The Challenge of Building New Cities: Inside The Satmar Hassidic Takeover of Bloomingburg

[This is the story of how a community of Hassidic Jews, through subterfuge and electoral fraud, took over a small town in an attempt to make it their own]

I spend a lot of time thinking about cities and housing. One question that often comes up among urbanists is: why don't we just build new cities? This could mean creating another NYC, or smaller cities oriented around different communities — like Boulder, Colorado, being a hub for outdoor recreation enthusiasts and Grateful Dead fans, or Provo and Salt Lake City as hubs for Mormons.

The primary challenge? Without government support, there's simply no land available to build new cities. Everything's already accounted for, and existing towns or cities don't want to fundamentally change.

Even if a group could acquire the land, cities don't exist in isolation. They require pre-existing infrastructure, connections to a labor market, and, for most, an already committed community that makes you want to live there. Most people don't want to be the pioneers, making it nearly impossible to reach the tipping point where others want to move in.

To illustrate just how difficult it is to develop new cities, I wanted to share a case study of the Satmar Hassidim and their takeover of a small village named Bloomingburg.

The Hassidic Context

For those unfamiliar with Hassidic Jews, they typically live in very insular communities. Most speak Yiddish as their primary language, don't receive a secular education, avoid modern technology like the internet, rarely work in standard jobs, often rely on welfare, have incredibly large families, and aim to live a completely protected Jewish existence. These communities are concentrated in places like Brooklyn, Lakewood, and Monsey. Each distinct group usually lives in its own enclave; for example, Skverer Hassidim in New Square, and Viznitz in Kaser.

Due to skyrocketing population growth (the average Hassidic family has 8 children) and the astronomical costs of New York real estate, most of these communities are severely restricted in their housing options. This creates a huge demand for more housing and new cities for them to call home.

You'd think if any group could easily build new cities to serve their community, it would be them. They don't care about existing urban infrastructure or being tied to labor markets, or the other conventional things that typically make a city appealing. They can't move individually because they rely on community infrastructure (mikvah, synagogue, kosher butcher, etc.), so there's increased pressure to create moving opportunities as a collective. Plus, they're led by community leaders who can essentially compel them to move.

Before we dive into the Bloomingburg story, it's helpful to give more context on the Satmars.

Meet The Satmars

The Satmar are the largest Hassidic sect in the world, best known for their fierce opposition to the State of Israel. With roots in Hungary and Romania before World War II, the Satmars, devastated by the Holocaust, arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1946 as a tiny community. Since then, their numbers have exploded.

Outgrowing Brooklyn, a small group moved to what became Kiryas Joel in the 1970s, while most remained in Brooklyn. With Brooklyn bursting at the seams and their property holdings worth billions, they started planning for more communities elsewhere. In 2006, the community split into two groups, one led by the former leader's son in Brooklyn (population: 60,000), the other by his brother in Kiryas Joel (population: 30,000).

In 2019, New York created its first new town in 38 years when Palm Tree (Kiryas Joel) seceded from the Town of Monroe, marking the long-term success of the 50-year Satmar takeover. Kiryas Joel is the poorest town in America — when visitors enter it, they are greeted by signs compelling all visitors to dress and act with modesty. The Satmar takeover was fueled with controversy, as they absorbed more and more land over time from the surrounding neighborhoods, commandeered public resources for their benefit, defunded public secular services, and redirected resources to solely benefit their needs. For instance, quite famously, in 2005, they took control of the East Ramapo school board, siphoning funds from public schools to their private religious institutions.

The Satmar Kiryas Joel strategy went something like this:

1. Find a small, economically depressed small town.

2. Buy property. Lots of property.

3. Move in en masse.

4. Take over local government.

5. Reshape the town in their image at the expense of the pre-existing community.

6. Profit? (Well, not really, but that's not the point.)

The Story of Bloomingburg

Now, let's look into the Satmar takeover of Bloomingburg and the creation of Kiryas Yetev Lev.

So why can't the Satmar, desperate to create their own city, just do it? Simple: there are no empty plots of land they can govern and build on. Why not take over an existing town? Well, after what happened to Monroe/Kiryas Joel, most communities are on high alert, ready to block any attempts by Hassidic groups to gain entry into their towns.

Enter Shalom Lamm, an enterprising non-Hassidic Jew with no obvious connection to the Satmar. In 2005, he started covertly buying property in Bloomingburg, the smallest village in New York State with just 400 residents. Located 25 miles from Kiryas Joel and 80 miles from Brooklyn, Bloomingburg was described as rural, poor, and unremarkable.

