The race is on: Can the backers of the Kingstonian get their project going between now and a year from now? They went before the Kingston Planning Board last week to ask for, and get, a 12-month extension of their site plan approval and special use permit for what has become the most argued-over project in recent city history.

Team Kingstonian says yes. Their attorney, Michael Moriello, in assuring the planning board that now, after fending off something like 18 lawsuits from another Uptown landowner seeking to reverse the Kingstonian’s approvals, everything in in place for them to begin their neighborhood-changing multiuse project in the very heart of the Stockade Historic District. “It is only after the above-mentioned court determinations that my clients are, finally, in a position to pursue moving this transformational project forward,” Moriello wrote the planning board. “In addition … the rise in interest rates, lingering supply chain troubles, costs of materials and construction charges have conspired to delay the building of the Kingstonian.”

Team Editorial, however, is a little skeptical. Ever since developers Brad Jordan and Joe Bonura Jr. announced two years ago that the Kingstonian was being put on pause, for all of the same issues Moriello cited in his letter: litigation, interest rates, construction costs, etc., your Editorial Team had consigned the project to the scrapheap of Kingston’s development history. Like many other ideas and projects proposed over the past 20 years, the concept seemed to have not survived its encounter with reality.

The word “transformative” is these days often applied to many things which are anything but. However, in Kingston’s case the Kingstonian would be just that. If built, it will not only provide over 140 units of housing and almost 300 parking spaces to a neighborhood in need of both, but will also do the impossible — get people to stop arguing over the Pike Plan. (We’re kidding: we know full well that the only thing that will get people to stop arguing over the Pike Plan is the heat-death of the universe.) It would fill a long-empty space in Kingston with a structure taller and more imposing than anything around it, and in a stroke add hundreds of residents to a pretty small area. As we’ve noted previously, if it does happen as planned, Uptown will never be the same again.

So let’s take a look at the various factors Team Kingstonian cites as behind the delay and see how, or if, they’ve changed in the last couple of years.

We’re no attorneys, but we can count, and 18 is a lot of lawsuits. We figure that every possible legal angle of attack that may have derailed the Kingstonian has been tried and failed, but it could be that all that really says is that we’re not imaginative enough to run a successful law firm. A heretofore-unanticipated line of legal argument, a new plaintiff or both could conceivably drag the whole thing into the courts again, making a groundbreaking before October 2025 an impossibility.

One thing we can say for certain is that the cost of financing the project is going down. That’s because the Federal Reserve last week cut its key lending rate by half a percentage point. That will pull down the interest rate lenders charge as well, potentially saving developers millions of dollars. We don’t know, but we wouldn’t be surprised if this factor alone drove Team Kingstonian’s decision to hit the pause button in 2022. As we all have seen in our own lives, if you can’t get the financing right, it’s no deal.

Have building costs also come down? That’s a tricky question as there is a ton of local variables involved which push costs one way or the other. Currie & Brown, a global construction consulting concern, has found costs in New York State are still trending upward, expected to rise by 4 percent by the time 2024 ends. Like a lot of other things, materials costs have gone through the roof since the pandemic: according to Currie & Brown, from 2020 to this year steel is up 50 percent, mass timber is up 22 percent and concrete is up 33 or 38 percent, depending on if you take it precast or cast in place. Kingston being one of the more expensive places in our very expensive state, we figure the Kingstonian will cost a lot more to build today than it would have cost two or three years ago.

“Supply chain woes” is a term that’s become fully wedged in our lexicon, useful to explain away or deflect the blame for almost any failure. (We’re sure some kid somewhere has used it to explain why their homework isn’t done.) What’s the deal with it? In July, mega-auditing and consulting firm KPMG put out a report saying that, yes, supply chain issues are still very much a thing. Predicting more disruptions going forward, KPMG says factors like labor problems and scarcity, wars, cyberattacks and climate change will all play their part in an increasingly chaotic dynamic. So it’s not going to get any easier for the Kingstonian in that department either.

It’s possible that these factors will play out in such a way that it makes sense for Team Kingstonian to get shovels in the ground at some point in the next 12 months. It’s also possible that they won’t, despite the obvious money to be made in our excruciatingly tight housing market. Developers are in a race against time, but why hurry if the prize for winning isn’t worth the effort? Any way you slice it, it looks like it will be another interesting year in Uptown Kingston.