Tuckahoe developer Philip Raffiani set about transforming his village”™s Main Street corridor a decade ago when his company built Viva Bene, a 10-townhouse development whose brick design shaped the look the avenue shows today. Two more projects over the next four years added rental apartments and retail space to Main Street in a village that occupies less than one square mile ”“ exactly 0.68 square mile, Raffiani noted ”“ in southern Westchester County.
“It took me seven months” to obtain the needed municipal approvals “to get the original building built,” he recalled recently in his office at Mirado Properties Inc., the commercial and residential development company he and two partners started in Tuckahoe in 1999. “We had tremendous resistance. Nobody wanted anything built.”
“The second and third buildings took me two months each” to clear the approval process. “Once they saw the first project, nobody resisted it anymore.”
In a booming housing market, Raffiani and partners had plans to redevelop two more parcels in tandem on Main Street. One, a 33,000-square-foot property at 150 Main St., was built in 1927 as a Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was last occupied by Westcon Group Inc., an international computer and communications equipment distributor that Raffiani co-founded in 1985. When the business was sold and relocated to Tarrytown in 1999, it had grown from seven to 250 employees. The Tuckahoe property, unwanted by Westcon”™s new owner, was acquired by Raffiani”™s company.
In 2005, Mirado Properties acquired 160 Main St., a 65,000-square-foot property across Midland Place from the former Westcon office. The two properties occupy about 2½ acres at the corner of Main Street and Midland Place.
In 2007, village officials approved his company”™s plans for an 88-unit condominium development on the two sites. But the county”™s heated real estate market was about to turn frigid.
“Then the way the economy went, it wasn”™t going to get built,” Raffiani said. At lending banks that had been throwing money at developers, “The doors just slammed shut. ”¦It was really crazy.”
“The banking community just stopped lending,” said Glen M. Vetromile, a Bronxville resident and managing partner at Glenco Group. His real estate investment and development company capitalized on the market”™s swift reversal five years ago when some developers were driven into bankruptcy and condominium and other projects came to a halt in the metropolitan area.
In Mount Vernon, Vetromile in 2010 teamed with a family-owned Mamaroneck company, Petro Real Estate Development Corp., to buy at bankruptcy auction a property in the Fleetwood neighborhood where construction of a 70-unit condo tower was about 70 percent completed when abandoned in 2008. Revived and marketed as a luxury rental development, The Horizon at Fleetwood is fully leased, he said.
With an eye on Tuckahoe”™s Main Street, Vetromile three years ago approached Raffiani “knowing that the project had stalled, with the concept of a rental” development in place of the approved condo plan. A project partnership was struck, with Glenco Group and Mirado Properties forming Tuckahoe Development Partners L.L.C.
For the Tuckahoe project, Vetromile also has partnered with New Jersey-based Roseland, the real estate development and management company acquired in October by Mack-Cali Realty Corp. at a price of approximately $135 million. Roseland Partners L.L.C. had been the developer selected by General Motors Corp. to redevelop GM”™s 97-acre former automotive plant site in Sleepy Hollow before pulling out of the long-delayed mixed-use project about five years ago.
The Tuckahoe partners in 2011 had site plans approved for a 121-unit residential development in two buildings on Main Street. To end a legal challenge brought by residents concerned that the project would swell student enrollment in the Tuckahoe Union Free School District, Vetromile said the partners a year ago agreed to reduce the size of the project to 108 one-bedroom and two-bedroom units.
The project will include 3,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space at 150 Main St. “We”™d like to have a bank” as tenant there, Vetromile said.
The partners also will pay for landscaping, fencing and recreational improvements at the village”™s Main Street Park across from the development site.
Raffiani said the project will cost $40 million to $45 million.
Demolition work has begun at the two sites. Construction is expected to be completed in about 20 months.
“We think it”™s going to lease up very quickly,” Vetromile said. He said the partners expect to draw “couples, singles, people in transition and empty nesters” to an apartment complex whose amenities will include a yoga studio and fitness center, an expansive outdoor terrace with gardens and fountain sculpture, a freestanding stone fireplace pit and an outdoor kitchen for private entertaining.
“The demand for rental units in lower Westchester is outstanding,” Raffiani said.
A scarcity of land in southern Westchester for developments of this size could make living and renting in Tuckahoe all the more attractive. “With the exception of Yonkers, there are no municipalities that have properties of any size” to offer developers, Vetromile said.
