Chronicle profile: Former three-time Croton trustee Richard Olver ponders a long career at home and abroad.
The retired UN senior official moved to Croton because he couldn't afford his childhood river town. He has advocated for affordable housing ever since, but has differences with current Dem leaders.
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After spending a chunk of his childhood in Hastings-on-Hudson, Richard Olver left the area to attend college in Pennsylvania, law school at Harvard, and then embark on a quarter century career with the United Nations that took him to trouble spots around the world. About 2002, he decided to come back to Hastings, after 40 years away. Olver wanted to replicate the community in which he had grown up.
But he couldn’t. It was too expensive. “I had to come all the way up to Croton to find something similar to what we had in Hastings,” Olver says.
Ever since, affordable housing has been a key issue for Olver. He took that advocacy position with him onto the Croton Board of Trustees, where he has served three times: First in 2008, when he served a two-year term along with pro-housing Democrats including former mayor Leo Wiegman and the late Ann Gallelli; then from 2010-2011, when he was appointed to replace trustee Demetria Restuccia, who resigned when she moved away from Croton; and then again in 2019, to fill the unexpired term of Amy Attias, who resigned from the board for reasons that remain publicly murky today.
But now, Olver says, Croton is “turning into the Hastings-on-Hudson of today. The only people who can afford to live in Croton are business owners, financial sector people, and dual career professionals.”
Some might disagree with that characterization, and also disagree with the measures the current Board of Trustees is taking to try to fast track development of affordable housing. But there is little question Croton is changing, and that the political battles that leaders like Olver, Wiegman, and Gallelli fought with the more conservative leaders of Croton United are, for now at least, a thing of the past.
Last month, the Chronicle spent a long afternoon with Olver in his study, talking about his life, his career, and his thoughts about where Croton has been and where it is going.
Given his family upbringing, it’s perhaps no surprise that Olver ended up working for the United Nations. His father, who was from rural Pennsylvania, was himself a senior UN official, starting from when the organization was founded in 1945; his mother was a “Jewish leftist” from New York City, who went to work for the Office of Price Administration (OPA), where her boss was Frances Humphrey Howard, the sister of Hubert Humphrey.
Olver’s parents were “Stevenson Democrats,” Olver says, referring to Democratic Party liberal Adlai Stevenson. At the OPA and at other stages of her career, Olver’s mother’s own mission was racial integration, at a time when Washington, DC was still segregated. When Olver was two years old, the family moved to Hastings-on-Hudson, where he stayed through the eighth grade. “I considered it home,” he says.
At Harvard Law School, where he received his law degree in 1974, Olver’s classmates included Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer. But politically Olver was far to their left. He studied with Critical Race Theory co-founder Derrick Bell, and after getting his degree, took a job with a legal services organization in Morehead, Kentucky, “in deepest, darkest Appalachia.”
There he represented mostly poor working class white people in civil cases such as divorce, property disputes, consumer issues, bankruptcy, and landlord-tenant disputes. But it was the Jimmy Carter years, and Olver soon got a taste of the kind of left-wing politics he grew to dislike. “The new liberal lawyers came in, and wanted to push more of a political agenda, an ideologically driven agenda” consisting of broader national issues. “They weren’t going to get anywhere with that,” Olver says. “It wasn’t a bad agenda, but we weren’t the people to change that.”
After four years in public law, Olver went into private practice, but stayed in Morehead for another three years. “It had a profound effect on me,” Olver says. “I realized I was not a left liberal or a progressive. I am interested in the facts and what people want.”
In 1981, Olver went to work for the United Nations. His first post was in Sri Lanka, where he was a representative for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for four years; then he went to Sierra Leone, right in the middle of a threatening civil war.
“I hated my time in Sierra Leone,” Olver says. “It was 1985 and the country was collapsing in slow motion. We were sweating blood trying to stop the decline into civil war.” In 1991, the efforts of the UN to stop the bloodshed failed, and a decade long civil war ensued. But by then Olver had begun spending most of his time at the UN’s headquarters in New York, trying to beef up the coordination of the organization’s network of resident staff, but still making many trips abroad.
After his retirement from the UN in 2007, Olver continued to work for the organization as a consultant, visiting countries like Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Kenya, Serbia, and Afghanistan to evaluate and make recommendations for UN operations in those nations. “At headquarters and in the field, my primary focus was on creating an effective UN. After I retired, I found myself in one war zone after another.”
Would those skills translate to a relatively small village like Croton? In 2008, Olver, and Croton, had a chance to find out.
Croton: “What we need is Leo Wiegman’s brain in Greg Schmidt’s body.”
