Huge development mobilizes residents
Ridge Farms, a massive mixed-use project, has spurred homeowners to get involved
It often begins with a postcard and a double take.
In late 2017, Monica Hodges was raising three children and immersed in her father’s care. She received a postcard in the mail advertising a public meeting about a proposed development with more than 700 homes on a massive piece of land spanning South Whitehall Township’s busiest intersection. The proposal, Ridge Farms, is a mile from her home of 10 years.
In September, JoAnn Markowicz almost ignored the postcard notifying her of an upcoming planning commission meeting, where the board would discuss a proposal for a senior care complex. Then she saw the address.
Her living room window offers a view of a 15-acre field of grass on Hillview Road, where a developer wants to build a senior care campus called Macungie Manor.
Hodges and Markowicz would go on to help organize groups of neighbors opposing the projects and advocating for moderate growth in the township. They showed up in-person for meetings — sometimes by the hundreds — before Ridge Farms won preliminary approval from commissioners in 2019, and now virtually, as Macungie Manor and other projects wind their way through the approval process.
The residents’ growing opposition will have little impact on Ridge Farms, but their timing coincides with a once-in-a-decade shot at designing the future of their township: the next comprehensive plan.
Now that everyone is paying attention, South Whitehall — a diverse township spanning the Lehigh Valley’s main thoroughfares and on the border of the state’s third largest city — is facing vocal division over how much and what kind of development to accept as its population grows.
Ridge Farms— the largest single development in South
Whitehall’s history — brought many concerned residents into the fold for the first time and helped usher a crowded field of candidates for the Board of Commissioners in 2019.
But the direction of the township, now led by a board defined by many divisive 3-2 votes, was forecast by the previous comprehensive plan and codified in zoning changes in 2014 that envi
sioned development like Ridge Farms.
That South Whitehall would pioneer a mixed-use, residential and commercial development of this size did not come as a surprise to township or regional planners. However, to many residents, immersed in their jobs or family rather than zoning codes and comprehensive plans, it came as a total surprise.
“There was outrage. People were angry,” Hodges said, thinking back to public meetings in the packed auditorium of Springhouse Middle School, where decisions were met with loud booing and admonitions of commissioners “ruining the township.”
“It was exhausting to attend a meeting. And it was even more exhausting and saddening to hear what these people were saying,” she said. “I thought we did have a shot.”
Waking up
Monica and Rob Hodges moved their family to the township in 2006, attracted to the rolling hills on Walbert Avenue, the farmland across the street, the proximity to school and amenities, and the rural flavor that invites deer to unabashedly visit their property.
“It was magical,” Monica Hodges said.
In the last five years, that farmland became a 55-plus housing community, and several parcels of land along Walbert have been targeted in development proposals. Then Ridge Farms took shape, sending the Hodges to one of many crowded public meetings.
“When you move into a home, you don’t look at the zoning map,” she said. “Now I will.”
The Regency at South Whitehall 55-plus development is what propelled Michael Wolk, now a commissioner, to get involved. The Air Products retiree met with planners and attended a few meetings, but the land development process was already far along.
When he saw the announcement for Ridge Farms, a tenth of a mile from where he lives, “the radar went up,” he said.
“I got involved pretty immediately,” he said.
It was like nothing the township had ever seen before. The proposal before the planning commission at that time called for a mixture of single-family homes, twins and apartments totaling 713 units; 75,000 square feet of retail space; a community clubhouse and village plaza; medical and office buildings; and open space and walking trails throughout. In essence, it will be a mini-borough over 190 acres on Cedar Crest Boulevard between Walbert Avenue and Huckleberry Road.
Now the number of homes on the portion of the project that needed conditional use approval is 780. On the west side of Cedar Crest will be another 90 homes that didn’t need to go through a conditional use process.
After attending a few packed public meetings where residents decried the development’s size, density, potential traffic impact and change to the township’s character, in February 2018, the Hodges, Wolk, and mutual friend David Burke sat downover coffee in Wegmans to craft a plan.
They founded a group called South Whitehall Concerned Citizens, tasked chiefly with educating themselves and their neighbors about zoning and land development law, mobilizing residents to attend every commissioner and planning meeting, and placing pressure on commissioners to scale back the growth prescribed in the 2009 comprehensive plan and resulting zoning changes.
“In the very beginning, we all had this idea that we could stop this,” Monica Hodges said.
“It transformed from trying to stop it, to, let’s make it more reasonable,” Rob Hodges said.
