The real-estate crash left pockets of the region's rural areas littered with the remnants of would-be golf courses, shopping centers and luxury subdivisions that never got off the ground. But the market swoon has yielded an unexpected upside for environmentalists.
Land trusts—nonprofit organizations that buy open fields, forests and other untamed properties to preserve them as open space—say they've received dozens of calls from developers over the past few years willing to sell them properties in upstate New York, Connecticut and New Jersey at discounts of up to 90%.
The Scenic Hudson Land Trust Inc. recently bought a 185-acre parcel of land across the river from the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Dutchess County. The trust had coveted the tract for years but balked at the price tag.
"If you're standing in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's bedroom, this is a commanding part of the view that he looked at from his own bedroom window, so it's a critical part of the nation's history," said Steve Rosenberg, executive director of the trust, which is based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
The developer, Jacob Frydman, chief executive of United Realty Partners, planned to build 175 homes and a shopping center on the site. When Scenic Hudson approached him during the boom years, he offered to sell them the land for $10 million.
But after the market crashed, Mr. Frydman said he saw things a bit differently.
"By the time 2008 rolled around, it became pretty clear to me that even though I thought this was exceptionally valuable, it was going to be a couple of years before the market caught up," he said.
The trust ultimately bought the majority of the site for just over $2 million.
Even more than previous downturns, the recent recession has created unique opportunities for land trusts to grab properties at cheap prices because land values in rural areas once ripe for second-home development and golf courses have taken a steep dive in the housing crisis.
"We used to call people, and now people are calling us. We're being offered more and more properties," said Kim Elliman, chief executive of the Open Space Institute, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that has preserved more than 116,000 acres in New York state.
The Open Space Institute recently bought several properties intended for second homes in Beaverkill Valley, N.Y., for $2,500 an acre, half of what they would have cost a year ago, according to Mr. Elliman.
But just as these trusts find themselves with unprecedented opportunities to buy plots of land, they are simultaneously squeezed by a severe lack of government funding and dwindling private donations.
"It's a shame, because there are so many properties that are now for sale that have long been targets for biologic corridors or land protection or public access for hunters and fishermen," Mr. Elliman said. "It's just a shame that there's not more money."
Many are turning to creative—and not always ideal—ways to get funding. The Open Space Institute, for example, reluctantly freed up funds by selling Arden House, a Gilded Age mansion nestled on a 110,000-acre state park in the Hudson Valley, for $6.5 million to a Chinese investor in a deal brokered by Colliers International.
Nationally, land trusts bought up parcels voraciously over the last five years. The number of acres conserved by state and local land trusts in the U.S. has swelled to a total 16 million acres from 10.9 million acres in 2005, according to a census conducted by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington, D.C., umbrella organization for land trusts.
In New York state, nearly 1 million acres in total have been preserved by land trusts.
But Russ Shay, director of public policy for the alliance, said pressure is mounting on trusts to buy strategically and raise private funds as state and city budgets for land preservation are slashed.
In New York state, funding for the Environmental Protection Fund, about half of which is designated for open-space conservation, was cut to $134 million from $205 million in the 2008-09 budget year.
"Many of our land trust members work very closely with government agencies and their budgets have been cut, often very severely," Mr. Shay said.
Many groups are trying other fund-raising strategies in order to take advantage of the downturn.
The Trust for Public Land recently bought a 42-acre former airport in Madison, Conn.—once slated for a 127-home development—for $9.5 million. It pushed for a ballot referendum, and town voters approved $9 million to buy and maintain the parcel.
"We're turning to referendums and [ballot] initiatives, and the people are saying, 'We're willing to have this tax imposed upon us because we know this is going to be money well-spent,'" said Christopher Kay, chief operating officer of the Trust for Public Land, which is based in San Francisco.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213602109951044.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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