After Fighting Hasidic Housing, a Small Town Faces a Backlash

“We’re doing what we can to alleviate 432 Hasidic houses in the town of Chester,” Alexander Jamieson, who was then the town supervisor, said at a heated public meeting in 2018 that was posted on YouTube. “There’s nobody on the board, nobody who wants the development to go through.”

Now the town of Chester has something else to worry about: A proposed lawsuit and investigation by Letitia James, the state attorney general.

The attorney general on Thursday jumped into the dispute, accusing local officials in Chester and Orange County of violating fair housing laws and discriminating against the Hasidic community, and petitioning a judge to join a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the Greens at Chester, the developer.

The filing is James’ first major effort to intervene in the heated housing disputes that have roiled suburban counties north of New York City, as Hasidic Jews seek to build new developments to accommodate their expanding numbers. The growth of the Hasidic population has sparked fears among non-Hasidic residents that the newcomers will change the character of existing towns.

The motion is a prelude to James’ office filing a separate lawsuit against the town and Orange County if officials do not settle with the developer and allow the project to proceed, she said.

In an interview, James said she decided to intervene because the discriminatory actions and statements of town officials struck her as particularly egregious.

“It is critically important that I send a strong message to communities that would engage in discrimination on its face that it will not be tolerated either in Chester, or on Long Island, or in any community in the state of New York,” she said.

Jamieson, the former town supervisor who is named in the lawsuit, denied that anti-Semitism and discrimination were at the root of the town’s opposition to the development. He said the concern is about housing size and density.

The proposed project encompasses over 430 homes on 117 acres, potentially adding thousands of new residents to the town of 12,000. This could stretch public resources, and shift the town’s political balance: In the town’s elections this November, for example, town supervisor Robert Valentine, who is also named in the lawsuit, won reelection by just 12 votes.

“We are not full of bigots, we are not anti-Semites,” Jamieson said of the town’s residents. “This is just about the size of the houses. The other stuff is just smoke and mirrors. It’s just a distraction.”

Valentine did not respond to a request for comment, but in an interview earlier this year defended his handling of the project.

The attorney general’s motion also names Orange County and the county executive, Steven M. Neuhaus, as among those violating fair housing laws by seeking to block the project. It quotes Neuhaus, who is a Chester resident, suggesting ways to stop the housing development at a 2018 town meeting.

“We can pressure the developer,” Neuhaus had said at the meeting, according to the complaint. “I don’t know when the water was tested ... There’s a lot of stuff to revisit.”

“We are going to work together to do what’s right for this town,” he said.

At another meeting, Neuhaus “defiantly stated that he would not authorize sewer permits at the Greens,” according to the attorney general’s motion. Subsequently, the county asked the state Department of Health to redo its water testing at the site.

The county said the attorney general’s motion was without merit.

“The attorney general has not identified a single permit being withheld by the county,” Langdon Chapman, the Orange County attorney, said in a statement Thursday. “Asking the state to do its job and review constituent concerns about water quality is perfectly reasonable.”

The saga over the development is a lengthy one. The town has fought proposed development at the site since 1985, when Wilbur Fried, a non-Hasidic developer, first sought to build houses there. Fried eventually sued in federal court, and in 2010, the town settled, granting him the right to build the homes on its hilly acres.

In 2017, Fried sold the still undeveloped lot to the Greens at Chester, which is owned, at least in part, by Hasidic Jews from Kiryas Joel, a nearby community made up mostly of ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews. Once the town got wind of the new owners, it created roadblock after roadblock to try to stop construction, according to the complaint.

In January 2018, the town introduced a Floor-to-Area Ratio law that would force the developer to build extremely small and unmarketable units, the complaint says. It also proposed levying an extra tax on the property, and mandated that the sewer line be rerouted.

To this day, no building permits for houses have been granted, although roads and other infrastructure have been completed. “Defendants have succeeded in effectively halting development of the Greens,” the attorney general’s complaint states.

In its own lawsuit, filed in July, the Greens at Chester asked for $100 million in damages for breach of contract and purported violations of fair housing and other anti-discrimination laws, as well as permits for the project to proceed.

“Every step of the way, we felt like this development was being used as a vessel to advance bias and discrimination,” said Livy Schwartz, one of the developers. “So in the end it became less about a housing development, and more about the existence of the Jewish people in this part of the state.”

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Last week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vetoed a bill that would have allowed Chester to collect a real estate transfer tax and use those funds to purchase land or development rights within the town. The governor cited the litigation involving the development as the reason.

For her part, James said she wants a judge to immediately declare that the town has violated the Fair Housing Act, which would stop it from enforcing local laws that are intended to discriminate against the Hasidic community. Her motion also suggests that a judge take additional actions, such as assigning a court-ordered monitor and requiring training to make sure that no further such discrimination occurs.

“This campaign to deny housing to members of the Jewish community is not only a clear violation of our laws, but is antithetical to our basic values and blatantly anti-Semitic,” she said in a statement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .