Regional Plan Association's 100-Year History in the Hudson Valley

In May 1929, the counties that make up the Hudson Valley sent delegates representing over 60 organizations to the presentation of the first Regional Plan. Delegates were from town and village governments, such as Larchmont, Newburgh, Ossining, Spring Valley, and White Plains, as well as farm bureaus and utilities, like Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation and the Orange and Rockland Electric Company. Several early members of RPA’s Board of Directors lived in Dutchess County and Orange County. One in particular, John Willkie, was the President of Central Hudson Gas & Electric and he lived in Poughkeepsie near the company’s headquarters.

Much progress was made on the first Regional Plan’s recommendations in the 1930s. Within four years of the plan’s publication, RPA noted that the highway between Tarrytown and Port Chester was being improved and that the cross county parkway between Yonkers and New Rochelle was on its way to realization. RPA also highlighted that lands acquired for an Eastern State Parkway had supplied 3,650 acres of parks in Putnam County, which had no registered parkland in 1928.

Between 1926 and 1940, parkland in the metropolitan region increased by 50%, largely in areas recommended by RPA. About 44,000 acres were acquired in this 14-year period. This included the expansion of Bear Mountain and the top of the Palisades, which was acquired and donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who specified that its use should be in accordance with the first Regional Plan’s recommendation.

RPA’s 1960 study, ​The Race for Open Space, set off a new wave of park acquisitions, including the Shawangunks which stretch across Orange, Sullivan, and Ulster counties, as well as Taconic State Park which straddles New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

Around this time, RPA supported the work of Scenic Hudson, the Hudson River Conservation Society, and others against Con Edison’s initial proposal to build a pumped storage hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain. Former RPA President C. McKim Norton recalled the debate in an interview in 1980:

“(T)he annual report of Con Ed for one year back there had a picture of this project on the cover, and we had a man on our Board who was in that company who was kind of in charge of public relations, I think his name was Otto Manz. I said, ​‘This picture is terrible. You never should have published it or you never should have done it, because this is going to raise a terrible row over Storm King.’”

RPA recommended that a comprehensive plan be developed for the Hudson River waterfront and that some parts of the waterfront be preserved as parkland. News outlets like the New York Times and the Newark News endorsed RPA’s stance on the issue and RPA staff members and Board members like Arthur Palmer and Albert Merck provided statements and testimony in 1965, contained in the report Planning the Hudson:

The report continued by noting, ​“There is no point in planning beaches downstream if pollution continues upstream, and a depollution program will affect and be affected by land use plans.”

RPA also recommended caution regarding the expansion of Stewart Airport in Newburgh, NY. While in its early years RPA championed smaller regional airports, it later reevaluated estimates based on new data and the Port Authority’s own projections on air traffic. RPA applauded the acquisition of a land bank for possible future development at Stewart Airport but said that the priority should be to improve capacity at the three existing large regional airports. Around this time period, RPA also helped support the creation of Patterns for Progress, an organization dedicated to planning and advocacy in the Hudson Valley area.

RPA has been an innovator in using media to involve the public in planning decisions since its beginning. For example, a memo in 1923 discussed educating the public about urban planning through newspaper articles and the newly-established radio and film industries. In 1948, RPA hosted a conference that highlighted how residents could get involved in their neighborhood’s development. In 1963, RPA launched Goals for the Region, a town hall meeting series that used television, listener groups, and written questionnaires to survey approximately 5,600 people about regional planning.

Residents from the Hudson Valley represented almost one-fifth of the participants in Goals, which was disproportionately high compared to how much of the region’s population they made up in 1960, with particularly strong participation from Orange County. Orange County Community College arranged a Goals for the Hudson-Delaware Region conference that was co-sponsored by the County Planning Boards of Orange, Rockland, Sullivan and Ulster, the Regional Chamber of Commerce Council, and Regional Plan Association. RPA summarized the results of Goals in Public Participation in Regional Planning which became part of the Second Regional Plan.

