Prospect Street’s leafy enclave begins at Main Street and stretches northeast for a half-mile in relatively close proximity to SUNY New Paltz, restaurants, shops, and other village amenities. But many of its residents see Prospect Street as an entity unto itself, a neighborhood worth preserving. That’s as true of longtime residents as it is of newcomers, who say they were sold on the street’s genial sense of community.
“‘The best block in New Paltz,’” said Jennifer Wright-Cook of 12 Prospect Street in a letter read during the public hearing. “This is what we heard every time we told people that we had just moved on to Prospect Street and New Paltz in August 2024. ‘Oh, they have the best Halloween there.’ ‘That block has lots of potluck gatherings, and that’s the street with the geese.’ ‘The neighbors are the nicest.’ Every word is true.”
Wright-Cook’s letter spoke of how quickly her family became part of the Prospect Street community.
“Our ten-year-old daughter, our dog Harry, and my partner and I have felt deeply welcomed and supported in our new community,” read the letter. “Our daughter walks freely to the neighbor’s house for bounces on the trampoline. We gather in our shed for conversations about activism. Kids host lemonade stands, and we all decorate our geese in graduation caps. In addition to the safe and welcoming community we have built, the residents of Prospect Street are engaged and active in the life of the village .… Prospect Street is exactly what New Paltz can be and is.”
But like a handful of speakers during a Village of New Paltz Planning Board public hearing held on Tuesday, July 1, Wright-Cook found flaws in the idyllic suburban setting, largely centered around work at 7 Prospect Street.
“We also came to discover that our sweet family-oriented block had quite a few short-term-rental buildings,” she said. “This means that we have plenty of late-night disturbances from energetic young adults walking to and from the bars. The new buildings at 7 Prospect Street will add more illegal rentals by the room, and with them more noise, more cars, and probably increased environmental destruction due to water runoff, et cetera. Seven Prospect will not add more lemonade stands or potlucks. They will not vote in village elections or join the library board. Seven Prospect does the opposite, it seems, of what the village hopes to do.”
Seven Prospect, and its adjoining property at 5 Prospect, have been under scrutiny from neighbors for at least two years, when Prospect Estates, LLC — principal Bassam Serdah — was granted the right to demolish a single-family home and replace it with a two-family dwelling and an addition built onto an existing single-family home for conversion into a two-family home.
Originally, neighbors bristled at their perception that the plans exploited a zoning loophole for an area that sits at the line of the B-2 (Core Business) and R-2 (Residential) districts, with the former allowing for three bedrooms of unrelated occupants in each single-family dwelling to rent individual rooms to college students.
Serdah and project engineer Anthony Meluso were on hand for the public hearing and application review, which seeks to gain retroactive approval for the addition at 7 Prospect, which has already been built.
Alison Nash, who has lived at 11 Prospect Street for 35 years, termed the building “unusually large for the area.” “It includes at least nine bedrooms,” she said. “As it stands now, the original house is being used as six separate room-by-room rentals. This setup doesn’t reflect the character of our neighborhood, which is zoned and was intended for single- and two-family residences. The site plan approved last year permitted a four-bedroom addition to the six-bedroom house. But after months of detailed meetings, the addition that was ultimately built did not conform to what had been approved. It exceeded the already large footprint.”
Work continued during a stop-work order against the project, Nash said, with a deleterious impact on her property.
After the order, several large truckloads of dirt were dumped in the rear side yard on the north side of the property directly adjacent to my home,” she said. She reported it to Alex Salanitri, the village’s municipal code officer, who was told the dirt was intended to be delivered to 5 Prospect rather than 7.
“But instead of removing it, the dirt was spread out at 7 Prospect forming what will later become a large parking area,” Nash said. “This raised the grade of the property even further, which already sits quite uphill from mine. The heavy equipment used left deep ruts near my home. And since then large pools of standing water have formed and remain there for months.”
Meluso said he believed the work already done at 7 Prospect Street, including the removal of a barn, should have directed water runoff away from neighboring properties.
“The old barn had quite a bit of pavement around it, and this barn … it all drained onto Mrs. Nash’s property,” Meluso said. “And it’s now gone. And it’s been regraded, so it drains this way, away from the property line.”
He speculated that issues Nash is facing might be related to other municipal projects.
Planning-board members said challenges to zoning laws were not within their purview.
Chair Zach Bialecki said the public hearing would be adjourned until their engineer reported back on the drainage plan for 7 Prospect Street.
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