What's Wrong with the Harmon Plan?

OP ED

Can a community be subjected to too much planning? “You betcha,” as soon-to-be ex-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin would say in her folksy style. The poor woman is a prime example of the too much, too soon syndrome.

The Harmon Plan Made Simple
Croton residents are collectively being urged to buy a pig in a poke. The current proposal involves making changes in the 2004 Gateway Law, now part of the Zoning Code. But the gateway concept is based on the erroneous principle that Croton should be made attractive—not to Crotonites—but to visitors presumably coming here to shop. This law defines a gateway as “the roads and surrounding properties a motorist or pedestrian encounters when first entering the Village. These areas create a sense of arrival and connection to the Village, and establish an image and initial impression of the community.”

Had researchers with clipboards been positioned at two exits from the Expressway for a single day to question arriving motorists about their destinations, the fallacy of that premise would have been revealed. Aside from those going directly to ShopRite from the Expressway’s Croton Point Avenue exit, few are headed to local shops or businesses. Most drivers entering Croton are either residents or are transients headed to Yorktown and points east.

The Gateway Law is straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Pretending to attract business, it declares various legitimate and socially acceptable enterprises, including automobile dealerships and fast-food restaurants, to be illegal. In its five years on the books, this law has not brought a single new business to Croton. Among the law’s other unreasonable anti-business provisions is its mindless ban on drive-through windows. Studies show that these can actually reduce the need for parking spaces.

One wonders how Croton can ban fast-food establishments with a straight face when it has pizza parlors up the kazoo. Gateway Law framers freely acknowledge that the law was directed against national food chains. Yet we have a Dunkin Donuts and a Subway sandwich shop. The ban on fast food restaurants has been an empty deterrent.

Ever since the Expressway opened in 1967, Croton has been a backwater community cut off from the traffic stream. Although most residents welcomed the change, isolation comes at a price. Because of its isolation and small customer base, Croton is a poor prospect for capital investment in retail space—a reality that will haunt any Harmon redevelopment. The only way to bring about change is to ask NY State to re-route traffic through Croton as before. Fat chance.

Consultants
Croton also has a penchant for hiring consultants to support local planners’ shaky concepts. Such experts always lack any sense of the history and continuity of the village. A case in point is the contractor, Danth, Inc. On the basis of two brief visits, its report lists the ideal types of “niche” businesses Croton should target: “a cell phone store, a pet shop, stores offering knitting, women’s clothing, prepared meals, and full- and limited-service restaurants.” Unfortunately, every one of these businesses has been tried here and either failed or closed. The consultant obviously never bothered to read Croton’s zoning code. Its report, which can be read on the Village’s website, offers suggestions about the best locations in Croton for national chain fast-food restaurants! For these examples of the fallibility of advice from quickie consultants unfamiliar with Croton, the Village paid out $15,000 of our tax dollars.

That “eyesore.” The Dodge dealership has been a thriving fixture in Croton since the 1920s. With its punitive prohibition against automobile dealerships, the Gateway Law drastically diminished to zerothe value of the business and the owner’s ability to sell it . Understandably, the owner did what any sensible businessperson would do. He closed the dealership, leaving the buildings empty—but still paying taxes.

Elsewhere in the Hudson Valley, new uses are regularly found for existing empty commercial buildings—but not in Croton. Proponents of the Harmon Plan now call the empty dealership an eyesore and the rest of the Harmon shopping area “blighted.” Having caused a viable business to close, they now clamor for the removal of the eyesore they themselves created. This reminds me of the teenager who murdered his parents and then begged the judge for leniency because he was an orphan.

Reminiscent of the recent real estate bubble, extravagant pie-in-the-sky promises are being voiced about the Harmon Plan. Beautification of the Harmon shopping area will create Harmon’s new “downtown” and attract throngs of strolling shoppers. Proponents seem unaware that Harmon’s future Times Square already has three very permanent and necessary gasoline stations and an automobile repair shop along its main drag.

