Thirty years ago, people
driving to Rochester from the south would have seen a landscape of mainly
farms, fields, and woods.
Now, most of that bucolic countryside is little more than
a memory, replaced by shopping malls, tract housing, and the odd mix of
commercial accretion that follows suburbia.
US Census Bureau data shows that housing construction
continues to outpace population growth locally. From 1990 to 2000 MonroeCounty’s population grew by 3 percent. Its housing stock, however, rose 6.6
percent.
Some suburbs have started to recognize trends like that
and take action with smarter planning measures. But as growth of all kinds
continues unabated, those measures are starting to be tested, their relevance
at stake.
A development plan in Pittsford is a prime example of the
conflict between property rights and the public’s stake in the landscape. On a
parcel just northwest of MendonPondsPark, a local developer is planning a subdivision with
almost 100 houses. Opponents of the plan have attacked nearly every element of
the plan, from lighting and the potential impact on local aquifers to the
changes the development would make to the area’s rural character.
The way developer Chuck Ryan sees it, he’s simply a businessman meeting a proven demand
— in this case, demand for new housing by aging baby boomers.
“The market we’re in is empty-nesters, due to the
demographics,” says Ryan. “People 55 and older are the fastest growing segment
of the population. We’ve gotten a tremendous demand from people who want to
stay in the town of Pittsford or stay on the southeast side of town that want
to downsize, but still would like their own lot and like their own house but
just want a smaller piece of property or smaller house to live in. Most of them
want a master bedroom on the first floor. Their children are usually grown.
They’ve come from a big house. They’ve lived in the community a long time,
would like to stay in the community.”
Ryan has already built other subdivisions targeted at
this market, and now he has waiting lists of people who want such lots.
To fill that demand, Ryan plans to buy a 115-acre tract
known as the Young Farm and build 92 houses on it. The property straddles Clover Street, just north of the Canfield Road entrance to MendonPondsPark.
It’s also in a unique strip that Pittsford has zoned as
“Rural Residential South Pittsford.”
When they build in that district — all of Pittsford
south of the New York State Thruway — developers must meet special
requirements. Those requirements were added to town zoning law last April in
the wake of a temporary moratorium on construction in that area.
During the moratorium, the Town of Pittsford took stock of its undeveloped land and decided to
adopt more stringent measures in the new zoning district. The idea was to
conserve things like “rural character, agriculture, open space lands, and
visual and wildlife buffer area adjacent to MendonPondsPark lands,” according to the text of the local law.
To meet the twin goals of preserving those values and
still allowing development, the town settled on 10 criteria for developments
larger than 20 acres. Those criteria operate as a sliding scale, determining
the density of housing permitted.
“If a developer met eight of the 10, he could have X
number of units,” explains Bill Brizee. “If he could only meet six of these
criteria, then he’d have a less number of houses allowed.” As chair of the
Pittsford Town Planning Board, Brizee has the sometimes thankless task of
implementing the criteria in a way that balances public interest with the
property rights of individual developers and landowners. The idea, he says, is
that “if you do a good enough job in design — if you meet these criteria —
then you can build it.”
If only determining whether a specific development met the criteria were as easy as it
sounds. True, some of the criteria, like Number 6 — “provision of public
sewers” — seem to leave little room for interpretation. But others, like
Numbers 1 and 9 — “preservation of agricultural lands and uses” and “design
that respects and buffers MendonPondsPark” — are anything but specific.
Does a vegetable garden constitute “agricultural use?”
How big a buffer is buffer enough? The law doesn’t say.
“This is somewhat difficult zoning, in that it’s
interpretation,” says Brizee. “There’s a little bit of subjectiveness in
meeting the zoning requirements of these 10 items. Other zoning things are more
clear cut.”
Indeed. Ryan — who is now seeking the first of three
approvals from the town planning board —says he believes his plans solidly
meet nine of the 10 criteria. (The one he says he’s “fuzzy” on is farmland
preservation, since a historic barn would be sold off.) To make certain he
meets the town’s new guidelines, Ryan’s hired a prominent designer, and says
most of the design changes he’s made are positive ones.
Take the density planned houses, for example. Each home
will be built on about one third of an acre. That leaves about 65 percent of
the total acreage as open space, says Ryan.
