The intersection that didn't have to be broken

Dear Editor,

Supervisor Lachterman's recent piece ("A long-term fix for a broken intersection," May 7, Page 26) on the Route 118 and Underhill Avenue project is worth reading. Not for what it says, but for what it carefully avoids. He rightly describes the work as “a structural correction.” He stops well short of asking the obvious question: correction of what, exactly? And why?

The answer is Underhill Farms.

In March 2021, I wrote to then-Supervisor Slater and the Town Board warning that approving a large residential development at one of Yorktown's most congested intersections, without adequate infrastructure planning or pedestrian connectivity, would produce predictable and costly consequences. The board approved the project anyway.

That decision is now part of our daily lives on Route 118.

The 148-unit development at 370 Underhill Avenue added hundreds of daily vehicle trips to an intersection already carrying approximately 1,600 vehicles in a single peak hour. The developer's own environmental submission documents 27 accidents at this intersection since 2019 — nearly one per month. I witnessed one of them firsthand; the image stays with you. That figure should have raised a hard question before any approvals were granted: is this really where we want to add a major residential development? Instead, the town accepted the developer's framing that the project would “remedy a longstanding traffic bottleneck” — turning a community infrastructure failure into a selling point.

The developer notes they are contributing “over 50% of the estimated cost” of intersection improvements “while generating less than 5% of the traffic.” Read that twice. They are paying a disproportionate share of fixing a problem they say is mostly not theirs, at an intersection the town had allowed to deteriorate for years. The remaining cost, estimated between $750,000 and $1.5 million for the intersection alone, falls on Yorktown taxpayers. The developer projects $1 million in annual tax revenue. Measured against the full infrastructure bill, the numbers deserve considerable more scrutiny than they received.

The pedestrian record deserves scrutiny. The developer marketed Underhill Farms as a walkable community. The supervisor describes the intersection upgrades as making it “more pedestrian-friendly.” Yet the Planning Board approved site changes that omit crosswalks on the northern and eastern sides of the Route 118 and Underhill Avenue intersection. For a project sold on walkability, those omissions are not incidental — and the marketing and the plan are not telling the same story.

Secondary traffic routing raises its own concerns. Glenrock Street, a residential road bordering the development, was specifically flagged by residents at public hearings. The developer's response was to move a townhouse building closer to both Glenrock and Beaver Ridge. A paved connecting road now links the development to Beaver Ridge, Yorktown's senior housing community on Allan Avenue. It will likely be used by residents looking to bypass the Route 118 intersection — routing that traffic through a community of seniors who had no say in the matter.

The historic preservation record is no easier to defend. The Soundview/Underhill Estate, built by one of Yorktown's founding families and cited in my 2021 letter as the kind of place the town's motto was meant to protect, is now retail and office space. When historic landmark designation was sought, the Town Board denied it — not because the history was in question, but because of financial considerations. Development revenue outweighed preservation obligation, and the town put that in writing. What was lost was the estate, and with it any serious claim that the motto means what it says.

There are people in Yorktown who will say that a private property owner has every right to develop as they choose. That is true, within the framework of planning and zoning — and that framework is exactly what neighboring communities have applied more rigorously than we have. Bedford and Somers have been more deliberate about what they require before approving — and their downtowns look accordingly different from ours. Yorktown has the same tools. The question is whether we use them.

None of this is an argument against higher-density housing done well. Density works when it is walkable, connected to infrastructure, and located where roads and services can support it. What we have on Underhill Avenue is none of those things. The town describes it as a model of thoughtful planning.

Yorktown has more decisions ahead. The next historic property up Underhill Avenue from the Soundview site is the John Bailey Tompkins House. If the pattern holds, it will face a similar proposal — adding more cars to the same road, more pressure on the same infrastructure, more questions answered after the fact rather than before.

Before any further density approvals along the Underhill Avenue corridor, the Town Board should commission an independent, public, corridor-wide traffic, pedestrian, and infrastructure capacity review — and adopt walkable pedestrian connectivity as a non-negotiable condition of approval going forward. That is not a moratorium on growth. It is a commitment that the next decision will be made with the information the last one wasn't.

The supervisor is right that the improvement will be permanent. So is the development that made it necessary. The next one doesn't have to be.

-Christopher R. Tompkins, Yorktown