I recently went to a town planning board meeting (held on Thursdays in my town at 7:30pm). The rumor was it was going to have conversation about the recent news that town was going to build a new “Little League” complex in what is our town’s multi-use open space called The Windham Path. Now, this path was conceived by the local owner of the Bike and Ski rental Shop Nick Bove and a few other local activists. Make no mistake the Windham Path is about a concerted effort to attract and encourage tourism to the town. Bove’s primary business could never exist with out the tourism that is present in the town and that has been a major contributor to the continued success of business like his rental shop. So in a real way Bove’s motivation for the path was less about the protection of nature but the corporate exploitation of this resource as part of a bike trail system he envisioned one day would reach to Woodstock , NY (ironically in the early 1800’s Woodstock was part of the land that would become the present town of Windham). These types of projects were designed to encourage the business of tourism and to help increase the process of gentrification by bringing in the Air BnB short term rental businesses that would grow as well.
However, this night we would not get the chance to hear about the new complex in the Windham Path that is becoming a contention among second homeowners, retiree transplants and certain locals and other younger family locals on the other side. Now, I just remind you one thing people aren’t mentioning often is that our precious little town is not growing in population only 1708 people (2020 Census data) or 48 people more than we had 20 years ago in 2000. Since 1980 the population has only grown by 45 people. That also happens to be the year I was born. So, as you can see this town is far from a metropolis.
But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good town or a nice place to live. It’s a small town with a big problem— no growth in the town other than gentrification through tourism. Just last year the town’s High School could not field a baseball team because it only had 5 players. And the entire reason we need a new Little League field is that the town never purchased enough land to create a parking space after the land for the field was donated to it by the 1969 by the Knights of The Road. The field used to be next to a ski shop that only stayed open in the winter months; so its parking lot area was used for the spring and summer baseball season. But, now like everyone else they sold the ski shop to people that turned it into a liquor store and are now adding on extra space for AirBnB rentals.
So, now our town feels that it needs to build a new facility to accommodate the Little League players. Ironically, the town already has a park called CD Lane Park in honor of one of our past illustrious County Legislatures in the area called Maplecrest, which is admittedly somewhat off the beaten path of RT-23 (Main St.). But, the park already has all the facilities that this new facility will have a pavilion with bathrooms, parking, a lake, beach, baseball field and more. The only problem is that our Town Supervisor Tommy Hoyt claims that a permeant fence for a baseball field would require cleaning in the case of major flooding. Flooding we haven’t seen since 2010 and the Tropical Storm Irene that flooded our town completely. This is clearly a vanity project for the town supervisor to have a big shinny new complex for baseball in the main entrance to the town on RT-23— the only catch the town barely has enough kids to play Baseball now! So what will happen in the near future?
And so this fight is going to become about the dying dream of the town as a home for families and the reality that gentrification in Windham has been a long on going process since the 1970’s. The problem facing Windham is not the fight between the families of the young kids (the minority really since only 310 kids k-12 are in the local school) and the overwhelming number of second home owners and tourists that pour into the town each year to ski, hike, bike and just get away from the New York City grind (aka The City because if you live in this area of NYS only one city matters). Our problem is that gentrification sucks towns like mine dry. It might take 50 plus years or more to do it but eventually the process will leave an empty shell of a place with a glossy veneer on the outside and nothing at its core but rot. And that is what this fight should be about, but it isn’t. One would think this would be our concern as we plan buildings and future Parkes in our town. It is not.
The town planning board made it very clear the big lots are gone in the town that only has 45 square miles or so of land area is now in the final phase of gentrification. That is the phase where only small lots with massive homes are built in what looks like suburbia in New Jersey or California.
And for 1.5hrs during this meeting I listened to home projects that were just that. Builder X wishes to build a 4090 sq ft home on a 1.3 acre plot in location Y. The most extreme was the condo complex of 29 units ranging from 5 bed room penthouses to 1 room efficiencies all on a .75 acre spot including parking for 47 cars in a 3.5 story building. HOA included in this lovely proposal. Yes, that is correct 47 cars for a complex that has more than twice as many potential occupants than parking spaces. So imagine a place that has room for over 90 people but only can park 47 cars max. What a Quandary?
The planning board’s solution was to talk about reducing the number of the units slightly— perhaps having only enough for 80 people or so. The board’s big concern for the Developers of all the properties I heard that day was to reduce floor space so big homes didn’t have the ability to have 10-15 or more occupants at time and over tax their septic systems. The reason why this was such a concern is not some zoning law (which the town really doesn’t have); but, because we’re in the New York City Watershed, and they didn’t want the blowback of leaking septics giving people in New York City a good case of cholera or typhoid fever. So, this is their solution to two problems: one, an already over taxed waste water treatment plant in town ,and two, the potential issues with New York City suing the town over lax sanitation regulations. Reduce the number of beds and everything will go away in their minds.
