Image courtesy of: Westchester Magazine, 10/24, Copyright © 2024 Today Media. All Rights Reserved.
I am a proponent of development and redevelopment, and I believe we all should be aware of the additional costs that are factored into rents or sale prices due in large part to municipal and public opposition to new development.
Westchester County is one of the most expensive and difficult places to develop in the United States. Though our volunteer members of Planning and Zoning Boards are well-intentioned, many local zoning codes are out of date and do not take into account modern planning trends.
Municipalities often hold public meetings on project approvals at which local citizens voice their opinions and concerns. Many municipalities throughout the United States are revising their planning criteria and zoning codes to accelerate approvals and reduce the cost of new housing. The opinions below are my observations over the 38 years I have been observing development and redevelopment in Westchester.
Home Rule (where each village, hamlet, town, city makes its own rules and regulations regarding zoning and development) as well as many layers of approvals and public hearings contribute to this.
The time it takes (literally years in many cases) means that projects that begin the process in a good market often come online as the markets have turned soft. The required services of Land Use attorneys, zoning experts, architects, engineers and many other consultants layer more time and cost onto the process.
Increases in interest rates, the cost of construction labor and materials adds additional risk for developers. Municipalities also add many additional fees, as well as requiring offsite improvements for new projects including new traffic lights, turn lanes and others further increase developer costs.
The title of this article lays out much of the problem:
NIMBYS (Not In My Backyard) have been around forever.
Westchester is a BANANA county (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody), and we have lots of…
CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything).
These citizen groups generally want no new development at all. If buildings are obsolete, so what? If there are higher and better uses for a parcel of land or a large vacant building, they do not care.
They are all against anything but what is there now, or was there – no matter how ugly, objectionable, or economically viable as it currently stands.
Many years ago, Reader’s Digest sold its headquarters campus in Chappaqua to a developer, who purchased it without conditions and spent the next 13 years getting approvals for a vastly different development than it had envisioned.
The former Ridgeway Country Club in White Plains and the former Hampshire Country Club in Mamaroneck have remained undeveloped for well more than a decade as municipalities have pressed against new, more dense development, and the NIMBYS and CAVE people have protested any new development. The owner/developer of the Hampshire site recently won a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Mamaroneck because the municipality continually “moved the goalposts” after the developer had complied with each additional, costly request during the approval process.
It seems that the public would always rather have a Dog Park than a new development, which provides no housing or economic advantage for anyone and produces no tax revenue for the municipality. The excuses they use are generally that the new development would cause “traffic” or “too many new students in the school system.”
As of this writing, it costs approximately $800,000 to build a single unit of multi-family housing in Westchester.
This is the cost for a small apartment (less than1,000 square feet), not for a single-family home on its own land.
The costs of land, construction, structured parking, amenities that the market requires, as well as the above-referenced expenses, all factor into this number.
These are the answers to “why is the rent so high.”
There is a huge housing shortage throughout the United States. The inventory of single-family homes for sale in Westchester is extremely limited.
Part of the reason for this is that empty nesters cannot sell their homes (even at sky-high prices today) and downsize to a smaller, single-floor home and save any money.
The empty nester housing product we do have is extremely limited. So those who have paid off their homes or who have low-interest mortgages are very reluctant to leave.
Many people could put the proceeds of a home sale in the bank and pay for +/- 20 years of rent with that money, but they are not attracted to living in a high-rise. Some others have sold their homes (and said goodbye to high taxes and maintenance costs) and happily downsized to apartments, where everything is taken care of by the Landlord. The latter are definitely in the minority.
In a future newsletter, I will discuss how some municipalities in Westchester have opened themselves to re-zoning to permit different uses or have reduced the time and cost of the approval process, with much success.