Southampton Town officials are hoping to finally bring positive change and revitalization to Riverside, an area burdened by crime and blight for decades.
The town has launched a project intended not just to study Riverside and its problems — something that’s been done several times before — but to actually implement meaningful change.
The town contracted in November 2013 with a master developer for Riverside, the Plainview-based Renaissance Downtowns, a privately held real estate development and investment firm that says it focuses on “the comprehensive and holistic redevelopment of suburban downtowns…utilizing Smart Growth and New Urbanist planning and development principles.” The goal is to achieve development that is socially, economically and environmentally sustainable.
“There have been some fits and starts over the years,” Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst told residents at the Flanders-Northampton-Riverside Community Association meeting last week. “This is the most concerted effort. And its success is dependent on everyone participating in the process,” she said.
Renaissance Downtowns uses what it calls a “community-centric approach” dubbed “crowdsourced placemaking.” The developers look to the community for its shared vision of what the place should be: What should get built? What are the residents needs and how should they be met? This approach helps ensure a market for the final product, the developer says.
Throne-Holst asked the people in attendance to help the town get residents involved.
“We want your opinions. We want you to talk to your friends and neighbors,” the supervisor said. “We want busineses to understand that this is an area that’s really ripe for investment.”
The developer has been reviewing all the studies on the area that have been completed in the past, said Sean McLean, vice president of development and planning at Renaissance Downtowns — and a Flanders resident himself.
He noted that the town recently received a state grant for a Brownfields Opportunity Area study and would be hiring consultants to undertake that study as well. That could lead to additional state funding for bricks and mortar projects, he said.
Renaissance Downtowns has launched a website riversiderediscovered.com, which it will use as a tool to provide transparency for the public, McLean said.
“We gather the information and put it someplace where all the world can see it,” McLean said.
Renaissance Downtowns uses the internet and social media for outreach and input as well. Visitors to the website are asked to register and will be given the opportunity to provide ideas for development and vote on ideas submitted by others. Renaissance has established a Facebook page for Riverside Rediscovered, as well as a Twitter account.
Elected officials and businesses pay close attention to social media, McLean said.
But McLean said the company recognizes there’s “a digital divide we need to work through.” As such, a physical presence and personal contact become even more important. Renaissance Downtowns has opened an office on Peconic Avenue and hired a community outreach coordinator, Siris Barrios, of Hampton Bays. Barrios has already begun reaching out to organizations and businesses and will soon launch a “door-knocking campaign” to gain input from residents about what they’d like to have in Riverside.
“We want to do as much as possible before Thanksgiving because after that people get into holiday mode until after the New Year,” Barrios said last week. (Barrios can be reached at the Riverside Rediscovered office at 631-591-3926.)
At last week’s FRNCA meeting, Barrios and McLean heard residents plea for a supermarket, complaining that people who live in Riverside and Flanders have to drive seven miles to do their grocery shopping — to either Route 58 in Riverhead or Montauk Highway in Hampton Bays.
But McLean said that is unlikely to happen. Large supermarket chains won’t come to an area without the population to support their stores — something McLean said the Riverside/Flanders area lacks.
“The town changed the zoning to allow the construction of a supermarket. If the economy would support a supermarket here, it would be here,” he said. The chains look at demographics to make their decisions based on a formula that determines whether a local market area would be able to support a store, McLean said.
Residents at the meeting also complained about the volume and speed of traffic on Flanders Road, which they said makes it impossible to enter the roadway at times, especially for left-hand turns. They asked for traffic lights and questioned why the state DOT, after a traffic study, only plans to install two lights at intersections in Flanders and none in Riverside.
“Everybody says they want stores, then everybody complains about traffic,” observed Flanders resident David Fox.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti
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