Wealthy community fights low-income housing plans

[CHAPPAQUA, New York] Few places on the planet are as enviable as this Westchester County hamlet. Stately houses are set on spacious, hilly lots shaded by old trees; its village centre has gourmet restaurants and bakeries; its schools are top notch, and its 9,400 residents have a median household income of US$163,201, ranking the area roughly 40th among America's wealthiest communities.

But the hamlet has been churned up by plans to build new housing for people of much lower incomes, including black and Hispanic newcomers.

A developer is offering to build 28 units of affordable rental housing with caps on family earnings, although with no income floor; families of four earning no more than roughly US$64,000 would qualify, as would poorer families, including those who receive federal vouchers.

The project would allow Chappaqua, where 91 per cent of the residents are white, to contribute to a desegregation settlement that Westchester County reached in 2009 that is being overseen by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The agreement is a condition of Westchester continuing to receive federal housing dollars after it was accused of lying about its compliance with fair-housing mandates.

It requires the county to spend US$51.6 million by 2016 to help finance the building of 750 units of moderate and low-income housing in some of Westchester's 31 largely white communities, including Rye, Larchmont, Harrison and Mount Pleasant. The county is required to aggressively market those apartments to non-whites.

Chappaqua Station, as the US$15 million, four-storey project is known, would be built in a weed-covered, one-third-acre patch on Hunts Lane, squeezed between Metro-North Railroad tracks, an exit ramp off the Saw Mill Parkway and a stone bridge over the tracks.

The plan has become the centre of a bitter three-year battle.

Robert Greenstein, the current supervisor of New Castle, which includes the Chappaqua and Millwood hamlets, was elected in November partly because of his opposition to the project. In September, a town board led by his predecessor, Susan Carpenter, approved the project, 3-2; the new board is, in effect, trying to overturn what the previous board agreed to.

The town's building inspector and an assistant fire chief oppose the project, and the inspector told the developer, Conifer Realty, that it needs to get a state review board to grant eight variances from the state code before the project can proceed.

The Hudson Valley Board of Review was set to decide the matter last Tuesday, but only three of the five members showed up and the developer asked to adjourn the matter until April so that there would be more members present to decide.

The building inspector, William Maskiell, contends that the site is hazardous because there is insufficient width around some sides of the building for fire ladders to gain access. He and the fire chief, Russell Maitland, also argue that an arched stone overpass is too low to permit the largest fire trucks to pass.

Conifer, backed up by an assistant New York City fire chief who said that Chappaqua Station would be "the safest building in town", replied that few apartment buildings had access on all four sides.

The developer also produced a photograph showing Chappaqua's ladder fire truck sailing through the overpass and pointed out that the purported safety issue did not stop a nursery school and gymnasium from operating a short walk down Hunts Lane.

Mr Maskiell retorted that he was observing the exigencies of state law in demanding variances.

Some residents who oppose the project have banded together in a group called Chappaqua for Responsible Affordable Housing. They said that they support the creation of moderate-income apartments but think the location is terrible because it is on a forlorn, polluted field.

Bill Spade, 53, an architect who said that his group supported an alternative site near the town hall, noted that the town rejected a market-rate apartment building for that site in 2006.

Randolph McLaughlin, a well-known civil rights lawyer representing Conifer, said that the alternative site was a wetland and that the market-rate building was rejected not because of fire hazards but because it was too tall. He said that in an era when discriminatory language might not be publicly palatable, opponents of such projects resort to other explanations.

"It's a delaying tactic with the hope that that project doesn't get built," he said. "When people start to make arguments that don't make sense, you have to ask what's the real reasons. It's clear they don't want affordable housing. The town hasn't built any in 20 years."

A hovering question is whether low-income families would be comfortable in a community of such well-off residents. While opponents think the poorer residents might be stigmatised living between a highway and train tracks, Mr McLaughlin thinks that they would feel comfortable and that their presence would be a blessing for Chappaqua. "To have your children raised in a town where everyone looks the same, what message are you sending?" he asked rhetorically. "They're going to have to live in the world. It's important to introduce children to diversity so they grow up knowing these people are just like us, no different." - NYT