A quickly crowding Hasidic Jewish village in New York that is working to expand its boundaries faces opposition from neighbors who fear more urban-style development by the insular community could overrun their slice of suburbia.
Michael Queenan, mayor of the neighboring village of Woodbury, about 50 miles north of New York City, said that the Jewish village’s expansion would crowd the area. “People moved up here because they wanted a different kind of lifestyle, they wanted a little elbow room.”
Kiryas Joel is a 1.1-square-mile village of nearly 22,000 people markedly different from the surrounding suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are crowded with bearded men in heavy wool coats and brimmed hats. Women in long skirts push baby carriages into bustling stores where Yiddish is spoken. Schools teem with children. And streets are lined with one tightly packed apartment after another.
Followers of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum began coming to the village from Brooklyn in the 1970s, hoping to create the sort of cohesive community some recalled from Europe, with large families a big part of it. Under tradition, Kiryas Joel girls marry young and start having children immediately, fueling long-term population growth. While the average Kiryas Joel family has six people, it’s not uncommon to see couples with as many as 10 children. An average of three babies are born in the village each day.
Kiryas Joel is among the fastest-growing places in New York state, nearly doubling its population since 2000.
On a recent tour, Kiryas Joel administrator Gedalye Szegedin noted that the zoning allows for denser housing than the surrounding town of Monroe. He pointed out a 200-unit housing project under construction, a plot where 1,500 units will go and a single-family home replaced by 24 units.
Szegedin said the village’s natural growth requires 300 or more units a year, and he predicted that in as little as seven years Kiryas Joel will simply run out of land for young families.
“If we’re not going to provide for it, they’re going to live doubled up with their parents,” he said. “They’re going to live in subhuman conditions.”
Kiryas Joel has backed three boundary-expanding solutions, all of them contentious.
Hasidim living outside the village created two separate petitions to have their land annexed by Kiryas Joel, which would allow for denser housing, sidewalks and other services. The Monroe town board in 2015 denied a petition to annex 507 acres but approved a separate 164-acre annexation plan.
With both board actions being litigated, the village last year proposed a new solution: adding 382 acres to the village and making it a new town called North Monroe.
Kiryas Joel officials say creating a new town would erase long-festering village-town conflicts, like the complaint that Kiryas Joel dominates town politics.
An appeals court this month denied opponents’ request to place a stay on the 164-acre annexation, clearing the way for rezoning in the coming months. The parallel effort to create a town still needs to be considered by the county legislature.