'Keep the Hasidic Out': A Small-Town Housing Showdown

“There’s nobody on the board, there’s nobody that works in the town, there’s nobody that wants this development to go through,” Alexander Jamieson, the former town supervisor of Chester, said at a public meeting in May 2018. “There’s nobody.”

Town officials have repeatedly placed obstacles in the developers’ path since they bought the land in 2017: restrictions on the size of the houses they can build, delays on issuing building permits and a request to relocate the main road by 10 feet.

“We’re doing what we can to alleviate 432 Hasidic houses in the town of Chester,” Jamieson said at that heated town meeting.

“Every day,” chimed in Robert Valentine, the current town supervisor, who at that point was on the town board.

Angry residents at the meeting talked of how school taxes could rise and public resources could be stretched in the town, about 60 miles north of New York City. They spoke of fears that the development would one day resemble Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic village about 9 miles away that is overcrowded and has ranked among the poorest communities in the nation.

The developers, Greens at Chester, LLC, cite these statements and others in a federal lawsuit that accuses the town, Orange County and individual local officials of discrimination, contending that they assume that the homebuyers will be Hasidic because some of the developers are.

The Orange County executive, Steven M. Neuhaus, a Chester resident and its former town supervisor, suggested delay tactics, including retesting the water and denying sewer permitting, at a meeting, the lawsuit recounts.

“We can pressure the developer to either go commercial, which I think we should do, or we can buy it,” he said at an April 25 meeting, a video of which was posted online. “If you want to pay a little bit more to save the town, that might be an option.”

“I’m trying to slow things down because I don’t think the school district can handle it,” Neuhaus added. “I don’t think my town can handle it.”

The lawsuit, filed in July, asks $100 million in damages for breach of contract and purported violations of fair housing and other anti-discrimination laws.

“If you show up to a public hearing, you can hear what the voters are saying, which is ‘keep the Hasidic out,’” said John Petroccione, the civil engineer who designed the project 25 years ago, and is working with the developers to complete it. He said the town had fought the proposed development since 1985, when the former farm was purchased by Wilbur Fried, a non-Hasidic developer. Fried also wanted to build hundreds of homes at the site.

Fried, 91, recalled how for 28 years, he fought off “not in my backyard” concerns about overdevelopment from Chester residents. He eventually sued the town in federal court. In 2010, he and the town settled, and the town granted him the right to build 431 homes there.

“I probably have the record for having the longest subdivision approval process in the state of New York,” Fried said.

But as the town slow-walked the approvals, the demographics in Orange County changed. A small community of Satmar Hasidim, who speak Yiddish and practice a form of charismatic Judaism that tries to limit modern influences, arrived in the area in the 1970s, seeking a peaceful place to raise their children away from increasingly crowded Brooklyn.

Their numbers grew steadily, in part because of their typically large families. Kiryas Joel, a section of the Town of Monroe where they settled, now has 24,000 people and became its own town, Palm Tree, in January. Offshoot communities have been formed nearby.

In 2017, Fried sold the lot in Chester with its court-won approvals for $12 million to the current developers. The city then granted permits to clear the land and build roads. But once town residents learned in 2018 that the new owners were Hasidic, town meetings were called and things came to a grinding halt, the lawsuit charges.

School costs are one major concern, residents said at town meetings. While Hasidic Jews typically attend their own religious schools, local districts in New York have to pay for a percentage of their busing costs and special education services. The Chester school district projected the development could raise school taxes in the town by from $92 to $524 per household, using an estimate that 1,720 to 2,580 students would live at the Greens at Chester.

Last year, the Chester school district had a total of 993 students, according to state data.

There are also political concerns. Hasidic Jews tend to vote in blocs, increasing their political leverage. The arrival of hundreds of new voters in a town of 12,000 has the possibility to remake the political balance in Chester, as it has in other towns, Jamieson said. The town recently voted to switch to a ward system of representation in preparation for a major demographic shift.

“There’s a lack of trust,” said Mary Laiks, who lived in Chester for many years and now lives in nearby Warwick.

The developers maintain that the entire conversation about having a Hasidic enclave in the town is discriminatory.

The Greens at Chester, they said, is not being built for Hasidic Jews. That, they say, is a biased inference based on their religious identity, and the fact that at least some of them live in Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn.

“We will sell to anybody who wants to buy,” said Livy Schwartz, one of the developers, as he stood with one of his business partners, Joseph Landau, at the development site in late July. Both are Hasidic Jews.

They underscored how the development will not consist of dense, multistory apartment buildings of the kind common in Kiryas Joel, but large attached and stand-alone houses they estimate will sell for around $500,000 each.

“They are worried about the big families,” said Chana, 40, a mother of nine children in Kiryas Joel on a recent Wednesday afternoon, explaining why she feels there is concern. “But there’s no invasion. We have bigger families, so we need more space for the children to play outside and have breathing space.”

Valentine, in an interview in his office at Town Hall in July, was unapologetic about his public comments, which included statements like: “If there was any way we could choose who could live there, we would do it. But we can’t.”

He said the main issue holding up the building permits is that the town believes that the 2010 settlement limits the “typical” house in the subdivision to 1,750 to 2,500 square feet, including the garage.

“They want to get more than what they are entitled to,” Valentine said.

The developers said that limiting the size of homes has been used as a tactic elsewhere to reduce the appeal of developments to Hasidic buyers, and disagree that the settlement imposed a limit.

Jamieson, who resigned as town supervisor last September after pleading guilty to collecting unemployment while working in that role, also stood by his comments.

“It’s not anti-Semitic to say it’s going to be a Hasidic development,” he said near the site. “I’m just telling the truth.”

Justin Rodriguez, a spokesman for Neuhaus, the county executive, said that it appeared that the developers “are using litigation in an attempt to silence public officials from expressing the concerns of their constituents.” He added that the lawsuit against the county had no merit, “and we will vigorously oppose it.”

As the developers wait for the court to rule, they are continuing to build the infrastructure, costing them millions. The roads, curbs and water and sewer lines for the first 82 houses are nearly ready, spiraling up a hillside that has been denuded of trees.

Schwartz said he doesn’t want to send the bulldozers home, because according to another town ruling, the infrastructure must be ready before final building permits will be granted.

“This isn’t the American way,” Schwartz said. “It doesn’t matter if you are black, Hispanic or Jewish. How you look shouldn’t be allowed to determine how you build and what you can build.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.