The ceremonial day was “a long time coming” in downtown Yonkers, Greyston Foundation President and CEO Steven Brown said at the recent groundbreaking for Greyston”™s $32-million workforce housing project.
The project under way this spring is a 92-unit, 12-story apartment tower at 49 N. Broadway due to open in 2013 for households with incomes no higher than 60 percent of Westchester County”™s area median income. It is a joint venture of Brown”™s nonprofit Yonkers-based organization, which began assembling the project site about 10 years ago, and L&M Development Partners Inc., the Larchmont developer of affordable and market-rate housing that has become a driver of apartment construction in Yonkers in the last two years.
“This is not the project we initially proposed, to say the least,” Brown added.
First proposed about four years ago, that larger project, estimated at $36 million, was to include some 10,000 square feet of retail space, an on-site parking garage and 108 affordable condos for income-eligible buyers on a Warburton Avenue commercial block that fronts the North Broadway site on the west. But Yonkers preservationists and the city”™s Landmarks Preservation Board in 2008 succeeded in making the Greyston parcels part of a new Philipse Manor Historic District, forcing a halt to Greyston”™s demolition plans there and more project delays and redesigns.
Jonathan Cortell, project manager and vice president at L&M Development, said the historic-district buildings instead will be redeveloped as his company”™s next Yonkers project. The partners hope to secure financing for that project this summer, he said.
L&M Development joined Greyston in the affordable-housing venture in early 2010. Brown credited the Larchmont company with putting together an innovative financial package to start project construction despite “a very difficult situation in a very difficult economic time.”
Construction will be financed with approximately $16.2 million in tax-exempt bonds purchased by the U.S. Treasury Department through the state Housing Finance Agency”™s  New Issue Bond Program, a two-year, federally launched program to stimulate multifamily housing construction. Bank of America, which has loaned and invested more than $65 million for L&M”™s Yonkers projects since 2009, provided a $16-million construction-period letter of credit.
Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, another L&M investment partner, purchased the 4-percent tax credit for low-income housing, totaling $1.2 million, awarded the project by the state Homes and Community Renewal agency. HCR provided an additional $2.5 million through its Homes for Working Families program.
Yonkers Mayor Philip Amicone, who opposed creation of the Warburton Avenue historic district as an obstacle to downtown redevelopment, thanked Greyston officials for their “perseverance” in the project.
Regarding Greyston”™s initial proposal, “I thought it was a great project back then,” said Amicone. The scaled-down development is “a good one” that will help to reinvigorate downtown and make it “one giant neighborhood again,” the mayor said.