“With that amount of open space, they will be clustered,”
he says. “That’s the only way to achieve that type of open space. You can’t
have large lots and preserve a lot of contiguous open space. You have to put
the open space in large lots or do smaller lots and have large volumes of
contiguous open space for the enjoyment of everybody. And that’s what we were
trying to do.”
Critics complain that the lots are still spread along
roads that sprawl themselves, turning the preserved open space (which will be
handed over to the town) into tax-free back yards for the scaled down lots.
While Ryan believes he’s fulfilled all or most of the town’s new criteria, an informal
opposition group calling itself Citizens for Rural South Pittsford says the
proposal fails to meet nine out of
the 10.
The group formed specifically out of concern over Ryan’s
subdivision plan. Some of C4RSP (as they abbreviate themselves) want the
proposal killed, says Mary Scheuerman, one of the members. But she and others
like her are more interested in making sure adequate study is conducted on the
tract’s impacts.
“If SEQR [the State Environmental Quality Review process]
is followed and if the proper analysis is done, that will answer the question
of will there be harm to the park and will there be harm to the character of
the area,” she says.
The concern over the area’s rural character is heightened
by the fact that parts of the east parcel abut MendonPondsPark.
“It’s really not just a Pittsford issue,” Scheuerman
says. “It’s a MonroeCounty issue, because lots of people use that park. They’re the people that
get cheated when a park gets compromised or damaged.”
The development’s proximity to the park has also sparked
the interest of the Sierra Club’s Rochester Regional Group.
“People should have an area where they can experience
nature and have the benefit of it,” says Frank Regan, one of the group’s
co-chairs.
“If the public knew there was any kind of threat,” he
says, “I would think it would be on their radar. I think they’d be alarmed.”
In the standoff over whether the 10 criteria have been met, the planning board decided
not to make a decision right away. Instead of ruling directly, they forwarded
Ryan’s plans to consultant John Behan, a planner who helped the town construct
its “greenprint” (a town-wide open-space preservation priority plan) almost a
decade ago, and more recently helped write the new zoning law for the land
south of the Thruway. Behan responded with a memo that the planning board
released at its meeting Monday night. That memo parses the Ryan plan one
criterion at a time, saying some are met while others not.
In all but one case, the memo also recommends changes to
the existing plan that would allow it to conform to the criteria. That
criterion is the “preservation of agricultural land and uses,” about which
Behan writes: “We cannot envision any minor or moderate changes to the proposed
plan to possibly achieve this criterion in a significant way.”
And when it comes to preserving open space and protecting
public views, Behan recommends removing a road on the west side, which has
about a dozen homes on it in the Ryan plan. Chairman Bill Brizee says he
believes that Ryan and the town can still come up with an acceptable plan. So
for the moment, the board is taking no action on the plan, and the public
hearing remains open. Though clearly frustrated by what has turned into a
multi-year planning phase for the project, Ryan seemed optimistic leaving the
meeting. “I think we’re close,” he said.
Whether the changes will appease the project’s critics is
unclear. The Sierra Club’s other co-chair, Hugh Mitchell, is also conservation
chair for the statewide Sierra chapter. Speaking to the planning board on
Monday, Mitchell spoke to broader issues of sprawl and the preservation of
rural character.
“Our concern is that this type of development — loss of
farmland and development of housing —has a great deal of impact both on the
city and on open space,” he said.
So far, the development’s critics have raised a broad
variety of concerns, including some very technical ones relating the SEQR
process.
But perhaps the most direct and honest apprehension came
from a resident unconnected with C4RSP.
“This just seems out of place,” Frank Bove told the
board. “This doesn’t seem like the kind of residential development I would
expect in this part of the town. There are other places where it would fit in
very nicely. But you’re in an extremely rural area. This doesn’t sound like the
right kind of thing to do here.”
That may seem to echo the town’s intent in changing the
zoning: to conserve “rural character.” But what exactly constitutes “rural
character” may be as open to interpretation as the town’s zoning criteria.
“People always use the term ‘Well, we’re going to change
the character of the neighborhood,'” says Ryan. “That’s true. We are. We’re
going to change it for the better.”
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.
