Hudson Valley Parking Lots Could Become Housing, Parks, and Walkable Communities

The parking lot at the Hudson Valley Mall in Kingston was built for a version of the future that never quite arrived. Or perhaps one that already passed.

On a gray weekday morning, the asphalt stretches outward in every direction, a cratered plain of faded striping and empty spaces. Near the surviving businesses—Target, a Muay Thai gym, the cineplex—a few cars cluster close to the entrances. Beyond that: acres of pavement, mostly vacant. The lot was designed to accommodate the retail peak—the holiday surge, the era when enclosed malls functioned as the commercial and social centers of suburban America.

“Those parking lots were built to accommodate Black Friday, not next Friday,” says Adam Bosch.

Bosch, the departing CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, has spent the past several years examining the region through the lens of land use, demographics, housing, and economic development. The organization’s recent report, “Built for Cars, Ready for People,” argues that the Hudson Valley is “awash in unused parking,” the result of decades of zoning rules that required developers to build far more spaces than most sites actually use today.

A 2024 video of actor and local resident Mandy Patinkin wandering around the near-empty Hudson Valley Mall in Kingston went viral on TikTok.

The report begins with asphalt but quickly expands into something larger: a critique of the Hudson Valley’s long-standing development mindset and a warning that the region may be planning for the wrong future.

For decades, municipalities across the country required developers to build parking according to formulas tied to square footage. Shopping centers, office parks, strip malls, and big-box retail developments were designed around peak demand days. The result was a landscape of oversized parking fields that remain mostly empty for much of the year.

Nowhere is that more visible than along the Hudson Valley’s commercial corridors: Route 9 in Dutchess County, the retail strips surrounding Middletown, the sprawling shopping zones outside Kingston, Newburgh, and Fishkill. Many of these areas were built according to suburban planning principles that separated housing, retail, and workplaces into distinct zones connected almost entirely by automobiles.

“That’s not the modern pattern of development that millennials and Gen Z are looking for,” Bosch says. “This generation does not want to live like their grandparents’ McMansion generation did.”

Instead, younger residents increasingly gravitate toward mixed-use neighborhoods where housing, restaurants, retail, public space, and transit are integrated. Walkability, density, and proximity have become economic assets. But in much of the Hudson Valley, zoning codes still reflect a late-20th-century suburban model built around expansion, cheap land, and abundant driving. Or rather: a model built around assumptions of endless growth.

One of the more provocative ideas Bosch raises during conversation is a term rarely heard in Hudson Valley civic discourse: “de-growth.” “Every major piece of data you look at shows that we are headed toward a future of shrinking population in the Hudson Valley,” Bosch says.

The numbers are stark. Pattern estimates the nine-county Hudson Valley region has lost roughly 160,000 residents through domestic migration over the past two decades. Public school enrollment has fallen dramatically. Fifty-two school buildings have closed regionally during that same period. “We should be on our knees praying for a hailstorm of children to fall from the sky,” Bosch says.

That tension—between the perception of runaway growth and the reality of demographic decline—sits at the center of the report’s broader argument. While many Hudson Valley communities continue to approach development defensively, Bosch argues the region is simultaneously confronting labor shortages, aging populations, shrinking rural communities, and a severe housing crunch.

“What’s been our mindset here in the Hudson Valley?” Bosch asks rhetorically. “How do we slow it down, shut it down, or cut it in half?”

That anti-growth instinct, he argues, often obscures the deeper issue: not whether development should occur, but what kind of development the region actually needs. The irony is that many of the physical spaces capable of accommodating new housing and community uses already exist. They’re just covered in asphalt.

“20-Minute Communities”

The report points to examples across the country where declining malls and oversized retail sites have been transformed into mixed-use districts known as “20-minute communities”—places where residents can walk from housing to shops, healthcare, recreation, and public gathering spaces within a short distance.