In Croton, Olver spent some years practicing immigration law, and attending church at St. Augustine’s Episcopal (in the 1990s, Over had begun wholeheartedly to embrace Christianity, which he credits with changing his life as much as his parents’ politics did.) A number of people on Croton’s Democratic Party committee also attended St. Augustine’s. “I was struck by what [former trustee and mayor] Leo Wiegman was trying to do, and Ann Gallelli,” Olver says. “So I volunteered to help. I was a refugee from Hastings-on-Hudson and I didn’t want Croton to be that. Affordable housing was at the top of my agenda.”
But Over stresses that “affordable housing” has a number of different meanings, ranging from housing for low income people, the lower middle class, “and people like you and me and our children.”
Olver says that the Democrats, having a majority on the Board of Trustees when he was elected in 2008, got together and began hiring consultants to figure out “what we can do to develop in such a way as to shift the tax burden away from individual homeowners.” One thing became clear right away, Olver says. Croton was never going to be able to have a vibrant, commercialized downtown area like Rye and some other New York state communities.
“The consultants told us we had a very tough hand to play. Croton is [divided] by the Hudson River, the highway, the railroad, and the Croton River. Croton had been a mixed income town, but that was busted by the [Route 9] highway. The highway was needed, it served the greater good, but it destroyed a walkable downtown.”
On top of that, Olver says, came gentrification. “We are now skewed towards upper income and older people. The studies showed there was no possibility for a major increase in the tax base” beyond what Croton already had.
The solution, the Dems decided, was multi-family, multi-story housing. “We spent ten years fighting over it,” Olver says, and a couple of times the Democrats suffered “blowout losses” at the polls over that and other issues. But he continues to staunchly defend the pro-housing policies. “The whole point of the Democratic Party’s focus on housing was to have a modern village with space for everyone.”
Olver admits that when village elections shifted from March to November, in line with other state and national elections, the habit of voting a straight party ticket—in a village where two-thirds of voters are registered Democrats—meant “it was impossible for [Croton United] to win.”
Although Olver returned to the Board for a brief time in 2019, he does not miss being a trustee.
“I got $4000 a year to sit on the Board and take abuse from people,” he says, adding that most members of the Board have day jobs. “It’s amateur hour up there. You don’t have the time or the energy commitment to do what is needed to promote a change agenda.”
To critics of the housing agenda now pushed by the Board’s solid liberal block—and to criticisms that Croton is now a “one party town”—Olver says that “the Democrats have won multiple elections on this housing mandate. Their opponents don’t offer alternatives. If they want to contest it, they can run candidates against it.”
But Olver says he has a number of disagreements with the Democratic Party, including its promotion of the SALT property tax deduction. “It’s a subsidy to the upper middle class,” he says. And yet, he laments, there is nowhere to go outside the Democratic Party except into the Trump camp. (As for the Working Families Party, Olver calls it a “malign influence,” especially its advocacy of rent control. “Rent control means no new housing.”)
And although former Croton United affiliated mayor Greg Schmidt was a political enemy of Olver, Gallelli, and the Dems on the Board, Olver praises his political skills and thinks they are needed today in village leadership. He does not appear to be a huge fan of current mayor Brian Pugh, for example, although Olver says he has “great respect” for him.
“Pugh’s politics are [NY state senator] Pete Harckham’s politics,” Olver says. He goes on:
“Greg Schmidt was the best retail politician I have seen in all my years here.” (A retail politician, for those new to the term, is one who interacts closely with their supporters.) “We fought them tooth and nail for years, but what we really need is Leo Wiegman’s brain in Greg Schmidt’s body.”
Today, while Olver obviously has a lot to say about Croton politics, he seems to largely stay out of them. He enjoys the social and religious scene at St. Augustine’s, and is spending a lot of his time writing up the many chapters of his life.
And, after three marriages and divorces, he has found new happiness with the woman he married in 2021 (at the church), writer Anne Dimock, who moved here from California after meeting Olver online. (Anne is quoted in the New York Times article about their marriage as crediting his three previous wives for making Olver “the wonderful man he is today…”
Richard Olver was in the middle of many bitter battles during his time on the Croton Board, and as a result, not everyone in the village thinks he is wonderful. But many can probably agree with the statement he made, back in January 2008, when the Croton Democratic Committee announced his candidacy, along with that of Ann Gallelli.
“We need to work across our differences to make this wonderful Village better without increasing taxes. That means respect and listening, instead of endless name calling and point scoring.”
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His observation are obvious hopefully they will be enlightening.
Richard Olver seems like an incredible person! Makes me proud to be part of this place, a place that I hope we can make work for everyone, not just the upper crust.
Michael: in a number of locations you have robbed Mr Olver of his 'l' and turned him into Mr Over.