The last two years have seen economic turbulence in the Hudson Valley as elsewhere. It’s uncertain how the pipeline of development projects that had to be postponed because of high interest rates and other reasons will be affected by the rapidly changing universe of economic opportunity.
Kingston Development LLC is the 13th item on the long agenda of the monthly meeting of the city planning board on the evening of September 16. The developer is asking for an extension of the two-year time frame given it in October 2022 to obtain a building permit “rather than the customary four months, owing to the continuous litigation associated with this project by the project opponents, and upon request by the applicant.”
Approved under the now-replaced zoning ordinance, the Kingstonian remains subject to those regulations, as modified in the approved site plan.
“We’ll see what they have to say,” said planning board chair Wayne Platte a week before the meeting.
A historic neighborhood
As approved, the Kingstonian project includes 143 apartments (14 reserved for people with incomes below 110 percent of the Area Median Income), a 32-room hotel, 427 parking spaces (plus another 206 spaces reserved in the adjacent Kingston Plaza), and more than 8000 square feet of commercial space. The Fair Street Extension, currently a city street, will be closed, and its top half will become a public pedestrian plaza.
The developers of the Kingstonian have described the mixed-use undertaking as “a community anchor” that “will tie together disparate parts of the neighborhood.”
Either connecting the Kingston Plaza to Uptown Kingston or encroaching upon the historic Stockade area — depending on one’s perspective — the $60-million-plus enterprise provides an example of a complex series of arrangements under which the developers say they are now eager to proceed. Opposing the project in the past have been several community groups and a particularly litigious and moneyed propertyowner who has argued in numerous lawsuits — so far unsuccessfully — that the 2022 resolution of the city planning board granting the Kingstonian site-plan approval should be annulled.
Extension needs extension
Three months after the initial two-year approval, the developers, citing legal challenges and supply-chain issues, had said they would probably be unable to start building in the two years their site-plan approval gave them, according to Ulster County Industrial Development Agency attorney Joseph Scott.
“If not for the multitude of unsuccessful legal challenges brought forth against the Kingstonian by the out-of-town developer, our community would have already been enjoying the benefits of this transformative project,” local principal Brad Jordan said in a statement in January 2023. “Ongoing litigation and appeals led us to recently request and receive an extension of the approvals, and while our opponent is trying to spin this as a delay, it is not our intention to utilize the entirety of this extension, and it should simply be viewed as our continued commitment to bring the Kingstonian to reality.”
The entirety two-year period of the extension is now about to expire.
The clouds recently lifted. In June of this year, the development team released an optimistic “public update notice to the community.” They were now ready “[to] move forward with the various development processes, financing, and construction.”
The team consists of Herzog Supply principals Bradley and Todd Jordan in Kingston, entities of the Poughkeepsie-based Bonura family, and Patrick Page Properties in Newburgh.
Though they couldn’t predict when construction would begin, the developers have continued to insist that their commitment to completing the project “remains unwavering.”
“Despite the setbacks and the impact of inflation, significant increases in interest rates, and higher construction costs, we are confident these challenges will stabilize to manageable levels, allowing the project to progress successfully,” their June statement said.
Building a complex, dense project on a two-and-a-half-acre landholding in a 370-year-old urban environment is not the same as building in an open field. It shouldn’t come as a total surprise — even if all goes well — if it takes quite a while longer for the first shovel to dig up ground somewhere on the site.
The Kingstonian was first proposed in 2017.
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