Kiryas Joel, Monroe, NY - As This Hasidic Village Expands to Accommodate a Baby Boom, Nearby Villages Fortify Their Borders

Kiryas Joel, Monroe, NY - As the administrator of this village in southern Orange County, Gedalye Szegedin knows that much of his job revolves around a simple equation: the number of girls who get married is roughly equal to the number of new homes this community will need to accommodate its rapid growth.

Last year, Mr. Szegedin oversaw the construction of 200 houses and apartments, mostly on the outer-lying lots along the eastern edge of this 1.1-square-mile community. By the end of this year, he said, the village will most likely have 300 new homes.
“There are three religious tenets that drive our growth: our women don’t use birth control, they get married young and after they get married, they stay in Kiryas Joel and start a family,” Mr. Szegedin said.
“Our growth comes simply from the fact that our families have a lot of babies,” he added, “and we need to build homes to respond to the needs of our community.”

But developable land is a finite resource here, and not much of it is left. And as Kiryas Joel pushes up against its borders, nearby neighbors in the towns of Blooming Grove and Woodbury are moving aggressively to prevent the community from expanding by incorporating into villages of their own.

Worried residents in Blooming Grove, which lies northwest, and Woodbury, which lies east, have voted overwhelmingly in the past two months to approve the creation of two new villages. State law allows villages to be established within towns and to set their own zoning regulations, and area officials say the new villages would be able to restrict the multifamily, high-density building that predominates in Kiryas Joel.

Kiryas Joel’s population leaped to 18,300 last year from 13,100 in 2000 and 7,400 in 1990, making it one of the fastest growing places in the state, according to the most recent estimates by the Census Bureau.
About 3,000 families who live in the village, many of them in boxy wood-frame homes built close to one another, with up to a dozen apartments stacked in four floors.
The village has no parks or public playgrounds, so children play with their colorful plastic toys on small front yards.