FOCUS: DEVELOPMENT
Housing bust isn't stopping huge project proposed for Clarence
Troubled housing market or not, the largest home subdivision in years in Erie and Niagara counties is moving forward — a 400- acre behemoth in Clarence where nothing will sell for less than $200,000, but plenty will be priced at close to $1 million.
After two decades and 40 reincarnations, the concept for Spaulding Greens, a development of 348 homes, has won the Planning Board’s approval.
On July 23, the Town Board will consider that recommendation.
No project that large has been undertaken in this region for quite awhile. But Dominick Piestrak, its developer, says he isn’t worried about the area’s troubled economy, its continuing loss of population or the slipping value of homes — even luxurious ones.
“There is a market,” Piestrak said. He has the track record, having developed
the nearby ultra-expensive enclave of Spaulding Lake and Orchard Park’s tony Birdsong subdivision.
But if you live on adjoining Green Valley Drive, big is not beautiful. The quiet dead-end street would be extended to provide access to Spaulding Greens.
“It will destroy the character of our neighborhood,” said Frank Cordaro, who raised his children on Green Valley, a street so car-free that it has become a playground for children from neighboring streets.
If undertaken, Spaulding Green will look something like Birdsong, Piestrak said.
Half of the area — located east of Goodrich Road and north of Greiner Road — will consist of lakes, along with forests and wetlands that eventually will lead to the town arboretum, now being established.
It also will feature a bike path that connects to the Clarence Town Hall, Town Park and Library.
Homes will include $200,000-plus “four-plexes” — small clusters of single-story, ranch style homes — plus upscale patio homes in the $400,000 range and luxury homes of $1 million or so, Piestrak said.
“It’s going to be the nicest one I’ve done,” he said.
But home building in the area has declined, although not as steeply as nationally.
From January through May, building permits for single-family homes in the Buffalo Niagara region dropped 17 percent from the same five-month period a year ago, the National Association of Home Builders recently reported.
Nationally, the year-overyear decline was 41 percent, and the statewide drop was 30 percent.
Buffalo Niagara’s total of 320 building permits through May for single-family homes was fourth highest among the dozen metro areas in the state.
But Spaulding Greens, Piestrak said, will appeal mostly to the two healthiest sectors of the housing market these days: well-off empty nesters and the financially thriving grown children of baby boomers.
The first have cash but do not want high-maintenance homes; the second want bragging rights.
“They’ve been successful, and they want the houses that show it,” he said.
The typical first-time buyers — young families — will have to make do with existing homes, he said, since building a home they can afford has become impossible.
Still, Spaulding Green radically will change the neighborhoods of exactly such families.
Green Valley, Cordaro says, has become home to an increasing number of young families, who have moved in because the dead end street has little traffic.
“The kids are back and forth across the street all day long, playing,” he said.
The neighborhood children are unfamiliar with traffic, he said. The street they know is so sleepy that, when they set up lemonade stands in the summer, they actually flag down cars, giggling. Not to worry. No one drives fast.
“What they’re going to do is turn this street into an express road without consideration to the character of the neighborhood,” he said of Piestrak’s plans. “I’ve lived on Green Valley 24 years, and there’s never been an accident.”
Neighbors — who have presented a petition to officials with more than 50 signatures protesting the extension — estimate an additional 1,520 vehicles will use Green Valley each day if the subdivision is built as now planned, inundating the street and its 10 houses with fumes, noise — and strangers.
“Everyone looks out” for the children, he said. “They (Spaulding Greens drivers) will not have the same regard.”
The project still faces a variety of steps before reaching the Town Board again for a final go-ahead.
Clarence Supervisor Scott Bylewski acknowledged the size of the project raises such issues as the effect on traffic, the schools and the environment.
Plans call for developing Spaulding Greens in stages, over 13 years or longer. Piestrak bought the property in the late 1980s after acquiring land for Spaulding Lake. But what started out as a standard upscale subdivision, with a golf course, stalled when a new Town Board majority began slowing growth.
In 2004, Piestrak made headlines when he proposed turning the land into an “urban village” — a type of development that mimics old-time communities, with homes of all types and neighborhood businesses in the mix.
Such “walkable” communities, where residents don’t need to drive a mile to a strip mall for a gallon of milk, have become increasingly popular elsewhere in the nation. But the idea flopped in Clarence.
Piestrak said the design has gone through 40 changes. Now a far cry from a urban village, it is “the second best thing we could have done,” Piestrak said.
He said he sympathizes with the families on Green Valley Drive, but added that the street does not belong to them.
“Everybody thinks the road in front is their road, and it is not,” he said. “It is the town’s road, for the good of all of the town.”
