As a youth, I spent much of my time in Kings Park, New York, a sleepy suburban burg tucked along the northern shore of Long Island, about fifty miles east of Manhattan. All of my family members have since relocated to other places, but for some reason the hometown retains a special place in my heart. Aside from the good school system (which produced such luminaries as Houston Astros great Craig Biggio and members of the metal group Dream Theater) and a relatively good location for commuters to New York City, the other claim to fame for my hometown is the enormous state mental health facility that occupied about 450 acres of prime real estate, including along the water. In its heyday in the mid-1950’s, the facility held over 9,000 patients, and required a small army of workers to man it. When it closed in 1996, the great news, and anticipation, would be what the State decided to do with the property. For several years the belief was that the tract would be sold to developers, and a massive residential and commercial building spree would commence.
In a classic example of NIMBY concerns at work, the hamlet mobilized, behind organized citizens groups. Local politicians joined the crusade to stop the construction. After it was discovered that Kings Park lacked a local sewer system (something that any resident could have told anyone who cared to ask), and that the site had some serious environmental remediation issues, the desirability of the site waned. Still there was potential that the development would occur. Then, just after Christmas, the State announced that it would transfer the overwhelming majority of the property to the State Parks Department, and that the dedicated swath would join its neighbor, the Nissequogue River State Park. As told to the New York Times in a small blip of story in its Sunday Real Estate section, the players in the process were shocked, and had little idea that this would be the result of ten years of anticipation.
This is where the New York Times lost its interest in the story. The writer no doubt had to hop back on the Long Island Railroad and make it back in time for her deadline. But the surprising nature of the pronouncement begs a number of questions intertwined with the land use process itself. Mainly, the State’s foot-dragging in making a determination should have tipped the Neighbors and Town officials that the State was having difficulties trying to convince a developer to purchase the property. If these folks were really involved in the process, wouldn’t they have known?
Beyond this query, the real lesson from Kings Park is that in the pursuit to regulate what can and cannot be done, and what does and does not get built, it is ultimately the property owner who is in control, and everyone else interested in what happens must wait to see what the owner decides to do. It is an actor/reactor symbiosis, and until the owner makes some type of affirmative action, everyone else needs to wait. This simple order of things causes much of the frustration for those participating in the land use process. The waiting can be endless, or in the Kings Park case, ten years, which is pretty long, too. Functioning within the land use arena requires a substantial helping of patience. Sometimes it takes people time to make up their mind, particularly when they’re public servants, and particularly when the decision involves the future of an entire town, no matter how much ink devoted to it by the New York Times.
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