It’s My Harmon, Too.
My family and I were not looking for a picture-postcard New England village when we went house hunting here in 1963. We moved to the Harmon area of Croton because it was what it was: an unpretentious workaday post-industrial Hudson River village with a good school system and frequent train service to the city. Because Clifford Harmon was a seller of building lots rather than a builder of houses, Harmon today is no Levittown, but a delightful mix of architectural styles from modest bungalows to more imposing residences. Its shopping areas can best be described as quirky or quaint—but appropriate to the history and character of the village. Most residents like it that way.

The Harmon redevelopment concept proposes to take the tax burden off the backs of Croton’s home owners with a Rube Goldberg scheme: (1) Raise the number of permitted floors in retail buildings to three and astronomically increase the number of walk-up apartments. Add a parking scheme resembling the game of musical chairs. (2) Wait for developers to flock to Croton and (3) buy, (4) demolish and (5) replace perfectly good buildings (including a landmark). Croton will then (6) undertake to find retail tenants, and (7) soak the hell out of them with high taxes, as promised by Trustee Olver in his patronizing letter to The Gazette.

If you believe this unrealistic, self-delusional plan has a chance of succeeding, especially in today’s troubled economy, I’ve got a dam I’d like to sell you.

Croton's Litany of Economic Body Blows

OP ED

Proponents of the so-called Harmon Plan are touting the revitalization of the Harmon business district as the way to get Croton out of its economic doldrums. My primary problem with this scheme is that it is spot zoning, a practice specifically forbidden by law. As usual, when differences arise about planning in Croton, ignorance of the facts rules the day. What proponents lack are a grasp of history and knowledge of current conditions.

A single cohesive shopping district along a main thoroughfare characterizes most Hudson River villages. Not so in Croton, which has five separate and distinct shopping areas, or “nodes.” These are listed here in their historical sequence: (1) Riverside Avenue (the remains of the former Lower Village), (2) Grand Street (the Upper Village), (3) Harmon, (4) Van Wyck, Croton Commons and the lower end of Route 129, (5) ShopRite Plaza and environs. Next, consider the doleful economic impact on Croton of the following events.

1923: Westchester acquires Croton Point, converts it into a park and takes its 508 acres off Croton’s tax rolls. No other village has so much public space within its borders yielding no tax revenue.

1950s to 1960s: The heart of Croton is devastated by the successive construction of three large shopping centers and their unsightly giant parking lots that should have been located at the periphery of the village. Croton added to its automobile blight by creating and paving a gigantic station parking lot capable of holding almost 2,000 vehicles—a veritable sea of parked cars stretching as far as the eye can see. These are self-inflicted wounds that beautification of other commercial areas today can never offset.

1967: The 12.9-mile long Croton Expressway opens, the only completed portion of a limited-access superhighway intended to link the Thruway at Tarrytown with Route I-84 at Beacon. Croton is thus effectively by-passed by north-south automobile traffic. Construction of the Expressway also destroys a thriving commercial area in Croton called the Lower Village.

1970: The Penn-Central Railroad declares bankruptcy on June 21, depriving Croton of its largest taxpayer and the revenue from its more than 100 acres of rail yards, shops and station.

2004: Croton enacts the calamitous Gateway Law. Not only does it specifically prohibit certain kinds of businesses, it imposes a totally impractical floor-area ratio on new construction. In five years, not a single enterprise that would be subject to the 2004 law has come to Croton. For 42 years some 40,000 motorists each day have sped past Croton on the Expressway. The most successful businesses in Croton have all been those largely able to subsist on the patronage of Crotonites.

No other village in the Hudson Valley has been subjected to such a chain of massive economic setbacks. Yet, ignoring the above realities, proponents of the Harmon Plan see adding modern retail storefronts as a magical solution to what they describe as Harmon’s image problems. They claim that such changes will result in additional foot traffic and yield higher tax revenues.

The plan also blithely doubles the apartment space permitted over stores, improbably describing potential tenants as “city dwellers who want to dip their toes in country living.” It also proposes to overcome the extreme shortage of parking space in Harmon with an impractical shared-parking concept.

