A national union pension trust has made the largest investment in its 45-year history to bring a residential pediatric center and about 1,500 construction and permanent jobs to Yonkers.
Backed by $100 million in financing from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT), the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center will move in February 2012 from its leased Manhattan headquarters to a 137-bed, 165,000-square-foot building under construction on a wooded hilltop in the South Westchester Executive Park. Founded and sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of New York, the nonprofit center serves children and minors with complex medical diagnoses and disabilities. It is one of only two pediatric nursing facilities in downstate New York and the only one dedicated to long-term care.
The center will create more than 700 jobs in Yonkers. While Manhattan employees can opt to relocate to the Yonkers facility, one-third of the center”™s current work force will reach retirement age by the time of the move, said Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center CEO Patricia A. Tursi. She said only four of the center”™s 650 current employees live in Westchester.
Construction crews this fall are hustling to frame just over 1,000 tons of steel and enclose the four-story residence for medically fragile children before the onset of winter. The project at 300 Corporate Blvd. S. is expected to create about 800 jobs for the area”™s building trades unions, which are struggling with an unemployment rate of about 40 percent for their members in New York state.
Tursi said the project in Yonkers ends “a nine-year journey” by staff and directors of the center to find a new home for their overcrowded Manhattan operation and structure financing for its development. The Yonkers site was chosen after a two-year search in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.
In Yonkers, “Every child will be just a few feet away from feeling the first raindrop or snowflake,” she told a crowd of Yonkers city officials and national and local union officers at a recent event at the site to announce the HIT financing for the approximately $116 million development.
The center”™s 6.5-acre campus in Yonkers has been named Harrington Park in honor of the late William F. Harrington, a Westchester attorney who was managing chairman at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt L.L.P. in White Plains and who headed the pediatric center”™s capital campaign. His son, William P. Harrington, succeeded him as managing partner at Bleakley Platt and as head of the center”™s capital campaign.
Formed in 1965 as a fixed-income investment company, the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust manages approximately $3.9 billion in assets for 350 union and public employee pension plans, including 35 investors in New York. In New York state, HIT has invested more than $1 billion in 43 housing and health care projects that have created an estimated 6,800 union construction jobs and have built or restored more than 25,000 housing units.
To counter high building trades unemployment, HIT since early 2009 has invested $570 million in 23 housing and health care projects nationwide with a goal of creating 10,000 construction jobs. HIT officials expect to pass that goal by spring of 2011. Speaking in Yonkers, John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president emeritus and HIT chairman, said the two-year campaign to date has created more than 6,400 construction jobs nationwide.
The Yonkers project financing, a 30-year loan at 5.22 percent interest insured by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, is by far the largest of HIT”™s investments. “Not only is this a great project, it”™s probably the most important project the HIT has done in its 45-year history,” said HIT CEO Stephen Coyle. The project is an example of that rare real estate development math where “2 plus 2 equals 7,” he said.
“It”™s also good to get some guys back to work,” Coyle said.
Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, who serves on the HIT executive committee, said investments such as HIT”™s are needed at a time when government”™s financial resources to help people in need “are becoming more and more limited ”¦ It”™s just the greatest challenge that we as a society faces. Charity alone cannot take care of the enormity of the cost that”™s involved.”
“It”™s a wonderful project,” said Edward Doyle, president of the Westchester-Putnam Building and Construction Trades Council. “We need the jobs. You need a home,” he told Seton center officials. “It took you nine years to get here.
“This job will be done on time,” Doyle pledged.
