Hope springs eternal

by Steve Hopkins The Kingston Times  February 16, 2006

The Teicher Organization was back before the Kingston Planning Board this week, hoping in vain to avoid having to get involved in a long, drawn-out environmental impact review process. The until-now red-hot Mid-Hudson real estate boom has shown signs of cooling of late, and the developers wouldn't be wrong to fear that any approvals gained for this project might just come in time for the market to bottom out, forcing them to have to hang onto the property until the next upswing 10 or 15 years from now.
But then, when you can get a nice double-sized urban lot for a buck and a promise, you've got nothing to lose. And if you're the sort of developer that Teicher might like to become one day - like The Landing's AVR Realty (AVR standing for Allan V. Rose, a veteran wheeler-dealer in hotels and shopping malls) and Sailor's Cove's Slane Companies of Columbus, Ohio (another big real-estate holder, which probably created the 771 Polaris LLC entity to handle this and other similarly risk-infused building projects) - you've been through this a million times before. You're in it for the long haul, and even if you've spent a few million on a post-industrial wasteland, you really can't lose either. You're essentially building a portfolio of properties, trying to increase the worth of each, so you can leverage more money in the future and grow and grow and grow until you can sell it all for a gazillion dollars and live out your days on a beach in the tax-free Cayman Islands.
It's not a disaster if you don't get to build a project yourself. It's the site plan approval you're after that adds millions in value before you've even put a spade in the ground, and that will still be there for you or a prospective buyer to whom you can flip the property when the market starts to rise again.
The problem is that this long-term strategy doesn't do much for a municipality like Kingston, fairly drowning in fallow, chemically tainted former industrial properties and reeling from rising taxes. The city has the bad self-image of an ignored, mildly abused middle child: oodles of potential and not much to show for it. There's a chip on Kingston's shoulder from decades of failure, of watching these big, unwieldy deals get cobbled together and fall apart. There's still no Kirkland. There's still no Noah. There's still only one piddling tenant in the fancy industrial park on the hill. A skyscraper in Uptown? A riverfront studded with luxury condos? Even among those who want it badly the prevailing attitude is: I'll believe it when I see it.
A message to the Planning Board: Take your time and do it right. Try to concentrate and get at least one of these things in the can as a template for how to do the rest. Don't cave on important issues that will come back and bite future Kingstonians in the butt, like not building a viable sewer infrastructure and not accounting for traffic increases on all major local thoroughfares, not just in the neighborhood of each project. Demand that whatever goes up not be cheesy, wildly out-of-place or a drag on the rest of us. Don't worry, AVR and Teicher and Slane probably aren't going anywhere, and if they do, someone will be along to take their place.
Meanwhile things are edging toward the better, organically, even without major development. New people are still moving in, adding their ideas to the mix of what they already like about Kingston, a vibrantly weird, artistically and aesthetically interesting place. There's a cluster of new residents who seem to be able to make a living off the web, who don't have to be any particular place to work and who have chosen Kingston as the half-built, promising satellite city in which to settle down. New galleries are popping up, oblivious to the fact that there's no money to be made - it's not the point. That's why I think there's hope with Rob Iannucci and his waterfront maritime fantasyland - he genuinely seems to be in it for all of the right-brained reasons: fun, creating a destination, fixing old things up, teaching kids ancient, forgotten skills and so on. He seems comfortable with never making another dime in his life.
Speaking of fantasy theme parks, I have an idea for the Millens property. Film a scary movie there (and a video game), about some fast-walking zombies who thrive on toluene and plastic from old car seats and prey on the little kids at the Catholic home up the street. Then freeze the place in time just the way it is - the barbed wire, the giant piles of twisted metal - and charge admission to be scared to death by high school kids made up as zombies jumping out from between stacks of flattened cars.
You never know ...

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