It shows that ultimately the big question to the town isn’t what are we doing to prevent the over building and destruction of the environment. No, the planning board that is made up of trades people like painters, builders and a Relator want to insure the building frenzy continues for as long as possible. And now that we’re down to the last bit of land to be purchased that means the profits on land sales will soar and the building costs will triple as they attempt to fit the biggest house possible on these small lots. And after all the free land is gone—the hope is that the building craze continues with people buying up older homes and demolishing them to build new McMansions. Just one problem with our planning committee— who is going to buy land in a ghost town?
One cannot help but get the sense that another massive housing bubble is being formed. In fact in 2022 a report by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank made the starkstatement that a housing bubble was brewing. The reserved talk about things like market fundamentals translates to the regions of the country like Boise, Idaho that in 2021 Fortune Magazine stated homes were 86.4% over inflated in prices. The fact the rising interests rates have cooled the market from the heady days of the Pandemic aren’t in my opinion enough to reverse the climate of rampant speculation and overbuilding.
This is especially true when we discuss the types of homes that are being built. The idea of an affordable home in Windham under 3,000 sq feet in new construction is like searching for a pot of gold at the end of rainbow. It just doesn’t exist at this point. These homes that are being built are not for permanent residence either. Much like the Aspen Trend these homes will be vacant for 40%-50% of the year with the Winter and Summer Seasons being the prime rental times. Or , so the people that are building these homes hope will continue to occur.
But, it would seem that AirBnB Rentals are slipping too as of June of 2023 Market Watch reported that rental sector was seeing a strong downward trend. The reality for the town of Windham, NY is more bleak since the Ski Slope has been pushing itself to become a private Mecca for a sub-set of wealthy people who perhaps cannot afford the $10 or $20 million dollar condo in Jackson Hole , Steam Boat Springs, Vail or Aspen they can afford the $200K membership to Windham Mountain Club and $2.5 or $4.5 million dollar ski home on the mountain here only 2.5 hrs from NYC. It’s a dream that some how this town will turn from quirky provincial town into a toast of wealthy cultured socialites that own a membership in an exclusive mountain club. It does sort of cause one to question what will happen to the housing market in a community that is basing its growth on building new homes— the magic of an exclusive Mountain Club is that it is by nature excluding a vast majority of people from its ranks.
One cannot help but, ask themselves, if an exclusive group of home of owners in a club become the core group of residents in this town—who lives in all these homes they’ve just built? It’s a good question and it makes you wonder if Windham [and any town like it ] will find itself in a future that looks eerily like the Treasure Coast of Florida in 2008-09 with entire communities vacant or nearly vacant?
And it isn’t impossible to see this future hitting towns like Windham that have over leveraged a single asset like real estate. It is similar to the way nations that have economic systems based on the exploitation of natural resources fall into the Resource Curse. The economies become stagnant and focused solely on the exploitation of the finite natural resources and this leads to weak economies that are highly unstable. Windham can be said to have this same problem given that is an economy based real estate sales and tourism. All of our jobs are centered around these core industries: restaurants, bars, cafes/eateries, convenience stores/ gas stations, realtors, hotels, house cleaners, lumber yard, building trades, and finally property management firms basically. The economy is driven by second home owners that come up on the weekends either buying new homes or rebuilding older homes.
My point is simple that these jobs are linked to the tourist trade— remove the fantasy that Windham’s an infinite space from which we can build and rebuild homes endlessly without urban clutter and you start to see my big point. We’re already running out of space. But never fear our chamber of commerce is here to save the day!
So, on March 26th of this year our wondrous chamber of commerce— Windham Chamber of Commerce had one of their monthly meetings this time on the state of the town in the aftermath of the Windham Mountain Club— the general tenor of the brainstorming mission was to throw out any and all ideas. The only problem is the ideas being thrown out were for more gentrification to occur! The entire session was driven by the catch phrase of “entrepreneurialism” which of course is code for taking local ideas and natural resources and finding liquid equity from the outside. In short turning what is left of the community that is locally owned into unequal partnerships with capital from NYC! That’s the magic of the entrepreneurs’ they want to see happen.
We’re not talking about local home grown and collectivist approaches to solving our economic stagnation from the bottom up—no, we’re talking about the chamber of commerce turning into a startup resource; Pushing our local ideas and resources into the hands of those with money! The problem with this plan is that outsourcing things like: Winter Carnivals, Music Concert Series, Dog Parks, Skate Park, Cannabis Growing And Dispensary, and of course a Gym and Indoor Pool. Most of these will not attract too much money from outside sources. But, some will and they will funnel the money into the coffers of other companies and states.
