SAVE Colonie

Good Development: Growth Through Planning, NOT Growth at Any Cost

For many years, SAVE Colonie: A Partnership for Planning has advocated for a simple principle: development is necessary, but every development must strengthen its community.

Our concern has never been whether the Town of Colonie should grow, but how it should grow. Colonie is a desirable community because generations of residents, businesses, public officials, and community institutions want to remain here and have invested in its future. People want to live here, and businesses want to locate here, which creates opportunities, challenges, and responsibility. Colonie is at the center of the Capital Region.

SAVE Colonie was formed as a partnership of residents, professionals, and community members concerned about the long-term effects of development decisions on the Town's natural environment, infrastructure, fiscal health, neighborhoods, and quality of life. Through participation in Planning Board meetings, review of development proposals, research into best planning practices, consultation with professionals, participation in the Town's comprehensive plan review process, and advocating to make public meetings and planning information more accessible to residents, SAVE Colonie has consistently advocated for thoughtful, transparent, and sustainable development. This advocacy is particularly relevant as Colonie confronts another significant planning challenge: affordable housing.

Colonie Needs Affordable Housing — But It Also Needs a Housing Strategy

There are legitimate reasons for Colonie to increase and diversify its housing supply.

Our population is changing. According to US Census data, nearly one in five Colonie residents is now 65 or older. Older residents may want to leave a large house without leaving their neighborhood. Younger households face increasingly difficult paths to homeownership. Workers employed in Colonie and nearby often cannot afford housing within the Town. Families increasingly need multigenerational housing. And the Capital Region as a whole needs additional housing, especially workforce and affordable housing.

Colonie has approved many attractive housing projects. Large apartment developments, Planned Development Districts (PDDs), single-family neighborhoods, senior communities, and other projects have added hundreds of housing units, most of them upper- to high-end units. Too often, development decisions are driven by developers’ proposals rather than by, or even consistent with, a community-defined strategy for where and how the town should grow, and what its needs are.

That is precisely why Colonie invested substantial time, public resources, professional expertise,  and community outreach and participation to develop its 2019 Comprehensive Plan Update. A comprehensive plan is not intended to sit on a shelf or simply document aspirations. Under New York’s land-use framework, the plan’s purpose is to provide the foundation for the town’s land-use policies and to guide zoning, planning, infrastructure, and development decisions. Colonie’s 2019 Update contained goals and directives, with action items set out year by year. What has happened to them? 

Residents participated in that lengthy process with the reasonable expectation that the resulting plan would matter. Developers, residents, Planning Board members, Town Board members, and other decision-makers could look to the Comprehensive Plan for consistent guidance on where growth is appropriate, what forms it should take, which resources should be protected, and what public benefits development might provide.

The lesson that we take from Colonie’s recent development history is that Colonie needs more choices about how and where growth occurs. Further, those choices ought to be guided by the 2019 Comprehensive Plan that the town and its residents have already invested in, and the ideas that plan contains.