Boiling the frog

The Catskill Homes Development proposed by developer Paul Savad has attracted heavy fire from neighbors, who have formed groups like Keep Cochecton Rural to resist the project. The objections they have raised, some of which were discussed in two letters printed in the October 5 and October 12 issues of The River Reporter, are legitimate issues that must be addressed if the development is to go through. Is the water table on the property adequate to accept 42 septic systems? Has the developer drawn his sketch maps in such a way as to exaggerate the amount of buildable land? Will the increase in traffic associated with 42 units overburden the roads?

We recognize the importance of questions such as these, and we most certainly laud the activist spirit that has inspired local residents to take an aggressive part in their community’s future. But they make one point with which we must respectfully, but most emphatically, disagree: they repudiate the whole concept of a conservation subdivision as “suburban sprawl.”

Suburban sprawl happens when land is built up, one acre at a time, one house per acre or half acre, until each and every acre is completely covered with houses or strip malls, and all native habitat eliminated in favor of lawn, pavement and clipped yew. What makes this sprawl so insidious is precisely that it happens so slowly: surely just one house is not a problem… and here’s just one more… and now there are only three… but after the fifth one, or the tenth, the neighbors all of a sudden notice that what had once been a beautiful, wild back yard has disappeared forever.

It has been observed that a frog dropped suddenly into boiling water will jump out at once and save itself. Put it in cold water and turn up the heat slowly, and it will stay in until it’s thoroughly boiled. The principle behind suburban sprawl is just the same.

Conservation subdivision does not produce the same result. In one sense, one could say it “boils the water” right away insofar as it erects, or at least plans for, a number of housing units in a given area all at once, rather than in dribbles over a period of years. That’s one reason it has elicited such a strong response from local residents. But it does something else all at once: it ensures that a significant proportion of the area developed will stay open land permanently. That portion can never be turned into suburban sprawl. To that extent, conservation subdivision ensures that the frog will never get boiled.

In order to leave some land undisturbed, the land that is built on in conservation subdivisions by definition has a higher density than is typical in suburbs. The result is the opposite of suburban sprawl: buildings built close enough together to provide an intimate community that is easily walkable. There is, in fact, a prototype for this model of closely clustered buildings surrounded by substantial tracts of undeveloped land, but it’s not the suburbs. It’s the placement of small hamlets like Narrowsburg and Callicoon in the midst of large tracts of farm and forest that has typified rural small-town America for decades, if not centuries. To expand by building conservation subdivisions is a way to preserve and extend this pattern, rather than to see every open tract disappear bit by bit under a burden of evenly spaced buildings.

The Catskill Homes proposal may not represent the highest potential of conservation subdivision, but there are some splendid examples of that potential in various parts of the country that might inspire local planners and residents, not only in Cochecton, but all around our area. See, for instance, www.tryonfarm.com for a project in which 75 percent of the land has been left open, and includes meadow, pasture, a farmstead and woods as well as residential areas.

We hope that any environmental and zoning assessments that are made of the prospective Catskill Homes Development are conscientious and accurate, and that the project is blocked or scaled down if it is found to be inappropriate. But we hope just as fervently that any development that does eventually occur is on the conservation subdivision model. Otherwise, the residents who hopped promptly out of the pot when they were told 42 units would be built all at once, may wake up 10 or 15 years down the road to find the same number of units spaced evenly over the entire area, and no open land left whatsoever—thoroughly boiled.

(See “Community Destiny” on page 4 for a local opportunity to learn about conservation subdivision)

Dr. Punnybone

Globule warming