Hudson River Development Q&A
Jun 4th, 2008 by Jervey
[Photo by kptyson on flickr]
The Times’ City Room blog hosts another in a worthy series of Q&As with experts of interesting issues, many with at least a tangentially sustainability tilt. This week, Ned Sullivan of Scenic Hudson discusses development and preservation on the Hudson waterfront.
Representative Q:
On both sides of the Hudson, from the Verrazano Narrows on up past Beacon and beyond, there was tremendous industrial activity from most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Over the last 2 decades - especially the last 8 years - there has been been continuous wholesale conversion of those contaminated areas to residential properties.
How do you plan to manage public access to the river, work with developers to implement environmentally safe remediation strategies and also collaborate with other river communities outside of New York City (New Jersey, Westchester, etc.)?
— Posted by Paul M.
Paul – You’re right! While there are still power plants along the river, big, polluting industrial projects generally are no longer a threat to the river and its shores. The new land rush is about residential projects. Development on the Hudson can be good, but it’s got to represent “smart growth” that complements rather than damages this great resource.
This means concentrating development in city and town centers, ideally within a half-mile of train and bus stations so people can walk and bicycle for many of their trips and use public transportation if they have to commute to their jobs or other distant destination. This is a major new thrust of Metro-North, working in partnership with the Paterson administration, and Scenic Hudson is supporting this. Good design is crucial to protect the scenic qualities that have earned the region designation by Congress as a National Heritage Area.
Scenic Hudson has several ways to create the kind of public access to the river you are talking about. Much of the work is through partnerships. We buy land and create public parks along the river. Today we have 28 of these gems in places like Yonkers, Irvington, Haverstraw, and Red Hook. We’re working closely with the Village of Tarrytown and a developer to support their efforts to create a beautiful waterfront park next to new townhouses where just a few years ago an industrial waterfront hosted a smoke-belching asphalt plant.
We have a major land protection initiative called Saving the Land that Matters Most. We’re working with the state and a dozen valley land trusts to protect 65,000 acres of land that meet the state’s highest standards for natural resource protection while creating parks in exciting new places where people can connect with the glorious Hudson.
We are also working with a variety of communities facing intense development pressures to help them shape zoning and waterfront revitalization plans that combine recreation and public access to the river, while identifying where a community would like to locate shops, restaurants and other businesses. If a proposed project really misses the mark and threatens to wall off access to the river and destroy world-class views and recreation opportunities, Scenic Hudson fights the projects. During the review process our staff experts point out impacts that shouldn’t be tolerated. But we also add value by offering alternative plans that can provide the developer and community with economic gains, create waterfront neighborhoods that preserve community character and provide powerful opportunities for people to connect with their Hudson.
We also promote the work of developers who are building it right. If you visit our Web site, scroll down the home page a bit, or look in the Press Room for news about three developers from the valley who are doing great work we all can be proud of. A beautiful and accessible Hudson is our economy, and the idea that we have to give away our scenic beauty and quality of life for economic prosperity is an outdated notion.
The rest of the Q&A here.