Hochul's housing plan would have big environmental impacts

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s well-meaning but ill-thought-out New York Housing Compact comes with concerning environmental impacts that are not widely known.

By mandating that local governments rezone land within a half-mile of Nassau County’s 59 railroad stations to allow 50 units per acre, a total of more than 1.2 million housing units could be built “as of right.” Assuming conservatively that there will be two occupants in each unit, this would add 2.4 million residents to the county’s current 1.4 million residents, almost tripling the population.

Since her proposal aims to build 800,000 new housing units statewide, requiring over a million units in just one county indicates that the 50-units-per-acre quota was arbitrarily chosen without doing the math.

This massive construction would have no environmental review, since Hochul’s proposal specifically exempts these projects from the State Environmental Quality Review Act.

For nearly 50 years, SEQR has required careful environmental reviews of major construction projects. These reviews must include public input and allow local decision-makers to require mitigation measures to protect against environmental degradation. These protections would be eliminated under Hochul’s plan. The proposal only permits local governments to look at the capacity for drinking water, sewage disposal and utilities — not the impacts on them.

By eliminating environmental review, developers would have little or no incentive to utilize green building measures and every incentive to build as inexpensively as possible. This would be bad for one project, but to allow this for more than one million new units in one county is unconscionable.

For its water needs, Long Island relies on a sole-source aquifer already under strain, especially in Nassau. Some areas near the coast are starting to see saltwater intrusion due to over-pumping. Tripling Nassau County’s population could have devastating impacts on our water supply and leave those who still have individual wells without a source of water.

Similarly, the ability of Nassau’s sewage treatment plants to handle a population three times its current size must to be investigated. For areas not connected to sewage treatment plants, additional on-site septic systems would exacerbate problems of excess nitrogen leaching into bays and harbors, leading to more harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion and fish kills. The construction also would increase the amount of impervious surfaces like roofs and parking lots, leading to more stormwater runoff and degradation of wetlands that protect our communities from major storms and serve as biofilters and habitat for wildlife.

Rather than having these requirements considered by the appropriate legislative committees and then debated in the State Legislature as with any major legislation, the governor has included this plan in her budget proposal with little opportunity for public input. It was also developed without consulting local governments that would be most affected.

One example of the extreme impact is the Village of Roslyn Harbor. It has 356 homes. Under the proposal, it would be required to rezone to permit 6,122 new housing units. At two persons per unit, this would increase the village’s population from 1,051 to 13,295. How is a small village going to provide the services needed?

While there is a need for more housing around the state, it is clear that this proposal is not well thought-out and would create problems that would forever change our communities and damage our environment for generations to come. The environmental gains many of us have worked to achieve for decades are in jeopardy.

The governor should withdraw this proposal from the budget process and work with local governments and other stakeholders to craft a workable plan to provide needed housing in an environmentally friendly way.

 THIS GUEST ESSAY reflects the views of Eric Swenson, secretary of Friends of the Bay, an Oyster Bay-based nonprofit environmental group.