The Armonk contracting and development organization Fareri Cos. has proposed constructing a two-building residential development at 154 Bedford Road in Armonk. The project is called Armonk Close and would be built on a 1.26-acre site that had been the site of a lumberyard.
The project is an outgrowth of a previous effort to develop apartments on the property by developer Michael Fareri that dates back several years.
In September 2017, a judge ruled that the town of North Castle acted legally when it rejected a request by Fareri to transfer an agreement to build affordable housing. Fareri had made a proposal to build at the lumberyard site but contended that building six required affordable housing units was impractical and would result in a $1.8 million loss. He proposed building the apartments at 470 Main St. instead.
According to a 2017 article by Business Journal staff writer Bill Heltzel, acting state Supreme Court Justice Anne E. Minihan ruled that the decision to transfer the units “is effectively left to the discretion of the town board.”
“I”™m really disappointed with the judge”™s decision,” Fareri said at that time. “At the end of the day, the town won the battle but potentially lost the war.”
Heltzel reported that in 2015, the town planning board granted Fareri site plan approval to build luxury apartments at the lumberyard site. Six of the 36 units had to be offered as affordable housing.
In March, Fareri asked the town to approve transferring the affordable housing agreement to the proposed development on Main Street.
He maintained that was not practical to mix “high end” market-rate apartments with below-market-rate apartments.
In a recent letter to Christopher Carthy, chairman of the North Castle Planning Board, and the board”™s members, Fareri said that he wanted to divide the property into two lots of approximately 0.63-acre each and put up one building on each lot. Each building would contain 10 residential units. The property is in the Residential Multi-Family Single Structure zone. Fareri said that as many as 36 units could be built on the property with 18 of the units market rate and the other two would be priced to fit into the affordable category.
Fareri said that there would be 57 parking spaces provided, which is more than the required 52 spaces. He said that 25 spaces would be outdoors and the remainder would be in a garage.
According to a staff report by the town Planning Department, in July 2015 the planning board granted site plan approval for the demolition of existing structures on the property and the construction of an approximately 48,000-square-foot, three-story building with 36 units. The staff report said that the current proposal showed there would be eight two-bedroom units that did not meet the town”™s requirement for two-bedroom apartments to be at least 1,100 square feet in size. Fareri had told the planning board that the square footage does meet requirements because calculations should include the square footage of separate storage units assigned to individual apartments.
The staff report also noted that the applicant”™s environmental assessment form made reference to their being 22 residential units in the project while the rest of the application refers to there being 20 units.
The staff report found that one of the buildings would be 31-feet-11.75-inches in height while the other would be 32-feet-2.5-inches tall. The staff report pointed out that the town limits the maximum height of structures to 30 feet.
The civil engineering, landscape architecture and planning firm Kellard Sessions began a review of the site plan for the town and called on the applicant to provide more details on a variety of subjects including a landscape and screening plan, site lighting plan and a stormwater pollution prevention plan.