RPA expanded this public engagement work in 1973 during the CHOICES for​’76 project. CHOICES was an Emmy award-winning series of televised town hall meetings. RPA created several one-hour documentaries which asked viewers to weigh in on planning decisions about housing, transportation, the environment, poverty, and cities and suburbs. Every major news network in the region featured the program. Paper questionnaires were distributed by more than 700 banks, public libraries, and newspapers, and in RPA’s book,​How to Save Urban America. Questions on planning decisions were listed on screen and viewers were prompted to fill their ballots. A high percentage of residents from Westchester and Rockland counties participated, and there were also significant numbers of Dutchess, Orange, and Sullivan county residents involved, according to RPA’s ballot analysis.

RPA’s public engagement efforts continued in the 1980s with Westchester 2000, a 700-member citizen task force dedicated to looking at urban planning issues and supported by the Westchester County Association, S. J. Schulman, the former County Planning Commissioner, and Andrew O’Rourke, the County Executive. William B. Shore, a longstanding RPA staff member, was a Tarrytown resident and the project manager of the initiative, and he worked alongside project coordinator Betty Greenfield.

The plan also stated that, ​“At the same time that the region has been devouring land at its periphery, we have been abandoning our urban areas, hollowing out cities that historically have been the locus for jobs and people. Cities such as Hicksville, Trenton, and Poughkeepsie lost 10% or more of their population between 1970 and 1990.”

In addition to reinvesting in downtowns, RPA’s Third Regional Plan articulated a Greensward Campaign, which included creating and restoring parks in underserved urban neighborhoods and establishing a regional network of greenways. The campaign also explored funds for planning, pollution prevention, and land acquisition via state-level initiatives that targeted consumption of natural resources, like taxes on extractive industries and the tourism industry.

Open space preservation and community engagement in the Hudson Valley continue to be a key parts of RPA’s work. Over the years, RPA has partnered with transit agencies and local communities on a variety of place-based design projects. In 2000, RPA helped develop a vision plan for mixed-use and open space in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, which helped resolve decades of legal and political paralysis around the cleanup of one of the most notorious brownfields in the Hudson Valley. In 2016, RPA worked on a similar project in Tarrytown, focused on the Metro North station area and waterfront.

Between 2000 and 2019, RPA released several reports on transit-oriented development in the Hudson Valley. It also published smart growth reports and toolkits, including the Mid-Hudson Sustainability and Smart Growth Toolkit, which was designed in partnership with NYSERDA to help implement the Mid-Hudson Regional Sustainability Plan. Continuing this thread of balancing open space preservation with community development, RPA, along with scholars from SUNY New Paltz, quantified the value of open space in Ulster, Dutchess, Orange, and Putnam Counties in Adding Value: Open Space Conservation in the Mid-Hudson Valley. The report argued that open space protected the region from floods, filtered water, sequestered carbon and more, which meant less expenditures by taxpayers and public agencies to address these issues. However, municipalities in the Hudson Valley struggled at times with the loss of tax revenue from protected land. RPA summed up the competing interests in a blog post:

“As municipalities face tighter and tighter budgets, the burden of lost revenue has, in some communities, caused a backlash against land trusts, threatening future open space protection… We need both open space and thriving municipalities. To balance these two priorities, the report lays out a series of recommendations ranging from ways to prioritize protection of open space and adopting smart growth policies to reduce pressure on unprotected open space, to actions that expand public knowledge about and improve practices around property tax exemptions while finding ways to offset unfair burdens of lost revenue from exempt land.”

More recently, RPA has investigated how areas like the Hudson Valley can create more housing for people of all incomes without necessarily resorting to large, land-consuming new developments. In its 2020 Be My Neighbor report, RPA found that the region can expand housing opportunities by allowing and encouraging options such as accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and conversions from single-family homes to multi-family homes. In 2021, RPA published a set of fact sheets outlining how legislation like the New York State Accessory Homes Act (S4547, A4854) could help counties in the Hudson Valley create more than 80,000 new homes using their existing housing stock. Specifically, in Dutchess County there is potential for creating over 8,100 ADUs in the next two decades; in Orange, almost 10,000 ADUs; in Putnam, 3,300 ADUs; in Rockland, over 10,000 ADUs; in Sullivan, 3,600 ADUs; in Ulster, 5,500 ADUs; and in Westchester alone, over 40,000 ADUs.

As RPA reflects on its history in the Hudson Valley, we look forward to continuing to advocate for balancing community development with open space needs in this scenic area of the region.