Federal grants aid Yonkers renewal

The city of Yonkers will team with a private developer to shape a plan to transform a deteriorated west-side housing complex and surrounding neighborhood as one of 17 municipalities nationwide awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Choice Neighborhoods Initiative program.

Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano announced the city – along with the Municipal Housing Authority of Yonkers and The Community Builders Inc., a nonprofit developer of affordable housing — has been awarded $300,000 to support the development of a comprehensive plan or “road map” to revitalize the Cottage Place Gardens site and Croton Heights neighborhood. The plan will analyze and recommend solutions related to education, health care, access to jobs and career paths.

The grant recipients in Yonkers have formed a steering committee of key partners, including the city school board, Yonkers Workforce Investment Board, Sarah Lawrence College, The Yonkers Neighborhood Health Center and Community Voices Heard.  The committee over the next year will meet with more than 20 community-based organizations to develop the plan.

The HUD grant initiative promotes a comprehensive approach to changing distressed areas of concentrated poverty into viable and sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods.

In a $19 million project, Community Builders will replace two buildings at the Cottage Place Gardens complex with a 50-unit mixed-income development at 188 Warburton Ave.

The public-private redevelopment of the city”™s west side also was aided this month by a $1,368,796 grant award to The Community Builders from the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York. The grant will help finance construction on the $52.4 million Public School 6 project, which will create a 50-unit building for low-income senior citizens and a 70-unit building for low-income families on the site of a long-abandoned city school off Ashburton Avenue. M&T Bank, a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, submitted the funding application.

The grant is part of $26.4 million in affordable housing program subsidies that the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York will award in its 2012 grant round.  The grants will help finance 37 projects that will create or preserve 2,679 units of affordable housing in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.