Next American City » Magazine » Growth & Change On New York’s Urban/Rural Edge

Driving west over the Shawangunk Ridge into Sullivan County on New York State Route 17, the hustle and bustle of the outer suburbs of New York City yields to something quieter, greener, and slower. If one heads off the highway onto roads like Route 17B or Route 42, logging trucks or the occasional tractor appear more frequently than SUVs. The smell of manure and fresh cut grass mingle with clean mountain air, and old barns are more common than sidewalks. Except for the road signs and the asphalt underneath the car, the landscape has changed little from what many earlier generations of settlers and visitors alike saw.

But the pace of development throughout Sullivan County has quickened, and the New York metropolitan area appears ready to leap the Shawangunks. Four massive casinos are being planned for the town of Thompson, along with thousands of housing units, including two subdivisions with more than 600 homes for Fallsburg, which would nearly double the number of housing units in the town. Taxes are rising, as is demand for government services.

Debates over the future of the county ring increasingly loud in the corridors of Sullivan’s fifteen Town Halls and circa-1960s county government building. Residents fear that Sullivan may quickly come to look like its neighbor on the opposite side of the ridge: the town of Wallkill in Orange County is now home to numerous malls, big box stores, suburban sub-developments, and a commuter train to New York City. The farms that once dominated Orange County are now outnumbered by subdivisions, and the county is firmly part of the New York metro area.

One can hear these debates at the rural edge of just about every American city. How quickly the community acts and what steps it takes determine whether suburban sprawl runs roughshod over these small towns, altering their historic character and creating bitterly divided classes of old-timers and newcomers, or whether economic growth is carefully managed to preserve the countryside while helping to alleviate poverty.

The Borscht Belt: Rise and Fall

Sullivan County is perhaps most famous as the Mecca of Jewish-American comedy in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The rolling foothills of the southern Catskills were home to legendary hotels like Grossingers, the Concord, Kutchers, Browns, and the Raleigh. It was the place where comics like Jerry Lewis, Henny Youngmann, and Jack Benny cut their teeth, where generations of Jews from New York spent their summers in bungalow colonies. Now, only the Raleigh and Kutchers remain open. The Concord looks like a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas: a massive hotel sitting alone on the edge of a lake, empty and crumbling. Abandoned bungalow colonies dot the scenery. Abandoned swimming pools outnumber full ones.

The hotel industry in Sullivan started almost by chance. Townsfolk along the O&W railroad, which ferried coal between Pennsylvania and energy-hungry New York City, began taking in boarders, and one thing led to another. The birth of the middle class, when average folks were at last able to take vacations, made the Catskills the summer hotspot. But when jet travel became affordable in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Catskills’ customers—and fortunes—went south.

At the same time, the farm country on the other side of the county took a hard hit, followed by problems in the industrial sector that had provided many jobs along the Route 17 corridor. The median income in the county rests at fourteen percent below the state average, with the percentage of college graduates barely half that of the state as a whole. Rates of disability are unusually high for the state. More than anything, say residents, when the economy went sour, the county lost its self-esteem.

A Changing County

Today, Sullivan rests on the brink of major change. The last census recorded 73,966 in Sullivan County, up 6.7 percent from 1990. According to the county’s Planning and Community Development Office, current population forecasts indicate that Sullivan County will hit 100,000 people by the year 2020.

The largest sector of population growth comes from people 65 and older. A generation that vacationed in Sullivan is now retiring there, as dramatically expressed by the conversion of the famous Borscht Belt hotel, Browns, into a retirement home. Second homeowners who previously came on weekends now live here full time.

Another significant growth spurt has come from workers from Orange, Ulster, and Rockland Counties who have decided to relocate and commute from Sullivan County. The federal government recently announced that Sullivan County will soon be considered part of the New York metro area, a determination based on the number of commuters. Thus, the County will be newly eligible for a slew of federal and state programs, including money for roads, public transportation, water and sewer, and business loans.

According to David Brown, director of the Polson Institute for Global Development at Cornell University, this “metro”-ization is the closest the federal government gets to demarcating urban from rural in America. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) makes the determination based on the number of residents commuting into a central city of 50,000 or more people.

