Riverhead’s next master plan must attract new talent

Riverhead’s master plan situation reminds me of some recent city planning news from Seattle, Washington. When Seattle closed their Alaska Way Viaduct earlier this year, some experts estimated that the 90,000 cars per day that the viaduct carried would pour out onto the city streets. What happened instead was striking: the cars simply vanished. Mass transit and other modes of transit picked up the slack.

Induced demand: it’s a principle that Riverhead Town would do well to apply in its next master plan. For instance, while complaints abound when it comes to parking availability, studies show that “the overall utilization rate of the downtown area did not exceed 58 percent.” Furthermore, we zone for mega-chain commercial retail, and so we attract mega-chain commercial retail — the kind that seldom provides the kind of upward economic mobility necessary for people, and the towns they live in, to thrive.

In all likelihood, this overemphasis on commercial retail has also suppressed wages and hindered local businesses. According to data pulled from the Census Bureau, the median salary for our town is around $53,882, well below the Suffolk County median of $92,838 per household. Similarly, a plurality of our residents’ jobs are in retail, a profession whose median annual salary — nationally — is only $28,180.

In short: I don’t believe that people are wantonly ignoring downtown businesses. I do believe, however, that the jobs in our town fail to pay enough people enough money to stay and contribute.

I would like to propose that, for Riverhead’s next master plan, we should focus on attracting tech talent. Here’s why:

Riverhead is at the crossroads of multiple strategic and scientific facilities. There’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Stony Brook University, and Peconic Bay Medical Center. Thomas Edison graced the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall with his prototype for the kinetophone, which presaged modern video footage synced with sound. Nikolai Tesla build his spacecraft-like Wardenclyffe Center and its Tesla Tower in Shoreham, where he pre-empted insights into wireless electricity transfer that we are only now beginning to replicate. Albert Einstein himself delighted in Peconic Bay’s waters, not long after sending a fateful letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that would ultimately start the Manhattan Project. And it was at the Grumman facility in Calverton that the capacities needed to put a man on the moon were made manifest.

Technology and innovation: they are our town’s history and they are our future.

As for how, here’s what I would propose:

One, we should rezone most of Route 58 — especially between Harrison Avenue and Northville Turnpike — into a technology center. Using successful city planning precedents, we should transform these at-risk parts of Riverhead into a Silicon Valley of Long Island. Let’s rezone Riverhead into a place where people can work and earn a quality wage with room to grow.

Two, we should rezone downtown into a mixed use space (i.e. fitting together residential, commercial, and light industrial) and empower it all with municipal fiber optic internet. Good precedent for this can be found with the city of Chattanooga, TN, where, in 2010, the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga was the first company in the United States to offer 1 Gbit/s high-speed internet, over 200 times faster than the national average. Tech has begun to flourish there, as programs like Center Centre, a user experience design career accelerator, have set up shop to take advantage of superior internet speeds.

Third, we should remove the Peconic Riverfront parking lot, which is prone to flooding, and turn it into an eastern counterpart of Grangebel Park. This wider park, like Mitchell Park in Greenport, would create a public green space for residents to relax and congregate, and it could also double as a natural barrier to both storm surges and rising water levels. We could also extend the popular downtown boardwalk westward, towards Spicy’s and the Riverhead Library.

And finally, we should make Downtown Riverhead as compact and pedestrian friendly as possible, without compromising our township’s overall rural character. To do this, we should create more bike lanes and crosswalks — in part to anticipate the eastward expansion of the Empire Bike Trails to Montauk by 2021— and we should ditch off-street parking requirements. As an excellent Vox video ‘The high cost of free parking’ puts it:

“Parking requirements often result in more parking space than building space, so they lower density of cities, pushing buildings further apart from each other, making it harder to walk and encouraging more driving. Many of the dense cities that we love like Paris, Washington DC, Amsterdam, or New York, wouldn’t look the way they do with parking requirements.” By reducing parking, we can charge appropriately for the parking that is available, and then use that parking revenue to fund the construction of more bike lanes, thereby mitigating the need to drive at all.

These many piecemeal projects, interwoven together into a single master plan for Riverhead, could turn our town into a regional confluence of talent and innovation. It could encourage our town’s younger generation to—instead of going elsewhere—stay and invest in their town, which in turn would promote local businesses, and create a positive feedback loop for commerce and the town’s overall well being.

John Fallot is a product designer and visual designer based in both Riverhead and Brooklyn. Send him an email.

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