The Five Towns community is up in arms over the sale of the 55 acre Woodmere Club to private investors. In a community created in the 1700s with guests as rich as George Washington and the revolutionaries, we are caught ill prepared for further development, but let me start at the beginning.
BACKGROUND
The five towns contain multiple villages and Woodmere, which is owned and operated by the Town of Hempstead.
We are a capitalistic country with rich private real estate laws dating from its inception. We were never reliant on the grant of land ownership by a king, since we separated from England many years ago. By and large private land owners are free to do as they wish with their land, including developing and selling that land.
PROVIDED HOWEVER, that there are laws in place to ensure that the right of one owner does not encroach on the rights of others. Governments create zoning laws to protect the nature and character of land and to ensure there is no such encroaching on others rights. It is analogous to the every core paradigm that one who has a seat on a boat, cannot make a hole beneath his seat and drown all passengers.
THE WOODMERE CLUB
The Woodmere Club is a privately owned club. It privately owns 55 acres of prime real estate in the heart of the five towns. It has every right to sell the land to whomever it wishes.
The purchasers of the Woodmere Club reviewed its zoning laws and determined that it would be profitable for them to purchase the land to develop close to 300 homes as the law stands now. Capitalism at its best. Fantastic for them.
BUT…
What the new owners plan to do is exactly cut a hole beneath their seat and LITERALLY drown the rest of the community, here’s how:
- The golf course lands act as a sponge to absorb water from its ocean inlet in Woodsburgh, acts as a sponge for storm waters and for under ground waters on which it was built. Building homes would remove the turf sponge and cause the water to reroute itself into neighboring homes.
- Have you seen traffic on the main five towns throughfares from 7:30am-8pm? The roads were built over two hundred years ago to carry horses and buggies. So sayeth the late Mayor Parise and current Cedarhurst Trustee Ron Lanzilotta who remembers those horses and buggies on Central Avenue, not too long ago. Traffic is tight when there is no emergency evacuation, consider the threat to residents of the community in the event there is another emergency evacuation as we saw twice in the last decade for Hurricanes Irene and Sandy.
- Do we have sufficient emergency fire and police vehicles to cover over a thousand new residents. Even if the new builders are limited to 118 new homes, with the average orthodox home carrying 5-7 people, we would need emergency personnel to cover them.
- Our sewage and garbage are already at limit, with flooding occurring quite frequently, and no resolution in sight. Those in Sutton Place, Lawrence Bay Park and on Ocean Avenue have sewage flooding their basements at times because there is already insufficient infrastructure to handle it.
- The impact on our natural wildlife.
- The engineer who appeared at the meeting last night thought the value of the surrounding homes would not be affected by the building of new homes. Clearly he does not understand the law of supply and demand. He also does not understand how a new mini city built in an already dense community would cheapen the value and character of the community.
SO WHAT ARE OUR OPTIONS
- Why cant the government insert greater restrictions on the property? The answer is that at some point, if the government restricts the property too much, a court might consider it “a taking” of the property, in other words, its as if the government itself has confiscated the property and the court will then tell the government that it finds its restrictions overly burdensome and will strike them down, possibly in toto, or would demand that the government compensate the owners for “taking” the property effectively ordering the government to take the property by eminent domain, appraise the property and pay the owners to take control of the property itself. So why not?
- The government does not want to go out of pocket in purchasing the propery.
- The government does not want to go out of pocket in developing, maintaining and policing the property.
- The government does not want to take this property off the rent rolls, where it woud lose valuable tax revenue. You see the engineer, as I understood it, did a reckoning of how much it would cost the government to provide services to the new residents of the new housing and it determined that the tax money coming in from the homes would be greater than the cost of the services to the residents, net net, the new homes would be added revenue to the government. [As an aside, one could imagine that what they are thinking is that the new residents would be orthodox and not utilize the school system. So the new residents would pay real estate taxes which include school taxes, but not utilize the public school system].
- If the Town of Hempstead turned the area into a park, it would open up the area to all Town of Hempstead residents which could bring in an element of visitors that the residents wouldn’t appreciate. It might also need police presence at night the way North Woodmere Park and Cedarhurst Park have. It would bring in people driving and playing and making noise on Shabbos and yom tov…potentially. But arguably daily visitors will impact the area less than full time residents.
- Lawrence has Zion Park, Cedarhust has its own park, North Woodmere has its park, Hewlett has Grant Park, so why not have a park in Woodmere as well. Keep the tennis courts and make a much needed pool complex like that of Echo Park.
- Let the homes be built.
- Have another purchaser purchase the property who would keep it as a country club and enhance the club and make it more reasonably priced. Of course, the current owners have to be willing to sell it them.
POLITICALLY
This has turned into a political nightmare for our councilman. Just bad PR management. In my humble opinion, someone fell asleep at the wheel in Woodmere in two instances recently. One is the monstrosity of the new Woodmere Rehab with insufficient parking, just a monster of an eyesore and burden on the surrounding charming community. And the ability of large parcel owners to sell off the square footage with an unlimited ability to develop said property at will.
The residents are wondering why the property appears to be selling for a few million dollars, a fraction of what was the original sale price of $70mm+ for over 100 acres of prime real estate. There is no trust here, something smells awry.
The councilmen knew the residents were passionate about how this property development was moving along, spending privately for an attorney and its own engineers report. Yet, they buried the notice of rezoning vote at the back of the paper and appeared to hope that no one noticed that there were plans to rezone the property for fewer residences, but nevertheless appearing to acquiesce to the development of said residences.
When questioned about this rezoning vote, Councilmen Bruce Blakeman and Anthony D’Esposito stated that they were afraid that once the moratorium expired, the builders would proceed in building their almost 300 new homes, so the rezoning change had to be effectuated immediately.
YET, they also said that rezoning the property does not mean that the developers could develop the property pending a determination of the impact of said development on the surroundings and environment, which said report has yet to be released. Well, if the developers have to wait for the environmental impact study to be completed before they can commence development, then why the rush to change the zoning laws to increase lot size and reduce development? Why the secrecy? Why did the councilmen wait for community outrage before scheduling a town hall meeting to discuss their plans for a vote and why it was necessary. Why did they schedule a zoning vote before notifying the community and discussing it. Then they postponed the vote and sent out notices saying so. Then they put the vote back on the docket, and took it off again. The councilmen were not above board, and it makes the community wary about what they are doing and how they are proceeding and breeds distrust, a healthy distrust of our political leaders.
Big PR debacle.
So where do we stand? The Town of Hempstead is wary about putting too many constraints on the property thinking that if they were brought to court, the court would strike down all the constraints on the builders and permit all 300 homes to be built. So the TOH decided to permit 77 homes to be built on the parcel owned by the TOH. They did not wait for the environmental impact study.
But it appears that they are afraid of the outcome of said environmental impact study, for if it is determined that building homes on the property will too greatly affect the area, then the TOH is hard pressed to find a solution. The TOH certainly does not want to hear that nothing can be built on that property because it could potentially put the onus on the Town to purchase it itself, costing the Town potentially millions of dollars to purchase it, develop, maintain, secure it, and importantly lose the property taxes from the rent roll that is associated with said land.
Quite the quandary.
But maybe the answer lies with King Solomon, who was judging a situation where two mothers were claiming one child. King Solomon ordered that the baby be split in two. Maybe the answer lies in what NYC did, which is to have the developer devote some land to homes, and some to public areas which the developer has to develop as part of its overall plan of development. Development should be limited to what the community infrastructure can bear, and force the developer to increase the infrastructure where necessary so as not to be an unctuous addition to our community.