One year from now, SUNY Purchase President Thomas Schwarz said, there should be a developer selected and a definitive plan in place for a 40-acre retirement community to be built on the campus”™s southwest corner.
At a Sept. 1 press conference, Schwarz provided additional details on the project and presented an approximate timeline for a request for proposals to be formally submitted and for a developer to be selected.
Schwarz said the Purchase College Advancement Corporation (PCAC), a not-for-profit organization, will act as liaison between the college and project planners.
“A year from now we”™ll know who”™s going to do what and what it”™s going to be,” Schwarz said. He said that in the next three months the PCAC will focus on hiring a consultant for the project and that within six months it would submit a formal RFP.
The Business Journal reported in August that Gov. Cuomo signed a bill allowing the college to lease 40 acres of its Purchase campus that Schwarz called “an unusable piece of property” for the development of a senior residential learning community.
The development will contain between 250 and 385 units depending on the plan selected by the PCAC, with 20 percent of the units being set aside as affordable housing.
At the briefing, Schwarz said the project will be completely privately funded with no tax dollars going toward construction.
“We will not be operating this, we will not be building it (and) not one nickel of state dollars will go toward its development,” he said.
The 40-acre parcel, which is located relatively far from the college”™s academic buildings and residence halls, is covered in debris that would have been expensive for the college to remove if it wanted to develop the land itself, Schwarz said.
As it stands, the lease will likely more than double the $1.5 million the college gives out in student scholarships each year and will allow the college to add faculty members beyond the already planned and budgeted-for addition of 40 people over the next five years.
“The ability to hire more faculty and ”¦ to provide more scholarships to students is a home run,” he said. “This is a win-win for us in all of those respects.”