They sought legal advice on what could be done, but learned a few difficult lessons. Zoning dictates everything in a township, and as long as a proposal complies with zoning law, commissioners are legally obligated to approve it, regardless of personal opinion or public outcry.
One of few routes they had in the short term was to maintain pressure on the township to hold developers to existing regulations, not just with Ridge Farms, but with other controversial projects, including warehouses on
Crackersport Road and a luxury apartment complex proposed at the former Parkview Motel. Changing the zoning law, they learned, is the long game.
But they also had an election coming up.
A divided board
As a citizen advocate, Wolk went to every Board of Commissioners and planning commission meeting. The Concerned Citizens group he helped build often would churn out dozens of speakers during public comment at key meetings.
Success was limited, he said, so it seemed logical to try to elevate someone to become one of the decision-makers.
“Basically, I was surrounded by a bunch of people who said, ‘Mike, you should run,’” he said.
Separately, resident Diane Kelly, retired from the dental profession and living between the recently built Hills at Winchester and to-be-built Ridge Farms, had gotten her postcard and started attending planning commission meetings.
By the third one, she stepped out of her comfort zone to speak during public comment. She mostly spoke about traffic concerns around Ridge Farm — one of the chief complaints — but noted her surprise that the planning commission had a vacancy while South Whitehall was seeing its largest growth spurt in decades.
A former commissioner took the mic after her, suggesting she apply. She served for two years before running successfully for commissioner last year.
“I didn’t expect or plan it at all; it just unfolded that way,” she said.
On the Board of Commissioners, Wolk and Kelly have ended up sharing a similar platform, which they describe not as “anti-development,” but supportive of moderate growth that reflects the character and desire of the community, and hopes to prioritize open space and farmland preservation.
As such, in 2020 they’ve voted together on development decisions.
Two new commissioners voting among the majority also rode, in part, the Ridge Farms wave.
Commissioner Matthew Mobilio, an attorney, also doesn’t like the Ridge Farms development, given its size and location near a busy intersection.
“The problem with Ridge Farms: It is the ultimate trap for anyone to talk about,” he said.
It’s legal and on a plot of land zoned for high-density residential use since the 1990s. In the commissioner seat, Mobilio saw an opportunity to lessen unwanted effects, such as traffic.
In the long term, he said he’d support changes to the zoning that made Ridge Farms possible. In the short term, his “yes” votes, he said, are to make a smoother process for a project that will happen regardless.
“That project is going to house South Whitehall Township citizens of the future,” he said. “Those people deserve to have the best development they can get.”
Joe Setton, a longtime real estate broker, came into his
seat through a highly criticized “midnight appointment” following the resignation of former Commissioner Mark Pinsley, who became Lehigh County controller. Setton is aware of the public perception that he would automatically side with developers in future votes, but he says that’s not true.
He sees it as more productive to cooperate with developers where it’s lawful, which can give the township an edge in designing the neighborhood.
“I would not advocate building an invisible wall and deprive others of enjoying what our township has to offer by making it difficult for developers to exercise their rights,” he said.
The only returning commissioner was President Christina Morgan, who has held a seat since 2009.
Morgan, an environmental compliance coordinator by day, stands behind both the development and the zoning changes made years ago to permit it. Without these changes, she said, what would eventually go on that plot is another cookie-cutter neighborhood.
“In the end, we could be looking at a trend-setting community,” she said.
A new model of development
Drafting the last comprehensive plan, beginning in 2007 and adopted in 2009, was a typical process: a steering committee with representatives of citizen boards, a guiding consultant, planning commission overview, elected official feedback — public meetings the whole way.
Planners didn’t have township social media at the time to draw residents out, but they advertised in the local press and the township website.
“We did what we could to get public input on this,” planner
Gregg Adams said, estimating a dozen people showed up to a given meeting. “I’m not going to say we had an overwhelming response.”
The resulting comprehensive plan invoked the modern planning theories of the day: an emphasis on walkable communities and village-style development, resembling boroughs in the suburbs. To achieve this, the plan suggested amending zoning laws to allow for more mixed-use in lieu of strip-style development.
The Great Recession put a damper on the speed of this vision. But in 2014, the township adopted overlay districts in its zoning ordinance and map, identifying areas that could be ripe for this kind of redevelopment, while preserving the Jordan Valley north of Huckleberry Ridge, known as “the jewel of the township,” Adams said.
