The town of Harrison has adopted a new master plan, a guiding document of development goals and zoning recommendations.
Harrison”™s new plan, adopted by the town board Dec. 19, focuses heavily on the so-called Platinum Mile stretch of corporate parks alongside Interstate 287 that also runs into White Plains and Rye Brook. The plan, prepared by New York City-based BFJ Planning, recommends rezoning a teardrop-shaped area of Harrison around the Platinum Mile to allow for mixed use that would open the door to senior living facilities and ground-floor retail and restaurant zoning by special exception permit.
Mayor Ron Belmont said that the rezoning would address a commercial corridor that made up 60 percent of the town”™s tax base in the 1980s, but has since seen large corporate parks abandoned or falling into disrepair and new tenants hard to come by. Today, corporations make up 18 percent of the town”™s tax base.
“The future of the town of Harrison is right there on Westchester Avenue,” Belmont told the Business Journal in an interview.
Some of the recent successes of the Platinum Mile have been nontraditional corporate uses. A Memorial-Sloan Kettering cancer center is under construction. Fordham University opened a graduate school campus in the area. Biotech company HistoGenetics recently purchased a Platinum Mile Building. Some have envisioned the area, which also includes a Westmed facility, becoming “The Medical Mile.” Belmont said he is waiting for a board decision to allow corporate sponsorship of the stretch, which would formally name the corridor after a corporate sponsor as a way for the town to net non-property tax revenue.
The master plan also aims to reinforce the town”™s B-Zone, in which two-family housing is permitted. Harrison has seen a shift from traditional “top-down” two-family homes, those homes that are built with one unit on each floor, to “side-by-side” developments that are generally larger and overwhelm lot sizes. Residents say the larger homes are changing the character of neighborhoods in the B-Zone and the plan recommends potentially adding a new site plan review process.
Harrison”™s downtown, which has empty storefronts and deteriorating buildings, was outlined in the master plan as a target for a phased-streetscape project to improve the aesthetics in the Halstead Avenue corridor. The area around Ma Riis Park, the downtown library and the Harrison municipal building were named as potential areas of redevelopment to reconfigure streets and land to form a centralized “municipal campus.”
Much of the future development of the downtown depends on the completion of a development deal on the Metro-North Railroad property. Metro-North will turn over an old train station parking lot to the town, which will have the property developed into condominiums and retail stores as a new town center. In return, Harrison agrees to build a several hundred-space garage near the Harrison train station.
The town and Metro-North have a signed confidentiality agreement, but it is known three developers bid for the work. Sources indicate that the bid will be awarded to Avalon, which just sold its building in New Rochelle. The identities of the bidders or terms of those bids remain protected under the confidentiality agreement.
Some residents felt the master plan catered too much to business and not enough to preserve the character of the town. Robert Porto, a longtime resident of downtown Harrison and a self-proclaimed environmentalist, said he thought it was a “disgrace” that the plan didn”™t recommend buying and obtaining more parkland and open space with the goal of preserving it.
“I think this is really just made for developers,” Porto said. He also felt the approval was rushed and done a week before Christmas, a time when many residents may not have attended meetings or offered input. Porto questioned why the approval came so quickly after years of drafting the document.
The approval of the master plan came after a nearly decade-long process that spanned three mayors and weathered the real estate bubble bursting and national recession. Steve Malfitano was mayor from 2002 to 2007 when the process, including multiple public forums, gained steam. The project was shelved after a change in mayors and during the recession but was resurrected in 2012 as Malfitano returned to office as a councilman. He said the plan was “the people”™s plan” because it was updated and written with input from representatives all over town and after years of public comment.
“We listened at length,” he said. “There”™s nothing in here we conjured up and said ‘Here it is.’”
