Mount Vernon apartment tower rising after years of delays
A $60 million workforce housing development stalled for more than three years by financial fallout from Westchester County”™s political battles and changes of government administrations is moving forward this winter at the gateway to downtown Mount Vernon.
Atlantic Development Group LLC, a Manhattan-based developer of affordable and market-rate housing, has begun work at 203 Gramatan Ave. on a 14-story, 158-unit apartment tower that will include about 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. The project, expected to be completed in early spring of 2016, is the first of three residential buildings planned by Atlantic opposite the city”™s Hartley Park. The full three-phase development is expected to cost about $120 million.
- A rendering of the 14-story apartment project underway at 203 Gramatan Ave. in Mount Vernon.
Developer Peter Fine, founder and principal of Atlantic Development, said his company plans to build 100 to 120 units of market-rate housing in an approximately $35 million project at 30 Oakley Ave. “hopefully in the next year.” In two years, he said, Atlantic plans to build affordable rental housing for senior citizens in a 10-story building on Crary Avenue
The apartment tower rising on a Gramatan Avenue corner will include studios renting at $1,089 a month and one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments renting at $1,167 and $1,401, respectively, said a spokesperson for the developer. Fine said the building, marketed as “luxury workforce” housing, will include a 6,000-square-foot glass-cube rooftop area, gym, media room, children”™s playroom and lounge.
Fine said the affordable apartments are targeted for households with incomes of $50,000 to $60,000 a year, “which is really the sweet spot in Westchester County in general, and it”™s the population that”™s always left behind in housing.”
The developer said the project will include $1.4 million in streetscaping improvements along an 800-foot stretch of Gramatan Avenue from the building site to the city”™s Sidney Avenue parking garage and a $3 million overhaul of the deteriorated municipal garage.
“It”™s going to be a transformative project for the city,” Fine said. “It”™s going to be a great project. It”™s one of the projects I”™m most proud of in the 80 developments I”™ve done in the last 15 to 20 years.”
Atlantic Development first proposed the project during the Democratic administration of former Westchester County Executive Andrew J. Spano, who pledged to commit county housing bonds to the developer”™s financial package. Atlantic Development razed buildings on the site in 2010 in preparation for the start of construction.
That same year, Spano”™s Republican successor in office, County Executive Robert P. Astorino, told the developer and Mount Vernon officials that the project was not cost-efficient, based on an assessment of its per-unit cost, and would not be funded by the county. Astorino vetoed the Mount Vernon appropriation among other spending on capital projects.
The county Board of Legislators overrode his veto. In 2011, a bipartisan majority of the county board approved approximately $4.5 million in housing bonds for the Atlantic development and related city infrastructure improvements in Mount Vernon.
The housing appropriation then languished with the Astorino-controlled county Board of Acquisition and Contract, prompting a lawsuit by Democratic legislators and a protest rally in 2011 by supporters of the project and the county”™s financial commitment at the Gramatan Avenue site.
That county funding is not a part of the financing package put together from four or five sources, Fine said. “It was just better for us and the project to get it done” without further delay, he said. Last fall, the state Housing Finance Agency approved $30 million in tax-exempt bonds for the project. The developer also received a small amount of gap financing from the state and from the city of Mount Vernon “to make up a portion of what the county was going to spend,” Fine said.
Fine said the development also was delayed by a change of mayoral administrations in Mount Vernon. “Every time the administration changed, it took us six months to a year to rev up and get it going again,” he said.
“The project was never intended to be just another apartment building,” he said. “It was always intended to revitalize downtown Mount Vernon.”