Editorial: False Promises Taint the Kingstonian

It is hard to argue with the goals of increasing parking, creating housing, filling in the empty “tooth gap” lots on North Front Street, and even, eventually, building on the unsightly surface parking lots where buildings once stood in centuries gone by.

But government and the Kingstonian’s developers have handled this project badly. They have divided the community and created bitterness by ramming down Kingston’s throat a business-as-usual development dressed up as a gift to the commonweal.

Politicians are elected to pursue the art of the possible, not the art of the deal.

Regardless if he is succumbing to pressure or if he truly supports this project, Mayor Noble has betrayed the voting bloc that put him in office, not to mention his own environmental and affordable housing platforms. Community well-being has been shunted aside in favor of moneyed interests. The parking promises are false, and if the last 50 years are a guide, so too is the promise of jobs.

Business owners favor the project, but the purported “overwhelming” community support also includes a Potemkin Village of cheerleaders. The developers and government profess to take community voices into account, but instead, they substituted the manufactured approval of the DRI committee; ignored dissenters on city government commissions, replacing them with presumably more amenable loyalists; swept under the rug unwelcome opinions from the general population, and launched a vicious attack on a leading community figure who raised objections.

Local officials, and the developers, should follow their own platforms and Kingston’s code in spirit as well as letter, disdaining loopholes that service self-interest; stop with the New Parking Math and do what is necessary to build a garage that will meet Kingston’s real needs; stop flirting with SEQRA infractions, and instead allow a formal EIS so local residents can know for certain what is the nature of the soil underneath Brad Jordan’s property and better predict the change to community character, and stop finessing the affordable housing component of zoning code with a specious argument whose reductio ad absurdum endpoint would ban all affordable housing construction.

If the numbers don’t work without cutting these corners, then it’s the wrong project for our city.

Build the Kingstonian, but do it the right way. At this point, you’re not even close.