Lamm's strategy seemed to be:

1. Buy land secretly over many years.

2. Promise the locals a golf course and retirement community.

3. Actually build high-density housing for Hassidic families.

4. Profit! (This time for real – real estate is lucrative!)

Lamm bought whatever homes he could, plus 200 acres of empty unincorporated land which he got the village to annex and rezone for residential use, in exchange for building a large sewage treatment plant. He also bought an old airport and 635 nearby acres. Meanwhile, Lamm paid a local supervisor and leading town builder $1.4 million to help him obtain as much land as possible for development.

At first, Lamm seemed like a self-interested real estate developer who just wanted to help Bloomingburg flourish as part of his intention to make some money for himself. He promised a small golf course, a public pool, and yes, some homes, but these would cater to childless retirees.

When development started in 2012 on Lamm's main development project, Chestnut Ridge — advertised as part of a recreational complex with golf, a pool and 396 townhouses for retirees who had left the city — people started to suspect something was off.

At the same time, Lamm, who had worked for 7 years in complete secrecy, received a visit from Satmar leader Zalman Teitelbaum in January 2013 to bless the project, before any community started moving in. Simultaneously, Satmar's Der Yid magazine devoted an entire issue to promoting the new village for Satmar families, and the Satmar Rebbe appointed a team to support the initiative.

After filing public records requests to review the environmental impact report, the truth of what was being built in Bloomingburg became known to everyone. There would be no golf course, or public pool or homes for retirees, but instead, it would be 400 5-bedroom homes for young Hassidic families. Once Bloomingburg residents caught on, they knew they'd be the next Kiryas Joel and immediately moved to block further intrusion and went full NIMBY. The Town of Mamakating (pop. 12,000), which includes Bloomingburg, tried to annex the village to gain zoning power and thwart the Hassidic-friendly construction, but failed. Throughout 2013, all ongoing projects were blocked by the village planning board.

Stuck in conflict with no ability to buy more property, rezone, or get approvals for new construction, Lamm realized it was all or nothing. If they could win the next election and control the planning board, they'd have enough people to forever control the town. If they lost, they'd never have the momentum to seize control. Hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate investment hung in the balance of this small election, the last of which had only 24 voters!

In October 2013, Lamm promised the current mayor (who was in his pocket) a guaranteed re-election if he ran again.

Initially, Lamm brought in high-priced political advisors, but since everyone in town already opposed the project, it didn't help much.

Unable to sway existing voters, Lamm decided to bring in new ones. He offered young Satmar students two years of free rent and $1,000 to move to Bloomingburg before the election. He made similar offers to other religious Jewish groups, bribing rabbis to send their students.

Lamm estimated he only needed about 150 new voters to win. Unfortunately, because his projects weren't complete, there wasn't actually room for people to move in, nor did people want to live in unfinished housing.

So, they got creative. They argued that anyone could be a Bloomingburg resident without actually living there if they had enough connections to the town. Lamm paid young students to set up utility bills and bank accounts suggesting they lived in Bloomingburg. To support this facade, Lamm and his team made empty, unfinished homes look occupied, filling them with food and bedding, and turning lights on and off. They even created backdated leases for all these "residents," conveniently dated exactly 30 days before the election to make them eligible to vote.

For the election, Lamm managed to "register" over 150 new voters in just a few weeks, leading to his candidate's victory. The ensuing period triggered a huge web of litigation, with everyone fighting everyone.

In December 2015, Lamm and his associates were arrested for electoral fraud, with Lamm serving 10 months in prison.

[One tricky aspect of this story is its intersection with anti-Semitism. It's an unusual situation where a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews made a concerted effort to radically alter a local community. Since the situation is so extreme and black and white, much of the language and strategy used by the townspeople involves treating the conspirators as a group of Jews. While this is factually accurate—there genuinely was a Jewish conspiracy—it inevitably leads to accusations of anti-Semitism and accompanying legal issues related to religious discrimination, even though the opposition was not driven by the fact that they were Jewish.]

After the election, with the government now on their side, enough development continued and approvals were granted to allow the community to blossom. In 2016, the Satmar leader visited Bloomingburg for a week, declaring victory and readiness for more families to move in. By 2020, hundreds of Satmar families had moved in, now to a town filled with kosher grocery stores, synagogues, mikvahs, and ample shuttles to Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn.

Today, Bloomingburg is well on its way to becoming the next large Hassidic city, fully controlled by the Satmars.

To understand the implications of this, I encourage you to read this 2022 Reddit thread, where someone shares that an orthodox group bought two abandoned former resorts/camps near their community in the Hudson Valley, New York and what this means for them. Nearly every comment warns them to move, as their fate is inevitable — their community will slowly be taken over too.

On one hand, it looks like the Satmar succeeded in building a new city. On the other, it's been twenty years and they are still at barely over 1,000 people living there, and only after incurring significant costs and setbacks. If a group so primed for building a new city struggled this much, it seems to be nearly impossible for any other group to accomplish.