Letter: A Longstanding Plea for Better Planning

By Ken Rosenthal

The following letter was sent to Planning Director Christine Brestrup, Town Manager Paul Bockelman, and District 3 Councilors Dorothy Pam and George Ryan on June 23.

One criticism of those who are trying to help Town leadership improve Town Center planning is that we are late to the discussion of better planning.  We’re not.  Here is what I said to the Select Board seven years ago, and with a few updates (dear friend John Fox, mentioned here, died three years ago). I’d be happy to deliver this message today.

“I am Ken Rosenthal, 53 Sunset Avenue. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the matter brought to your attention by John Fox. He has pointed out serious flaws in the Town’s planning and decision-making processes. My purpose is not to assign responsibility, but rather to point out to you what I believe to be a fundamental failure of elected and appointed Amherst Town government to respond to the basic needs of development in ways that will benefit the long-term interests of the Town. It’s a failure that arises from a perspective on commercial development that I believe is erroneous.

“We all know that Amherst is a one-industry town. Its industry is higher education, and most of the residents of this town are the immediate consumers of that industry’s products, the students.

“For some time now those who would be planners of the Town’s development have behaved as if they believe that the route to the Town’s commercial success, and its best advantage for taxpayers, is to encourage as much private housing for students on private property as possible. That kind of commercial development is counterproductive.

“I want to emphasize that I am not against commercial development in Amherst. I am a lawyer and business person. My business career in Amherst was in higher education management, but for many years elsewhere, before I retired back to Amherst in 2006, I was active in the food and beverage industry. Amherst once had a Development and Industrial Commission appointed by the Select Board, and for a time I served as its chair.

“Amherst is at its best as a diverse community whose business centers provide the goods and services that year-around residents desire. The more of those year-around residents – people of all income levels and ages, employees of the Town and of the Town’s businesses and industry who reside in Town, retirees who choose to live here – the more of those residents, the better. They are the ones who would drive the economic engines that provide employment for the Town’s service- and shop-workers twelve months a year. They are the ones who would walk to our several town centers and spend there the money they earn right here.

“It is said that the Town is deficient in providing enough housing, and that’s surely true. Department chairs at UMass say they wish there was more affordable housing in Amherst for the new faculty they hire, and we know that many Amherst employees say they cannot find affordable housing in this town where they work. Implicit in the Town’s recent planning, however, is the drive to build a different kind of housing – housing for undergraduate students. This is expressed in the current proposals for North Amherst’s Retreat, the plans for Kendrick Place and the replacement for the Carriage Shops. By whatever name, they are undergraduate dormitories. 

“Undergraduate dormitories have no place in the residential and commercial areas of Amherst. They belong on the college and university campuses where, until relatively recently, they have always been. With small exceptions Amherst and Hampshire Colleges built housing for all their undergraduates, and right up through the construction of Southwest so did UMass. And private developers built housing for the rest of us.

“If the developers of the Retreat, Kendrick Place, and the Carriage Shop housing wanted to build for year-around families, I and others would welcome those projects. They would include the amenities that young or old singles, couples and families desire. Their new residents would mostly be people who work in our main industry and its peripherals – higher education. There is a demand for that kind of residential development, but it is now satisfied by our neighboring towns. 

“Instead, the recent developers have sought (unreasonably, I would say) and been granted (wrongly, I would say) permission to avoid the requirements of the Town’s zoning laws and regulations so they can build dormitories where none belong. The results are so-called mixed use facilities which are in fact single use dormitories whose residents will adversely impact the nearby quality of living for their neighbors without improving the merchant economy in the centers. The absence of adequate parking in Kendrick Place and the Carriage Shops is just one obvious example. 

“Their developers and our planners argue that this is good for the Town in two ways: real estate taxes will be paid, and the demand for student housing will to some extent be satisfied. Two wrongs here: First, housing of such scale on those sites for year-around residents would pay the same taxes. And, as for the demand for student housing, it can never be satisfied by housing on private property in Amherst unless one imagines a town that none of us would want to live in. 

“There are other approaches, but the developers disdain them and the planners don’t encourage those alternatives. Build housing for year-round residents in the center of the Town and its village centers. Let public/private partnerships encourage student housing on the campus where it belongs. And by the way, if done creatively, there will be added tax benefits to the Town.

“Perhaps the current studies by U3Advisors jointly paid for by the University and the Town will take us in that direction.  But our planners have failed to correct errors in the draft documents of previous consultants, and have provided those erroneous documents to U3 as well as permitting them to circulate to the public uncorrected.

“The planners speak of infill and suggest that their support for dormitories in residential neighborhoods is the only way to accommodate the Town’s housing and commercial needs. Citizen residents of the Town know otherwise, but until the very end of U3’s research their voices have not been heard in the numbers and with the diversity they deserve.

“The frustration that this is causing is manifest now in Town Meeting, in op-ed pieces, in new citizen groups that are forming, in the investigation of Town proceedings by good citizens like John Fox. None of this would be necessary if the planners who influence Town leadership responded to the demand for year-around housing and identified with the needs and opinions of the citizen residents. 

“Variances are available to correct mistakes in zoning laws; special permits are privileges that must serve the good of the community as a whole as well as the desires of the few who seek them. Our planners should expect the developers who would build in Amherst to respect the desires of the Town expressed through our laws, rather than recommending exceptions that defeat them.”