Ginsburg Development launches luxury rentals brand

For developer Martin Ginsburg, the recent groundbreaking ceremony for his Valhalla company”™s $100 million residential complex on the Yonkers riverfront was both a homecoming of a kind and occasion to reminisce. It marked too the launch of a luxury rentals brand by a developer who, 50 years after starting his company and six years after the credit crisis brought development to a standstill and forced some developers out of business or into bankruptcy, is back building and reviving stalled projects for a changed market in Westchester and the suburban region.

Ginsburg Development Cos. executives were joined by Yonkers city officials in wielding ceremonial shovels for the Oct. 21 groundbreaking on the vacant site of River Tides at Greystone, a 10-story, twin-towered, 330-unit luxury rental building at 1105-1135 Warburton Ave. that is expected to open in fall 2016. The steep-sloped, sandy-soiled property overlooks the Greystone station of Metro-North Railroad, and future River Tides tenants and their next-door neighbors to the north at Riverview Club Condominium will have walkway access from the property to the commuter train stop.

The project, with its proximity to the Metro-North station, supports Yonkers officials”™ efforts to encourage transit-oriented development along the city”™s post-industrial Hudson waterfront. The Yonkers Industrial Development Agency, whose chairman is Mayor Mike Spano, last year approved up to $1.7 million in sales tax exemptions during construction, a $1.935 million mortgage recording tax exemption and a 10-year partial property tax exemption for the project.

“This property, which has been taxed as vacant land for decades, will now become an important addition to our city”™s tax base,” Spano said in a statement. The Ginsburg project also is expected to create more than 300 construction jobs over a two-year period, according to a spokesman for Ginsburg Development.

As if to remind a groundbreaking audience of the project”™s transit-oriented focus, the blast of a train horn approaching the Greystone station platform briefly drowned out Ginsburg”™s remarks at the microphone. “It”™s very convenient to the railroad,” he deadpanned when the noise subsided.

For Ginsburg, an architect who founded the development company in 1964, the Greystone neighborhood of Yonkers once was his family home and a focus of his company”™s early condo development projects.

The Ginsburg company in 1970 built Esplanade, a 57-unit complex of condo flats and townhouses at 1200 Warburton Ave. The developer and his wife lived there, and Ginsburg was elected president of the condo association, he told his Yonkers audience.

“I have a particular affection for this area,” he said. His company has built more than 600 residential units in or near the Greystone area of Yonkers, he said.

“I built that,” Ginsburg told the Business Journal, pointing to Riverview Club adjacent to the excavated River Tides at Greystone site. Formerly called River Hill Tower, the 262-unit high-rise was completed in 1975.

“I built that too,” he said, pointing across Warburton Avenue to Riverwatch, a 14-story balconied building built in the late 1980s for the rental market. The Ginsburg company began converting the property, formerly the Tower at Greystone, into a 65-unit condominium building in 2005 as the housing market peaked in Westchester County. The conversion was completed in 2007.

Ginsburg said he has owned the site under development for 40 years. “We had a few false starts that never went anywhere,” he said. He called the property “our prime site in the neighborhood.”

His plans for a condominium development on the site were approved by city officials in 2005. But the credit crisis and Great Recession stalled the project as market demand and financing shifted from the condominium projects of the boom years to rental apartments.

The River Tides, where luxury apartments will range from studios to three-bedroom units, should appeal to singles and young couples who are not yet ready to purchase a home, New York City rail commuters and empty nesters, Ginsburg said.

“The theme here is going to be, come home and vacation,” he said. “I think we”™re building a masterpiece for Yonkers and for Westchester.”

The developer said River Tides will be a flagship property of the Valhalla company”™s new GDC Rentals brand. The new program will make Ginsburg Development the premier developer of luxury rentals in Westchester, he said.

GDC Rentals includes two other projects under construction in Westchester and Rockland counties and a third rental development for which Ginsburg is seeking municipal approval in Hasting-on-Hudson.

In Haverstraw, Riverside is a 106-unit rental development being built at GDC”™s Harbors at Haverstraw site, where Ginsburg Development completed 388 condo apartments and townhouses before the financial crisis. The rental project, which reportedly will cost approximately $27 million, is scheduled for completion in fall 2015.

On the Ossining riverfront, Ginsburg Development broke ground in June on Harbor Square, a $65 million, 118-unit luxury rental complex. The project, which includes a restaurant on the site, was first proposed in 1998 as a condominium development by another Valhalla-based developer, Louis Cappelli of Cappelli Enterprises Inc. The Cappelli and Ginsburg companies formed a joint venture for the project in 2005 and began foundation work at the site before the project came to a halt in the credit crisis in 2008.

Ginsburg revived the project as a rental development in 2012 and Cappelli Enterprises no longer is a partner in the venture.

In Hastings-on-Hudson, Ginsburg last year returned to village officials with modified plans for Saw Mill Lofts, a project on an approximately 7-acre vacant parcel between Route 9A and the Saw Mill River. Ginsburg is seeking approval to build 54 market-rate loft apartments and 12 affordable units in three buildings. The property formerly was part of the Ciba-Geigy campus, now the Ardsley Park life science campus in the town of Greenburgh.

Ginsburg said he plans to build a bridge over the Saw Mill River to connect the development to the county”™s South County Trailway.