There is some similarity with Castana/ Food Country insofar as developer and community have been at loggerheads since Day One. It's different, though, insofar as 1322 is tucked away in a residential spot and has no commercial component, unlike Castana, which is on a main street and includes residential and commercial.

I can't begin to speculate on financial similarities. All I know is that the current owner's original proposal would vault this (the 1322) development into the many-multi-million-dollar range (she bought the property for just under $2m [I think], and an earlier scaled-down proposal included 22 condos [average price?, maybe $400-500K?], 6 THs [average price?, at least $750K if not more], and the coachhouse [add another TH price at least], and... well, YOU do the math -- it's a ton of money, that's for sure...). Naturally, the $-amounts involved merely exacerbated hostilities and upped the ante all around.

What I find very interesting is that Rockland is ~70% renters -- i.e., it's a nice little fairy-tale to think of it as an enclave of SFH, but in reality it isn't. I'm not sure how Fairfield (the neighbourhood with Castana/ Food Country) adds up. But it is the case that the Rockland Neighbourhood Association has less than 10% of the Rockland population as members, and that its board is almost always exclusively composed of property owners, i.e., primarily people who own a SFH in Rockland, or even a MFH. The renters aren't represented, and don't seem to be interested in joining these boards, either (currently, one renter is on the board, but he has political ambitions [IMO] that go way beyond Rockland).

The fights take place between yesteryear's small-scale property owners and newer, big-scale property owners (the developers), with the renters staying out of it for the most part. That's too bad, I think. Since they make up the majority of the population, it would be interesting to know where they stand on development...

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