Ridge Farms is proposed for one of these overlay districts and spills over into a traditionally zoned residential plot, totaling 870 residential units over both zones. Its housing unit density is no greater than surrounding neighborhoods — in fact, it’s less dense than Country Crossings next door — but its overall size and variety is unprecedented.
There’s just one other development of comparable design and scale: Madison Farms in Bethlehem Township, a “mini city” off Route 33 that Bethlehem Township commissioners approved in 2012. On 103 acres, it has more than 800 dwellings of varied types, 150,000 square feet of retail, a medical center and 35 acres of open space.
Regional planners see mixeduse developments like Madison Farms and Ridge Farms as good projects to accommodate population growth in a way that retains a communal feel. The Lehigh Valley’s population has been growing steadily by an
annual average of 4,000 to 5,000 people for 60 years; the population regionally is expected to increase by 26% by 2040, and in South Whitehall, 29%, according to the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission.
In terms of the mixed-use trend, the Lehigh Valley is behind most other metropolitan areas by about 20 years, Executive Director Becky Bradley said.
“We really have to recognize that we have substantially changed,” she said. “We are a major, major region now. And we have to think of ourselves differently.”
There’s been talk here and there of other such plans. Around the same time Kay Builders was working on approvals for Ridge Farms in South Whitehall, President Rick Koze was also approaching Upper Saucon Township planners about a similar project: 900 housing units with retail and a town center on 119 acres along Route 309.
Enough resident outcry there made him abandon the plans. The difference: Upper Saucon didn’t have the zoning on the books.
Because that zoning had been in place in South Whitehall, Koze said he was taken aback by the loud public response.
“It’s smart growth,” he said. “I knew there’d be pushback, but not to that degree.”
In hindsight, Bradley said she isn’t surprised. Farms, trees and open space have sat on the land to be turned into Ridge Farms for as long as anyone can remember.
She has watched the project closely, and with excitement.
“Even though it took a new form of development to get the community, the public engaged, it’s good that there’s community dialogue around this,” she said. “At the end of the day, the community has to decide what it wants to be.”
A community decision
This time around, the comprehensive planning process has been flipped on its head.
Instead of the public looking at what committees come up with, the planners have been gathering input from the public since 2019.
“We wanted to make it a truly grassroots approach,” said planner George Kinney. “We wanted people to come into the process with the understanding that there’s no preconceived governmental notions ... that perception some people have that, ‘Oh they already got it figured out.’”
Some of those first public input meetings were right on the heels of Ridge Farms, so the turnout was better than last time. In a series of public meetings before
the pandemic, about 100 people participated in map exercises showing their preferences on where the township should prioritize growth, IT Director David Manhardt estimated. Now the township is collecting input on how the township should grow through an online survey, which has received more than 500 responses.
The response he’s seen runs the gamut. Some recommend the walkable communities they
used to live in as models; others say there’s too much traffic and growth, too fast.
“I suspect we’ll see kind of a mixed bag,” he said.
Attendance at public meetings is less of a mix. Resident Ben Long, whose family owns Lehigh Valley Water Systems, attended a few of them, but said he stopped because he felt his voice supporting growth and development was getting drowned out.
“Those whohave a really good experience with something may not always tell you that,” he said.
The next phase involves creating subcommittees to draft the plan, using the data gathered from public input. Planners hope to be done in the spring.
Kelly’s concern is it can be confusing for the public to understand how these data points get turned into reality. One of her goals in running for commissioner, as well as Wolk’s, is to have a seat at the table during the comprehensive planning and zoning processes so she can get the public involved as much as possible.
The public, meanwhile, keeps a watchful eye on who is in those seats, and citizen Facebook groups send summaries to their masses. Some were critical of the recent decision to appoint Matthew Mulqueen, a former commissioner who voted to approve Ridge Farms and lost the election last year, to the planning commission, for example.
Residents spoke in the last election. In 2021, there are two seats up for grabs — Morgan’s and Setton’s.
Morgan said she’ll run again for the same reason she always does.
“I want to do what’s good for this township,” she said. “I want to make sure we maintain our uniqueness and special qualities, and grow in a very balanced and well thought-out way. This is the greatest place to live around.”
On that, the residents who maintain a constant presence at public meetings and send dispatches out to hundreds of others, agree.
“If we didn’t have hope, I don’t think we’d be fighting,” Rob Hodges said. “Every time we lose one of these votes, I say to Monica and Dave, ‘OK, we lost that battle, but the war’s not over.’ We’re being heard.”