Croton still lacks a business-development agency to encourage new business. It has no inventory of commercial properties in the village, and no idea of their dimensions, amenities or current rents. How can any development plans be contemplated when we have no idea of Croton’s business picture today? It may very well be that Croton should be reducing commercially zoned areas instead of expanding them.

One of the objectives of the Harmon Plan committee has been to save face for those responsible for the Gateway Law by quietly changing the floor-area ratio to a realistic number. I challenge them to come forward and acknowledge publicly that the floor-area ratio fixed in 2004 was wildly aberrant for Croton’s commercial properties.

Backing Into Zoning Change 12

PLANNING

Projections of Croton’s growth abound. But has anyone looked at Croton’s population statistics over the past century? I was trained as a scientist. The first rule in science is to gather data so as to be able to deduce theories, reproduce the results of others or draw conclusions.

For the record, therefore, and for use by those who value and use statistics, I offer the following table. All figures, except for one instance that is noted, are verified population figures from the pertinent decennial U.S. Census. The drop down to single-digit percentage growth since 1970 may indicate that Croton is approaching population saturation, at least for a while. It will be interesting to see what next year’s 2010 census holds for Croton.

Croton-on-Hudson Population Statistics and Growth

1898: Croton-on-Hudson incorporates
1900: 1,533
1907: First lots sold in Harmon
1910: 1,806 (+273 = +17.8% )
1917-18: U.S in World War I
1920: 2,286 (+480 = +26.6%)
1930: 2,447 (+161 = +7.0%)
1932: Harmon, Mt. Airy absorbed by Croton
1940: 3,843 (+1,396 = +57.0%) (See Note 1)
1941-45: U.S. in World War II
1950: 4,837 (+994 = +25.9%)
1960: 6,812 (+1,975 = +40.8%)
1970: 7,523 (+711 = +10.4%) (See comment below)
1980: 6,889 (-634 = -8.1%)
1990: 7,018 (+129 = +2.9%)
2000: 7,606 (+588 = +8.4%)
2008: 7,919 (+313 = +4.1%) (See Note 2)
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Note 1: The figure of 1,396 includes population growth in Croton, and the added population contributed by Harmon and Mt. Airy.
Note 2: July 2008 estimate. Source: city-data.com

The 1970 figure appears to be anomalous. No one in authority can explain the rise to a total population that would not be approached again for three decades. The drop off in the 1980 census is also puzzling, resulting in a net gain in population between 1960 and 1980 of only 77 persons, or one percent.. The consensus is that these widely swinging numbers represent changes in the designated election districts used to delimit the boundaries of Croton-on-Hudson for census purposes.

Backing Into Zoning Change 11

PLANNING

What Did Croton Taxpayers Get for Their $21,500? That was the amount spent on two Harmon reports? The answer is, “Not much.” $6,500 of it went to Saccardi & Schiff for a plan that includes the destruction of the oldest building in Harmon and for a controversial scheme for residents and customers to play musical chairs with parking behind a huge, blocky building that would replace the Village-created “eyesore” of the Dodge dealership.

Don’t let the Harmon committee tell you that this large building of nearly 25,000 square feet and its 47 parking spaces are only "suggestions" for what could occupy that space. Their intention clearly is to demolish the landmark Clifford Harmon former sales office. In their exhaustive 44-page recommendations to the Village Board, the building is shown in Appendix 2 as an “affected property,” and is glaringly absent from plans 4c and 4d. Why doesn’t the Harmon committee fess up and admit they were not aware of the building’s history?

Another $15,000 went to Danth Inc. for a report that claims Harmon is ripe for a host of businesses, based on its “unmet demands.” Among these are stores selling furniture, family clothing, women’s clothing, radio-TV-electronics, jewelry, sporting goods, used-merchandise, and full- and limited-service eating places. The report then winnows these and recommends for Harmon a cell phone store, a pet shop, stores offering knitting, women’s clothing, prepared meals, and full- and limited-service restaurants. Whew!