However, the evolution from rural to urban is not as clear-cut as the OMB would have it. Bill Pammer, following a 25-year career that has taken him to Ohio and Moldova, recently returned to his native town of Thompson in the center of Sullivan County after being named the county’s Commissioner of Planning. According to Pammer, “There is a tendency to look at urban and rural as mutually exclusive. What we have here in Sullivan is the blending together of both rural character and a new urban sensibility. When you talk about urbanization, you are talking as much about a change in mindset as a change in growth patterns.”

Part of that change is for residents to accept the economic pressure for new development, residential and commercial, and the accompanying shifts in demographics, infrastructural needs, and taxes.

Sullivan 2020, or How to Grow Sullivan

Without Destroying It

In anticipation of this growth, Pammer has dedicated much of his time to Sullivan 2020, a comprehensive, community-based planning process to update the county master plan, which was written in 1962. He isn’t drawing up a rigid, bulleted document to print en masse and gather dust on someone’s bookshelf; he views 2020 as an evolving exercise in participatory planning and government. The process began with a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats) analysis at a large community meeting in September of 2003. In July 2004, county residents held longer meetings in five locations throughout Sullivan. They brainstormed ideas for improving the county’s land use regulation, open space and farmland preservation, economic and business climate, community services and transportation, and housing infrastructure.

“The increasing urbanization of Sullivan County—and by this I mean to some degree the influx of new residents from urban areas—brings with it new demands for services and quality of life protections in Sullivan County,” says Pammer. “I break it down into five major categories: tax burden—one of the highest in the nation, that is in many ways due to our system of overlapping governments and home-rule; water—both quality and availability; public transportation; affordable housing—specifically workforce housing; and balanced growth—maintaining natural resources and open space while providing opportunity for economic development.”

The emphasis on transportation and community involvement strikes a positive note with David Brown. “Rural areas must make sure that public decisions are representative of public will. But the public must be open-minded and look at the change that is happening in a fair way, not solely through the lens of the ‘golden age,’ of how things supposedly were before,” Brown said.

“If all of a sudden someone who is living in the county is now commuting fifty miles to work, they must ask themselves, ‘How can I make that commute easier?’ If you see that the county is aging rapidly, ask how can we take advantage of new retirees and their disposable income? Should we build a better public transportation infrastructure to enable them to spend their dollars locally, and to allow local service workers who don’t have access to a car to get to those new business frequented by the population?”

St. Mary’s Sets the Pace

Places like Sullivan exist two or three hours outside of most large cities. Their economies are rooted in agriculture and tourism—providing summer destinations for nearby urbanites. They are the places that today’s grandparent generation remembers—spending every summer swimming in lakes and rivers and buying peaches or corn or cherries from local farmers—but that in recent times have suffered economic downturns. Lake County, California, is one: pear farming country where Clear Lake drew summer visitors from the Bay Area, but where the unemployment rate since 1990 has fluctuated between 8 percent and 13.2 percent, well above both the state and national averages. Or St. Mary’s County, Maryland, which boasts the state’s original capital city as its major tourist-draw and which thrived on tobacco farming before the crop declined in popularity.

Ten years ago, St. Mary’s County, less than a hundred miles from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was in the same situation that Sullivan and Lake Counties find themselves today. It figured out how to restructure economically: how to grow the economy yet control its physical growth, prevent sprawl, and maintain its rural character. Over the last ten years, median household income has grown 29.4 percent, one of the highest growth rates in the state, and the unemployment rate was a mere 2.8 percent in January 2004. Meanwhile, town centers are thriving, and the county and towns have permanently preserved a significant amount of open space and farmland.

According to former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, who made state “smart growth” policies the hallmark of his administration, the crucial factor in St. Mary’s balanced resurgence was strong state government intervention. When Glendening was Governor, he worked to ensure that St. Mary’s benefited from statewide growth. The state campaigned heavily to land a research facility at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, at a time when base closures were the norm, because it would attract other tech companies and highly skilled workers. Meanwhile, state funds helped rebuild schools, construct science centers and computer labs, and bring in satellite campuses of schools in the region like the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, and Georgetown University. Long-time residents of St. Mary’s county would then be able to take advantage of the state’s growth and keep pace with other counties. As a result, almost twenty percent of St. Mary’s County jobs are in the tech sector, over twice the state average.

