The Pace of Growth

With land use regulations under review in dozens of Hudson Valley towns, citizens and local officials find themselves grappling with one of the major shortcomings of traditional zoning codes: while the codes specify lot sizes and permitted uses for different areas of a town, they offer little guidance on planning the pace of growth.

Almost all new residential development increases property taxes for existing homeowners, as previous columns have illustrated. But a surge of new homes over a short period of time causes greater disruption to public services and costs taxpayers substantially more than gradually phasing in the same number of new homes over a longer time frame.

Asking themselves not only how much growth they want, but how soon they can handle it, municipalities in several states have adopted development “phasing” techniques to insure that population growth does not overwhelm their schools, overstretch their fire and police departments or bury their residents under huge tax increases.

Some towns have met the threat of too rapid growth by imposing a limit on the number of building permits they will approve in a given year. Others have opted to freeze subdivision approvals entirely until adequate public facilities—schools, roads, water systems, etc.-- can be financed and constructed to meet the demands of new residents.

Legal precedents support a town’s right to impose phased growth restrictions provided they are based on thorough analysis and are consistent with planning goals and zoning regulations. In a landmark 1972 case, New York State’s highest court ruled, “Where it is clear that the existing physical and financial resources of the community are inadequate to furnish the essential services and facilities which a substantial increase in population requires, there is a rational basis for ‘phased growth.’”

One successful model of phased growth is the central Massachusetts town of Amherst. A rural college community of 23,000 full-time residents, Amherst in the mid-1980s was comfortably absorbing between 100 and 150 new homes annually. But in 1986, with real estate markets booming nationwide, developers besieged Amherst planners for approval of more than 1,200 new housing lots.

“People were scared,” recalled Robert Mitchell, the former Director of Amherst’s Planning Department and now his state’s Special Assistant for Sustainable Development. “They worried about overcrowding in the schools and traffic demand… They wanted to maintain open farmland and a diverse range of housing types, the distinctive features of the town.”

With overwhelming public support, Amherst imposed an 18-month moratorium on new development and allocated $100,000 to Mitchell’s department to develop a blueprint for the town’s long-range future. The resulting regulations increased zoning densities, maintained the town’s commitment to affordable housing and initiated programs to preserve farmland. As part of its growth strategy, Amherst also capped the rate of new home building at 125 permits per year.

“More important than the number,” said Mr. Mitchell, was a point system for allocating the limited permits among developers that focused on “not just the quantity but the quality of growth.”

The Amherst system, like many others across the country, gives more points and more permits to developments that advance the town’s primary planning goals: concentrating population in and around village centers, preserving open space and making at least 10% of the housing stock affordable to working families.

Since its inception 18 years ago, Amherst’s growth plan has remained popular with townspeople and with developers, who have not filed a single court challenge to the phasing system.

“It changed the kinds of developments being proposed,” Mr. Mitchell said. “We sent a clear message to the development community of what kind of growth Amherst wanted and the incentives we were willing to offer. All proposed subdivisions now meet our growth standards as a matter of course.”

Phased growth planning can also be very valuable to smaller rural towns in the Hudson Valley, according to Nan Stolzenburg, founder of Community Planning & Environmental Associates, which consults to dozens of upstate towns including Pine Plains and Kinderhook.

“I almost always recommend” some method of regulating the pace of growth consistent with a town’s financial and physical capacity to absorb it, Ms. Stolzenburg said. “But my clients often reject it.”

New York municipalities remain generally reluctant to adopt phased development along the lines of the Amherst model. Some town officials are deterred by the up-front costs of the studies required to justify a phased growth plan—though they are insignificant compared to the potential tax savings the plan could achieve. The need to administer the plan once approved adds another layer of complexity.

But the biggest reason many New York towns resist enacting phased growth plans, Ms. Stolzenburg suggested, may have more to do with the politics of planning in general.

“There needs to be the political will on the part of town officials,” she said, to step into “the conflict between what a community wants and what large landowners with significant influence on decision-making believe they have a right to do. It all comes down to money and politics.”