An eight-story, 85-unit apartment building at 172 Warburton Ave. in Yonkers has been completed.
Built as part of the plan by the Municipal Housing Authority for the City of Yonkers (MHACY) to revitalize the public housing project formerly known as Cottage Place Gardens, the modernized complex is named The Ridgeway.
Local, county and state officials gathered at 172 Warburton on Oct. 29 to mark not only the building”™s completion but also the continued progress being made to transform what had been an aging section of the city.
The construction of 172 Warburton Ave. came in the fourth phase of the six-phase Ridgeway program, the entire cost of which has been estimated at $296 million.
The overall project will create more than 500 new and renovated apartments in the southwest Yonkers neighborhood along Warburton Avenue north of Ashburton Avenue and south of Lamartine.
Work already has begun on phase five of the project, which involves erecting another eight-story building that will be at 178 Warburton Ave. The phase-five building is to include a new Early Head Start daycare center with eight classrooms, a family resources room and other facilities.
“The whole area of Warburton that it is replacing has been radically changed,” Wilson Kimball, president and CEO of MHACY, told the Business Journal. “In almost all of the cases the buildings were demolished.”
She said some residents were moved into different apartments at Cottage Place Gardens and then moved back after construction had been completed while others were given Section 8 vouchers and allowed to move to different properties.
To date, 327 new or refurbished apartments have been completed in the Ridgeway development.
“The tenants who are living in the new buildings love it there. They love the amenities, they love the way the buildings look, they love the finishes and they love the fact that this is a brand-new housing complex,” Kimball said.
Cottage Place Gardens, a public housing project that was built in 1945, had 256 apartments. The phase-five 178 Warburton building replaces Cottage Place”™s now-demolished buildings 4, 8 and 12 and a commercial space that had been a gas station.
Sue McCann, senior vice president of The Community Builders (TCB), which has been developing the project along with the Housing Authority, told the Business Journal that her firm found the location in Yonkers to be especially attractive in view of the proximity to New York City.
“It”™s one of our favorite projects because it”™s really transformative,” McCann said. “We saw that there was much potential there and it just needed a little rethinking of the way that neighborhood had historically been laid out.”
McCann said that TCB”™s design for the housing is a sharp break from the utilitarianism that makes some public housing projects of the 1940s and ”™50s look sparse and grim today.
“We are able to produce a real high-quality product that any middle-class person would be happy to live in,” McCann said. “People are living here because of the affordable rents and they seem quite pleased. Seniors tend not to want to move from where they are currently living. The seniors who moved into the building that was just for the elderly in our first phase, some of them can”™t believe how nice it is.”
Founded in Boston in 1964 as South End Community Development, TCB has constructed or preserved hundreds of affordable and mixed-income housing developments and owns or manages 13,000 apartment homes in more than 14 states.
Kimball noted, “In the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, when they did high-rise public housing, what you got was a lot of individuals of the same economic background sort of warehoused in these tall towers. I don”™t think any of us thinks that”™s ideal anymore. I think we all would prefer a mixed-income community.”
Kimball noted that developers in Yonkers now are required to include 10% affordable housing units in their market-rate projects.
She also pointed out that the federal Section 8 voucher program, which allows low- and moderate-income families to pay no more than approximately 40% of their monthly income toward rent, has won acceptance from many Yonkers landlords who must comply with federal requirements such as annual property inspections and meeting minimum standards set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Kimball said that the MHACY has more than 1,900 units that it owns and manages, Â provides more than 4,000 Section 8 vouchers, and plans a three-pronged approach to carry it forward into the future. Its real estate portfolio is valued at approximately $750 million.
“We want to work with the market-rate developers to integrate our tenants into their structure. We want to build our own new housing that is a cut above what it used to be,” Kimball said. “We want to get more Section 8 vouchers into the smaller landlords, not just big ones like RXR or Ginsburg, but into the smaller landlords”™ hands so they have a guaranteed rent and our tenants can have a choice — they can live in a high-rise or they can live in a two- or three-family.
“Ultimately,: she added, “a Section 8 voucher is about choice and we want to promote that.”
The newly completed building at 172 Warburton contains a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. Rents on 65 of the units will be affordable to households earning at or below 60% of the area median income (AMI) while 20 apartments will be for those earning up to 90% of the AMI.
There are 39 one-bedroom, 31 two-bedroom and 15 three-bedroom apartments in the 104,773-square-foot building.
Although she didn”™t attend the end-of-construction celebration, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statement in which she said, “Southwest Yonkers has a vibrant history, and this new public housing complex will provide residents with modern, high-quality affordable homes while also strengthening the entire community.”
New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) has provided a portion of the funding for the Ridgeway project. Since 2011, HCR has provided more than $414 million to create or preserve nearly 3,300 housing units in Yonkers.
HCR Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas said, “In partnership with MHACY and The Community Builders, we are driving the complete transformation of this neighborhood by replacing outdated buildings with modern apartments and a new pre-kindergarten facility to benefit the entire community. With the completion of 172 Warburton, our investment has yielded 327 newly constructed homes across four phases of development.”
According to Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano, “The redevelopment of Cottage Place Gardens into The Ridgeway is yet another example of how Yonkers is revitalizing our neighborhoods and improving the lives of all our residents. As we see luxury housing rising along the riverfront, it is also important that we provide quality affordable housing so all boats rise with the tide.”
