County to Vote on Affordable Housing Bonds

YONKERS, NY - Westchester County's Board of Legislators is expected to vote today on expending $8.2 million in bonds to purchase property on Riverdale Avenue in Yonkers for affordable housing. The project's developers, Sandy Loewentheil and Ron Moelis of 326 Riverdale Owners LLC, would in turn pay the county $1 for the land at 314-30 Riverdale Ave., where they have proposed building a $51 million, 12-story complex.

The proposed building would house 170 units, and 136 of them would be available to people earning 60 percent or less of the county's median income. The rest of the apartments would be rented to people who make less than 130 percent of the county's median income. Most of the proposed building's units are studios and one-bedrooms, with 33 two-bedroom apartments. The building would offer affordable rents for 50 years.

According to the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, the 2008 median income in Westchester for a one-person household was $71,100. Using that limit, the apartments targeting single people would seek people with current incomes ranging from $42,660 to $92,430.

County Legislator Ken Jenkins, D-Yonkers, is chairman of the legislature's Government Operations Committee, which works on housing and community development. He said the project would help working people. "If someone is a teacher in the school across the street, they would be able to apply for an apartment in that building," he said.

Moelis' application with the Yonkers Planning Board last year boasted that he and his partner had built more than 6,000 units of market-rate and affordable housing and more than 250,000 square feet of retail space in the metropolitan New York area.

The developers' projects in the Lower Hudson Valley include Sycamore Crest in Spring Valley, a 96-unit senior citizen apartment building that opened in 2001. Another of the developers' projects was The Arbor at 3620 Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. The 127-unit complex, now owned by Columbia University, sits on the former site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.