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Change Is Coming To Your Community. The Only Question Is Who Gets To Steer.
By Mike Oates
I have a saying that I trot out at nearly every public meeting, and it has never once failed to get a knowing laugh: people like change, as long as everything stays the same.
We all do it. We want the new restaurant, but not the parking it brings. We want our kids to be able to afford to live nearby, but not in that kind of building. We want Main Street to thrive, but we also want it to look exactly the way it did the summer we got our first job there. We are, every one of us, enthusiastic supporters of change in the abstract and cautious skeptics of change on our own block.
I understand the instinct. I have it too. But after years of working with communities across the Hudson Valley’s nine counties, I have come to a conclusion I would like to share gently, the way you would tell a friend there is spinach in his teeth: change is coming to your community whether you invite it or not. The only question is whether you manage it or it manages you.
Communities that adjust to change tend to get the version they like. Communities that refuse tend to get the version they don’t. Change does not go away when ignored. It simply loses your phone number and starts making decisions without you.
Consider Main Street. A storefront that opened in 1985 and is still selling what it sold in 1985 is not preserving history. It is a museum with a cash register, and museums, as a rule, charge admission because they cannot survive on sales. The shops that are thriving in our downtowns today, and there are many, kept the brick, kept the tin ceiling, kept the owner’s name over the door, and changed almost everything else: the products, the hours, the online ordering, the Thursday night event that gets people on the sidewalk. The hardware store that added a coffee counter did not betray its heritage. It made sure there would be a hardware store for the next forty years. The customers of the 2020s and 2030s are not coming back for the merchandise of the 1980s, no matter how fondly we remember it.
Now consider housing, which is where the “as long as everything stays the same” instinct gets truly expensive. Many of our towns have zoning that permits exactly one kind of home: a single-family house on a generous lot. It is a lovely kind of home. I live in one. But when it is the only kind allowed, something quietly unfortunate happens. The couple who raised their family in that house, who coached the Little League team and chaired the library board, reach the point where they would love to trade four bedrooms and a lawn mower for a two-bedroom place they can walk to the pharmacy. And they discover that no such place exists in the town they have loved for forty years. So they leave. They take their volunteer hours, their Sunday morning coffee orders, and their institutional memory to another state. Meanwhile, the young family who wanted that four-bedroom house cannot find one, because nobody is moving out, because there is nowhere to move to.
That is not preservation. That is a slow-motion goodbye to the people who built the place. Allow a few townhouses, a few apartments over the shops on Main Street, a few smaller homes tucked sensibly into the neighborhoods that already exist, and a remarkable thing happens: the grandparents stay, the grandchildren arrive, and the town gets to keep both. The music teacher can afford to live in the district where she teaches. The volunteer fire department gets volunteers who are under sixty. Everyone wins, and the town still looks like the town.
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying to bulldoze your history. The Hudson Valley’s history is its greatest competitive advantage. Nobody chooses to visit or invest in a place because it looks like everywhere else. Our stone houses, our river towns, our rail trails on old freight lines, our farms that have been in the same families for generations: these are the reasons people fall in love with this region and decide to stay. Protect them fiercely.
But protecting something and freezing it are two different things. Every generation before us improved on what it inherited. The people who built our downtowns were not preserving a colonial village; they were putting up the newest, boldest buildings they could afford, and we cherish those buildings now. The rail trail everyone loves was, not long ago, an abandoned rail line everyone complained about. Someone looked at it and saw the next chapter instead of the last one. That is the tradition worth honoring. Not the buildings alone, but the habit of building.
The good news, and there is a lot of it, is that the Hudson Valley is already full of communities getting this right. Downtowns that were half-empty fifteen years ago are now places you cannot find a table on a Friday night. Towns that took a hard look at their zoning are welcoming young families and keeping their seniors. Old factories are becoming breweries, studios, and workshops, still with the name of the original company painted on the side. In each case, someone decided to steer the change rather than stand in front of it.
So here is my friendly suggestion for the next time change knocks on your community’s door. Do not pretend you are not home. Invite it in, ask it questions, and set some house rules. Decide what is sacred, and be honest that the list is shorter than it feels. Then get to work making sure the next generation has a Main Street worth walking, a home they can afford, and a town they will one day be just as sentimental about as you are today.
People like change, as long as everything stays the same. It turns out the way to keep the things that matter is to be willing to change the things that don’t.
Mike Oates is President and CEO of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation (HVEDC), the regional economic development organization serving Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Ulster, Sullivan, Greene, and Columbia counties. He is headquartered in Poughkeepsie and can be reached at moates@hvedc.com.
