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Developer alters housing portion of
Yonkers plan
By JOHN GOLDEN
Westchester County Business Journal, July 21, 2008
Despite concern and warnings that the city’s slow approval process and
an ailing economy could combine to kill their project, partners in the
proposed $1.6 billion redevelopment of downtown Yonkers still hope to
break ground there by the end of the year.
But the partners’ new position on affordable housing within the
mixed-use development – a dominant concern of low-income residents and
community action groups at public hearings on the project – is not
negotiable, a top executive for the partnership said last week. SFC
wants to build those units, about 70 to 75, apart from its four
high-rise residences proposed for the riverfront and near Getty Square
and also set aside rent subsidies for an equal number of units for
tenants in existing housing in the downtown area.
Meanwhile, a Republican on the Yonkers City Council accused the
council’s Democratic leadership of “failing the citizens of Yonkers” by
allowing the SFC project to languish “with no end to the approval
process in sight.” Councilman John M. Murtagh, a declared candidate for
the Democrat-held 35th District seat in the State Senate, urged the
council to adopt a “reasonable but strict timetable” for the various
approvals needed before construction can begin at the proposed River
Park Center near Getty Square.
“We do have a time frame,” City Council President Chuck Lesnick
countered his critic last week. Murtagh in his recent press release said
Lesnick has shown “an utter inability to make any semblance of
substantive progress whatsoever” on what would be the largest
redevelopment project in city history.
Lesnick said planning consultants for SFC and the city “are knee-deep in
comments” received by late May from interested parties on SFC’s draft
environmental impact statement, which was submitted to the city a year
ago. He said the council could approve a final environmental impact
statement by early October, as SFC officials have urged. Still, “If we
don’t have four or five votes” for the project, “then it doesn’t matter”
if that timeline is met.
Lesnick said the council’s process “has been open. It’s been
transparent. It’s been structured. It’s been time-sensitive. It has not
extended the project one extra minute. We’re actively working to try to
get final approval.”
Joseph V. Apicella, senior vice president at Cappelli Enterprises Inc.
and the partners’ executive project manager in Yonkers, last week said
SFC hoped to have final project approvals from the council by Nov. 25.
“That is our Super Tuesday,” he said. “Hopefully by the end of the year
we can have a groundbreaking.”
Lesnick indicated much remains to be settled before then, including
project financing.
Affordable housing looms as another unresolved issue and potential
obstacle to construction. Lesnick said he was “quite surprised” to hear
at a recent meeting of the council real estate committee that SFC “is
going to back away from its commitment to affordable housing.”
SFC had proposed to build 6 percent of dwelling units as affordable
housing for qualified residents. Preliminary plans include a total of
nearly 1,400 housing units at Palisades Point on the riverfront and
Chicken Island, though Apicella said 1,500 units could be built.
Lesnick said he hoped to reach an agreement with SFC that 10 percent to
13 percent of total units would be affordable housing. Another major
mixed-use development under construction in Yonkers, Forest City Ratner
Cos.’ Ridge Hill, has a 13.5-percent affordable housing requirement, he
said.
SFC now proposes to build affordable housing equivalent to 5 percent of
the project’s total housing units “in and around the project area,”
Apicella said. He said it was “too expensive” to put those units within
the project’s high-rise towers.
Apicella said SFC also will guarantee a set-aside of $35,000 per
dwelling for another 5 percent of total project units to be used as
subsidies to mitigate rent increases in the downtown area.
“That’s a significant pot of money for a rent subsidy program,” he said.
“I think it’s an extremely generous offer and very innovative.” It would
enable residents to stay in existing downtown housing after
redevelopment, he said.
“That’s not negotiable,” he said.
SFC to date has invested $21 million in the Yonkers project. Though
Apicella and other SFC executives have said the approval process has
taken too long, the partners are not about to pull up stakes there.
“We’re professionals,” said Apicella. “We don’t play the game of, if you
don’t do this by such and such a date, we’ll take our marbles and go
home.”
Still, Apicella said Councilman Murtagh in his criticism expressed “a
very realistic anxiety” about the development project “being put on hold
or going away.”
“The council has to move. This is not an opportunity in a real estate
depression that you mull over too long.” If the project continues to be
delayed in a weakening economy, it could lose prospective retailers,
condominium buyers and luxury-apartment tenants and financing, Apicella
said.
“There’s going to come a time that if the economy gets sicker, we’re not
going to be able to pull up this project by its bootstraps,” he said.
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