Out West, Bosch says, developers and municipalities have aggressively pursued these redevelopments. Former mall sites in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California have been converted into neighborhoods with apartments, parks, restaurants, transit hubs, offices, and civic amenities. “One planning board asked a developer what they needed to do to increase a proposal from 1,600 housing units to 2,000,” Bosch says, still sounding slightly astonished by the memory.

That pro-growth mindset, he suggests, differs sharply from many Hudson Valley development battles, where projects are frequently reduced in size or delayed amid fears of overcrowding.

Some local governments are beginning to rethink things. In White Plains, the largely vacant White Plains Galleria mall is slated for demolition and redevelopment into housing and open space. In Orange County, proposals surrounding the Galleria at Crystal Run include housing built on underused parking areas near transit infrastructure.

Kingston has explored redevelopment opportunities on municipal parking lots through request-for-expression-of-interest processes that envision structured parking paired with housing and commercial uses above.

Bosch sees those efforts as promising not simply because they create housing, but because they begin reclaiming land currently dedicated to inactive infrastructure.

Unlike greenfield development, many of these parking lots already sit alongside roads, sewer systems, utilities, and existing commercial services, making them unusually well-positioned for redevelopment. Pattern argues these sites could support housing, jobs, parks, and community amenities without sprawling farther outward into undeveloped land.

Oversized parking lots also carry environmental consequences. According to the report, excess asphalt worsens flooding, intensifies summer heat, degrades water quality, and reinforces car dependence while driving up development costs and rents. Maintaining these enormous paved surfaces is also increasingly expensive, particularly as retail vacancies rise and mall revenues decline. “You can’t maintain that based on a couple leases in a mall that’s all but dead,” Bosch says of the deteriorating lots surrounding Kingston’s Hudson Valley Mall.

The Destabilization of Tourism

Parking minimums don’t simply shape landscapes; they shape affordability. Every required parking space consumes land, paving, drainage infrastructure, and maintenance costs that are ultimately folded into rents and development budgets. One of the report’s central arguments is that reducing excessive parking requirements could make housing projects more financially viable in the first place.

At the same time, the region’s housing dynamics have become increasingly strained. The rise of tourism, second-home ownership, and remote work has pushed housing costs upward while shrinking the supply of modest rentals once accessible to working-class residents.

Bosch argues the pandemic accelerated trends that had already begun after the 2008 recession, when “staycation” tourism first brought large numbers of downstate visitors northward.

Remote work intensified the transformation. Workers earning metropolitan salaries can now live in the Hudson Valley while commuting into New York City only occasionally. That influx has reshaped local real estate markets and altered community economics throughout the region.

The consequences ripple outward. Middle-income households once able to purchase homes increasingly compete in rental markets instead. Service workers struggle to find affordable housing near tourism centers. Employers from restaurants to hotels to healthcare providers face labor shortages not necessarily because jobs don’t exist, but because workers cannot afford to live nearby.

In places like Hudson, Beacon, Woodstock, and Kingston, popularity itself has become destabilizing. “We may ultimately become a victim of our own popularity,” Bosch says.

Which brings the conversation back, oddly enough, to parking lots. For Bosch, the acres of underused pavement scattered across the Hudson Valley are an opportunity: land already cleared, connected to infrastructure, and positioned near existing commercial corridors. The challenge is whether municipalities are willing to rethink the assumptions embedded in their zoning codes and planning philosophies.

The region, he argues, no longer needs endless fields of parking designed for a retail economy in retreat. “That’s not the modern pattern of development that millennials and Gen Z are looking for,” Bosch says. “This generation does not want to live like their grandparents’ McMansion generation did.” According to Bosch, it wants housing. Public space. Walkable communities. Flexible mixed-use development. Infrastructure aligned with demographic and economic realities instead of nostalgic assumptions about suburban growth.

The Hudson Valley spent much of the last half-century building places for cars to arrive and leave. Increasingly, the future may depend on whether those same places can become somewhere people actually live.