In one of its most aggressive and innovative moves, the state used its tobacco settlement money, totaling billions of dollars, to offer tobacco farmers a deal. “We told the farmers, ‘Listen, we will pay you,’” Glendening said. “In exchange, you stop growing tobacco, and place an agricultural easement on your land to prevent it from ever being developed.” In one fell swoop, the state worked with the area’s “old-timers” to improve public health, maintain a strong agricultural sector, and preserve open space and farmland.

The changes have attracted people like Steve Eisen to St. Mary’s County. A commercial real estate investor, Eisen owns a farm in St. Mary’s that he plans to use as a second home. He is thrilled with recent legislation that will help preserve old tobacco barns. He cites the fact that many children of local farm owners are staying in St. Mary’s, despite the rising real estate values, because there are now well-paying jobs.

“Strong state and federal intervention helped St. Mary’s County residents take advantage of the growth and change,” he says.

Don’t Pop the Cork Yet

Back in Sullivan County, Dick Riseling wonders who will benefit and at what cost from the change enveloping Sullivan County. Riseling grew up in rural Illinois and runs Apple Pond Farm, an organic farm in the rolling green hills of Callicoon Center in the western part of the county, just up from the Delaware River and a world away from the Borscht Belt.

Although he is excited about the 2020 process, and is a member of the steering committee, he is concerned about the overall tone and focus of the current dialogue in the county. “I don’t see people asking the important questions, the hard questions: how is this development or that proposal going to help alleviate poverty? Will it make things more equitable or continue us down the path of inequality which we are seeing more and more in the country?”

According to Riseling, nobody is asking whether all of the jobs that will be supposedly created by the casinos and the factories will pay a living wage: “Are these the types of jobs that county residents want and need? Is making seven bucks an hour cleaning up around slot machines going to pull families out of poverty?”

What saddens him most is that he sees real potential for both growth and social change, all within an environmentally sustainable framework. “Take renewable energy,” he said. “There is a growing demand for both renewable energy and green building in the region. It has immense potential to both bring economic growth and living wages, in a way the helps protect the environment and open space, rather than destroy it. Imagine if the state and local governments were to invest their economic development dollars into growing this sector rather than pushing low-paying casinos and ecologically unsound factories? The effect would be tremendous.”

Whither Albany?

Rural New York remains one of the poorest parts of the country, and the economic indicators of the entire upstate region remain bleak. Year after year, counties and towns struggle to make ends meet, to stimulate a depressed economy and maintain some sense of hope. Sullivan is lucky in this respect. Soon to be officially included in the New York metropolitan region, it not only can change, it will change, whether it wants to or not.

Sullivan’s residents can manage that change in a way that benefits existing residents, raises people out of poverty, and protects the environment, which is such a defining part of Sullivan’s identity. But they must educate their students to the highest possible standard, attract businesses and industry that will provide high-paying jobs and help the county retain its youth, and develop the transportation infrastructure to meet the needs of a changing population. They also have to create a coherent new land use plan for the county to replace its forty-year old vision.

To realize such a future, however, may require a change in the state government’s vision for Sullivan.

“Unfortunately, not all states have gotten on board with aggressive policies to promote smart growth and to help their counties deal with urbanization. New York, for instance, does not have a Smart Growth policy in place,” notes Governor Glendening. “Many of the tools that subsidize sprawl—or that can be altered to subsidize smart growth—are too costly or cumbersome to be left to local jurisdictions. States must provide both the leadership and the money in order to help its counties take advantage of growth and not be overwhelmed by it.”

The state has shown willingness to play a major role in Sullivan through its strong promotion of casino development, but that vision may be selling Sullivan short. As St. Mary’s County demonstrates, rustic places with engaged constituencies can, with the right vision, achieve far greater things. Because of changing regional and global economies, places like Sullivan—the backwaters of economic development for decades—are all of the sudden prime real estate once again.