The report’s author was obviously unfamiliar with the study area and its retailing history. He says the nearest pet shop to Harmon is in Montrose, 4.7 miles away. Montrose has no pet shop. Choice Pets in Ossining, 3 miles away, is the nearest pet shop. Knitting? The Niddy Noddy, even with world-famous knitter Irene Miller at the helm, had to close. Women’s clothing? Remember the Import Corner, a lovely store? Same fate.

The Harmon committee obviously neglected to provide the author of the report with a copy of the 2004 Gateway Law banning fast-food restaurants. How embarrassing! He recommends a McDonald’s for Harmon, but points out that they would probably want to be closer to the Expressway. Another example of that law excluding revenue-producing businesses. And, despite the awkward presence of two shuttered Harmon restaurants, his report sees great hope for full-service restaurants there. Tell that to the owners of the Riverside Café and Tutto Bene.

All in all, this report is a huge disappointment. One has to wonder whether the Harmon committee believes that Croton taxpayers got $21,500 worth of sage advice from these two flawed reports. Our feeling is that we were gypped.

Backing Into Zoning Change 10

PLANNING

Ten Hurdles the Harmon Proposal Cannot Overcome. A Checklist

1. The Expressway. This limited access 9.2-mile highway bypasses Croton, leaving it cut off from the main north-south flow of traffic. Croton has never been the same ever since it opened in 1967. Some 40,000 vehicles detour around Croton daily at 55 miles an hour or more. Croton’s customer base is thus essentially reduced mostly to Croton’s population, approximately 8,000 persons.

2. Five widely separated shopping areas. These have their roots in Croton’s history, as described in Nos. 4 and 5 of this series. The lack of a single, cohesive shopping area creates special problems of geographical separation for Croton that can never be overcome.

3. Higher taxes for owners, more than 50% of which are school taxes.

4. Higher rents for renters.

5. Lack of a “magnet.” A bank or post office draws shoppers to a shopping area. Croton Commons, ShopRite and Van Wyck all have this added benefit. Harmon does not.

6. Less-than-ample traffic. “Traffic” in this sense refers to traditional foot traffic. Strolling shoppers are important to the economic health of shopping neighborhoods. Only Grand Street has a semblance of foot traffic and leisurely shopping. Harmon has no foot traffic, in part because of the presence of three of Croton’s four gas stations. The Harmon proposal will not give Croton a “downtown,” as candidate Restuccia claimed.

7. Inadequate parking. Finding parking spaces in some Croton neighborhoods is always a problem, notably Harmon, the Lower Village and Grand Street. The Harmon plan anticipates multiple use of parking spaces by residents and shop customers, a solution fraught with problems.

8. Competition. The huge Town Center and Jefferson Valley Mall and the smaller Beach, Arcadian and Chilmark complexes continue to give all Croton merchants competition. Newer Harmon merchants without an established clientele would suffer more than long-established stores.

9. Low level of community loyalty. For years, the Leo family owned The Video Connection in Croton Commons. When the Blockbuster chain opened a store nearby, The Video Connection tried to hang on. Did Croton residents support the local, family-owned business? They did not. They flocked to Blockbuster. The Video Connection closed soon after. So much for community loyalty.

10. Overly ambitious zoning. Croton may currently have too large an area zoned for commercial use, resulting in more retail spaces than there are potential tenants to fill them. This is a topic Croton has never wanted to explore, but perhaps it should do so now before it considers adding a large number of additional commercial retail spaces than are needed by its comparatively small customer base.

Backing Into Zoning Change 9

PLANNING

Let’s pause and review: The mantra of the Harmon committee, most of whose members live in Harmon, is “Build it and they will come.” Opponents say it should be “Build it and they won’t come.” Proponents of the divisive Harmon proposal admit they’re greedy for the bigger tax revenues new properties will bring. Fearing a depression is coming, critics say the concept slights other struggling areas of Croton.

