Yonkers developer Kenneth Dearden likes to look at urban skylines in his travels. He likes what he sees when driving by downtown White Plains, where developer Louis Cappelli”™s twin glass-sheathed condominium towers at the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton dominate a skyline transformed by redevelopment in recent years.
Dearden and his partners at Metro Partners L.L.C., where he is president of development, want to build a reflecting apartment tower of similar glass design, though of lesser height, on Buena Vista Avenue near the Yonkers City Pier and Metro-North Railroad station. The 25-story, 412-unit rental tower would be the centerpiece of an estimated $150 million project on two acres that would transform a city block of homes and vacant or underused industrial parcels while incorporating elements of the street”™s 19th-century architectural heritage.
History and some green
That heritage includes 92 Main St., a former city trolley barn that Metro Partners converted into The Lofts at Metro 92, which includes 40 live-work lofts and ground-floor retail space. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the brick building would be connected to the adjacent glass tower in the design proposal being reviewed by the Yonkers Planning Board.
Teutonia Hall, a boarded-up, 120-year-old building on the Buena Vista Avenue block, would be razed to make way for the residential tower. The former arts centerӪs distinctive and largely intact fa̤ade would be dismantled brick by brick and reassembled at an entrance to a fully automated parking garage and education center that would flank the tower on the south side.
On the parking garage roof, the developer envisions a 10,000-square-foot hydroponic garden, a larger-scaled version of the hydroponic greenhouse that draws tourists to the nearby Science Barge moored on the Hudson that is operated by Groundwork Hudson Valley. The Yonkers-based environmental group could operate the garden in partnership with the developer.
Dearden said the development team is considering a geothermal system to supply heat and electricity for the apartment building. Excess heat could be used to warm the rooftop greenhouse, he said. Metro Partners operates a geothermal system at nearby 66 Main, its 166-unit luxury apartment building that opened three years ago.
Generating income, taxes
As at 66 Main, the Buena Vista project will be marketed to attract Metro-North commuters as tenants. In a recent presentation to the city planning board, lead agency for the state environmental quality review required for the project, Dearden said an estimated 65 percent to 70 percent of market housing in downtown Yonkers is occupied by commuters to the city.
The planned apartment building would include 24 efficiency studios, and 266 one-bedroom and 122 two-bedroom units. The developer”™s planning consultant, Tim Miller Associates Inc. in Cold Spring, estimated they would house approximately 790 tenants who would bring some $7 million annually in disposable income to the downtown business district.
Businesses there still are waiting to benefit from an economic renaissance in Yonkers that has been thwarted by the recession and the lack of project financing and prospective retail and residential tenants for the major mixed-use redevelopment project planned by Struever Fidelco Cappelli L.L.C.
The Buena Vista development, Dearden told city planning officials, would produce approximately $1 million annually in real property taxes, including school district taxes that would add more than $10,000 per student annually for the city”™s financially strapped schools.
Dearden said he hoped to bring the project proposal to the Yonkers City Council this fall for final city approval. If approval seems assured, a cleanup of industrial brownfields on the project site could begin this summer, he said.
Dearden said state tax credits from the brownfield cleanup program are needed to bridge the difference between constructions costs that are on a par with New York City”™s ”“ about $400,000 per rental unit for this project ”“ with Westchester rental rates that will bring the developer about $300,000 per unit.
“It”™s crucial to us to keep the unit count high” to make the project financially viable, Dearden said.
Traffic, preservation concerns
Some speakers at the planning board”™s recent public hearing on the developer”™s proposal said they were concerned that influx of apartment dwellers could cause traffic problems on the narrow street. Others said the 25-story glass tower was out of place in the neighborhood and clashed with its 19th-century historical character.
Terry Joshi, president of the Yonkers Committee for Smart Development, urged the planning board to work with Metro Partners to find a compromise in project design that balances “their really laudable development goals” with preservation of the area”™s architectural integrity.
The proposed tower was designed by architects at the Lessard Group Inc., a firm based in Washington, D.C. Lessard was retained by the transformer of the White Plains skyline, Cappelli Enterprises Inc., to design Trump Plaza and the never-developed LeCount Square in New Rochelle and the Trump Parc luxury condominium tower in Stamford, Conn.
“Residential buildings actually don”™t generate a lot of traffic,” Dearden later said of one concern raised at the hearing. “It”™s retail that generates traffic.”
The Buena Vista project does not have a retail component.
Dearden said he was not worried the residential development would fail to attract tenants, another concern voiced at the hearing by a resident who raised the prospect of “another bunch of empty buildings in downtown Yonkers,” where he said apartment occupancy rates are low.
At 66 Main, Dearden said, he has only one or two vacancies a month. “If you build it, they”™ll rent it in Yonkers ”“ if you build it well,” he said.
