creating a comprehensive and complementary housing policy and zoning; (3) producing new housing opportunities; (4) creating housing and community development programs and partnerships--and identified the three "foundational recommendations" of the plan: (1) hire a housing coordinator; (2) adopt an affordable housing policy; (3) update the City's 2002 comprehensive plan and its zoning. Czajka stressed that strategic and action were the critical words in the title and recommended that the Housing Task Force continue going forward, meeting on a quarterly basis, to monitor progress in implementing the plan. He urged the Council to adopt the SHAP before submissions in the CFA (Consolidated Funding Application) program are due at the end of July, indicating that some of the proposals being submitted would benefit from having the SHAP in place, and Council president Tom DePietro indicated that it would fit within the Council's schedule, since the aldermen would be voting on adopting the SHAP at their meeting on July 17. It's interesting that the Council could not vote on a resolution to support the proposed route of the Empire State Trail through Hudson without holding a public hearing, but no one suggested that a public hearing might be needed before adopting this rather wide ranging plan.

On the related topic of zoning, the Council received last night, as a communication, a letter from Chuck Marshall of Stewart's Shops who apparently has joined forces with Steve Scali, owner of Scali's Pizza and Pasta, another commercial entity that is a nonconforming use in an R-2 residential district, to try to persuade the City to alter its zoning to allow the expansion of nonconforming uses in residential districts.

When Gossips last reported on this issue, after the Legal Committee meeting on May 23, the committee was considering the "hybrid option," amending the code to allow nonconforming uses to be enlarged or relocated on the same lot, to allow an existing nonconforming use to be changed to another nonconforming use, and to allow a nonconforming use to be reestablished if it had been discontinued for more than a year. The way things were left at the end of the meeting was the amendments to Section 325-29 of the code would be submitted to the full Council for consideration. That didn't happen last night, and apparently some things transpired behind the scenes. 

Last night, Gossips asked John Rosenthal (Fourth Ward), who chairs the Legal Committee, what had prompted the letter from Scali and Marshall. He said that he had spoken with Marshall about the proposed "hybrid option" and the letter was a response to that. The letter, which introduces terminology and concerns that were never mentioned in Legal Committee meetings, begins:

At the May 23rd Legal Committee Meeting, a recommended change to Local Law No. 9, was voted out of committee, but failed to reach the desks of the full Common Council. It is our understanding that the stumbling block to an amendment getting set on the Council Members' desks, is that the prohibition of the expansion of non-conforming uses does not address "historic concerns" surrounding Stewart's and Scali's, both family and employee owned businesses.

The letter goes on for five more paragraphs. The point seems to be that Stewart's and now Scali's as well are not content with a zoning amendment that would redefine nonconforming use to allow them to do everything but expand beyond the lots they currently occupy, and they are holding out for an overlay district that would allow for the progressive transformation of an essentially residential neighborhood into something that resembles the unchecked commercialization found just over the border, along Fairview Avenue and Union Turnpike, in Greenport. 

In 1965, the Healy Farm--93 acres between Fairview Avenue (Route 9) and Union Turnpike (Route 66), just beyond Hudson's northern border with Greenport--was sold for a shopping center and industrial development. The following article appeared in the Times Union for June 8, 1965.

  
Three years later, in December 1968, the City of Hudson adopted its zoning. It's not hard to surmise that a desire to protect Hudson's residential neighborhoods from the kind of commercial development happening in Greenport was the impetus for making existing commercial establishments on Fairview Avenue and Union Turnpike in Hudson nonconforming uses. Fifty years later, with two Gothic houses about to be demolished to create a new shopping mall in Greenport, with a bigger and better McDonald's as its centerpiece, an amendment that would allow nonconforming uses to rebuild and reconfigure without expanding beyond their current lots, demolishing houses in the process, still seems like a good idea, particularly since preserving housing is the first goal of the Strategic Housing Action Plan.
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