Moreover, they point out, every Harmon property, occupied or unoccupied, is still yielding tax revenue. The proposal focuses on the former Dodge and Nappy’s properties. It foresees a developer purchasing them, demolishing the buildings (including a Harmon landmark) and erecting mixed-occupancy structures with ground-floor stores and an indefinite number of apartments on two floors above.

The fly in the ointment is the existing zoning law that must be changed. Opponents of the plan, including this writer, have pointed out that such spot zoning is illegal in New York. Why is the Village getting into the real-estate business and accommodating developers anyway? The Harmon committee cannot guarantee that tenants will show up. One of its members, Jeremy Ezra, 31, currently employed by a New York City real estate firm specializing in large commercial properties, has offered to assist in finding tenants. What the owners of barely profitable businesses elsewhere in Croton will think of this one-sided favoritism to Harmon is anybody’s guess.

With the first phase of new buildings nearing completion, the committee predicts individual property owners will begin to erect matching structures. The scenario goes something like this: I am the debt-free owner of a thriving store on South Riverside Avenue in Harmon, and I live above my store. Succumbing to the committee’s hype, I scrounge for credit and contract for a new building. Next, I close the store, sell off inventory and fixtures at a loss, lay off my two employees, move my household furniture to a storage facility, and rent a furnished apartment.

Fast-forward to the time when the replacement building is ready. After being without income for almost a year. I move into a new upstairs apartment, restock the store and try to entice former customers to return. It’s not easy. Because of my heavy debt load, I must charge higher prices. Kicking myself for ending up with a struggling business, massive mortgage, two empty high-rent apartments above mine, staggeringly higher tax bills—and a view of the new empty stores and apartments of the bankrupt developer across the street.

I have just one question for the Harmon committee: What planet do you people come from?

Backing Into Zoning Change 8

PLANNING

In 2004 Croton declared war on business. Not all businesses, just businesses certain people arbitrarily decided they didn’t want here. The attack weapon was the Gateway Law. Zoning laws usually specify permitted businesses or occupations. Croton turned common practice upside down. It designated five categories of undesirable businesses that any community wanting tax revenue would have gladly welcomed. Croton’s message: “Keep out!”

This 2004 law’s ban on parking lots was probably intended to prevent competition with the Village’s own lucrative station parking lot. Other exclusions foolishly targeted existing businesses—two local automobile dealerships and their storage lots. When the owner of the Dodge dealership discovered that if a fire destroyed more than 50% of his business, it could not be rebuilt, he moved his operation to the former Kayson property.

It turned out that Croton had shot itself in the foot by becoming a business-unfriendly community. Its punitive action actually created the empty Dodge dealership. Planners now call it an eyesore, and are pushing hard to eradicate it. For five years, Croton discouraged tax-paying businesses from coming here. Advocates of the Harmon scheme would have you believe that they can magically attract tenants to new apartments and storefronts in Harmon when existing facilities there are empty.

Other 2004 law prohibitions targeted businesses wanting to come to Croton. Its ban on drive-through windows was initially aimed at the Eckerd pharmacy chain. Eckerd wanted to buy the undeveloped Katz property, but the village said no to a planned drive-through window for prescription pickup. When the village attorney cautioned that it was unwise during negotiations to write a law solely directed at Eckerd, planners added fast-food restaurants to the list of banned businesses as cover.

Thoroughly disgusted, Eckerd decided it didn’t want to come to a community so openly hostile, and withdrew its offer for the Katz property. As TV hucksters say, “Wait, there’s more.” Another shot in the foot. After the Eckerd deal evaporated, the owner of the Katz property sued Croton, charging that the village had, by its actions, caused the purchase to fall through. Croton settled the suit by buying the property, thus taking it off the tax rolls.

Taxpayers are now the unwitting owners of a million-dollar white elephant yielding no taxes and worth less than what we paid for it. The village still doesn’t have a clue about what to do with its unintended acquisition. Such debacles are called “planning.” Meanwhile, we are being offered a snake-oil scheme that would destroy Harmon’s first and oldest surviving building.