This passage quoted in Jane Jacobs’ classic “Cities and The Wealth of Nations” (1984) is from a 1889 speech made by Henry Grady of Atlanta Georgia in a Board Room with Northern businessmen. It shows the same basic problem that Windham has since its only value to others is a tourist trap. All of the key resources that we in Windham could use are turn into imports. In this case we might just as well as be as dead as this figure of speech from the 1880’s in Jacobs’ example. Project after Project the big ones are going to large construction firms. The old Thompson House Hotel that is now the Boutique Hotel called Wylder was renovated by a company called Baxter Construction from Poughkeepsie, NY. I used to work with them on projects with certain clients in Dutchess County NY. The landscaping, site clean up, and certain demolition was completed by company called LCS also from Poughkeepsie that I used to work with at the Culinary Institute of America. Neither of those jobs were done by locals. The new townhousing being built on our South Street location near the Ski Slope is done completely by outside contractors. The Ski Slope’s new majority owners Kemmons , Wilson and Partners a hospital fund (out of Tennessee) already have their own property management group Valor Hospitality Partners that will soon take over the day to day operations of the Mountain for sure. And when it comes to maintaining properties of the club I bet you Valor will also be the go to company. After all Clubs work best when the member is required only to pay the membership dues, spend in the properties and relax because everything else is covered.
That reality will push the competition for securing business with second home owners and these property management firms into overdrive for sure. After all as the second home owner pool starts to dry up in the face of an ever more exclusive Ski Resort and a reduction in revenue that brings to the town as a whole—the future will be one of further stagnation of occupations and decline economically for sure. It turns out that towns need a vibrant and mixed coalition of enterprises that develop long term sustainability. The Capitalist Model of business is not this mechanism.
Capitalism by definition is system that requires the infinite growth to ensure the creation of profits. It also requires cheap exploitable resources both of the natural and human kind to make excess profits available for the capitalist class to exist. In this sense as Dr. Herman Daily used to like to phrase it capitalism is a system of “low entropy inputs and high entropy outputs”— meaning in short the natural materials of production lumber, coal, iron ore, and so on all had to go through a series of processes that would ultimate turn them into a finished product: a car or a chair or refined steel for building buildings and coke for making steel. In the end these new products were highly ordered wastes eventually and it would require even more energy to reduce these items into some thing new like a wooden chair into mulch or art of some type— a car’s steel frame back into an ingot for a new item. Towns, however are much harder to recycle— once built up and allowed to decay they do so slowly withering away until some new boom occurs. Capitalism tends to move where the profits are the highest and where wealth can exploit the labor the easiest. And sure a dead town certainly might fit those bills, but only if it is in a region where the cities have vibrant growth again.
Our goal as a town should be to break free of those capitalist shackles— instead of pushing how do entice the further gentrification of the town— we should look to collectivist approaches. We should be asking ourselves what economic activities can we engage in that will bring about maximum employment , low environmental impact , and allow our population the greatest employment flexibility.
In Sweden the city of Stockholm the Water Treatment Plant turns the excess purified water’s heat into to heat for homes. It is possible to store heat for months at time. Imagine a town where not only does the water-treatment plant produce extra clean heat energy for the winter all year round using heat exchangers and advanced storage technology, but the sludge of human waste could be turned into safe composting materials with the correct processing. My point is that we as a town have to look at all our resources even ones that are a bit off-putting to create a new collective economic system.
What do I mean by collective economies? I mean economies that based on worker and consumer cooperatives instead of our traditional business models. Worker cooperatives have a much higher job satisfaction, more resilient to economic shocks and are more productive than standard business models in Capitalism. All of those things are exactly what my little town needs— it needs people to stay and more important to grow. It also needs people be engaged in the economy and the politics of the town. And I can think of no better solution than a well crafted system of worker cooperatives and consumer cooperatives like the Spanish Mondragon Cooperative does in Spain at least.
It is easier to fight about the Little League field for sure when the rest of our problems seem so insurmountable. It is easy to blame the Private Equity firms that are buying up the town and the second home owners with their Air BnB’s—instead of looking at the policies of the town’s government and the rush to wealth generation that our primary industries saw as the best windfall of profits since early 2000’s and the hysteria of Terrorism. Those are easy things to blame. It is also just as easy to create plans that will ultimately only lead to further gentrification of the town and the alienation of the remaining locals. What is hard is to make real sustainable changes that go against the very core of the illusion that underpins the socio-economic wealth generation of the town. But, it can be done and it must be done.
The proletariat is occupied. Sold out to the highest lying bidder. Thus we live in squalor, and without hope for anything - but some rich guy or investment company to decide to waste their mad construction and consumption money on us. That's no way to live. We're living it.