Housing plan would disrupt neighborhood’s ecosystem

The plan for a new housing development in Niskayuna will uproot the wooded open spaces and wetlands along Ruffner Road and turn them into another cramped subdivision of houses and townhouses. It will destroy the safe habitat for wildlife. Yet wildlife is an integral part of the very ecosystem in which humans live.

The separation of humans and nonhumans is the legacy of 19th-century thinking. We live in a different world today, a world that recognizes that human, animal and inanimate objects are all on the same “flat” plane of existence. Green spaces and wooded areas are important resources to help resist the effects of the climate crisis.

The announced plan will knock down an existing home and build a rotary onto Ruffner Road, turning a calm, quiet, low-density residential street into a traffic inferno.

Corporate oligarchies always manage to find ways to go around representative democracy to increase their profit ratio. They represent their development plans as creating new jobs, adding to the tax revenues and improving the environment. The jobs are temporary, more revenue will have to be spent providing new services to new residents, and their claims to improve the environment are nothing more than greenwashing.

This development plan will overburden an alreadystrained water and sewer system, increasing the water bills for all residents who already pay heavy surcharges.

Wild wooded spaces are not just the breathing spaces of the neighborhood; they sustain life, human and nonhuman.

Do not diminish them.

Teresa L. Ebert Mas’ud Zavarzadeh

Niskayuna