Federal Government May Step in to Mandate Affordable Housing in Westchester

Westchester has been on the hook to build 750 affordable housing units since 2009, when the county settled a federal lawsuit with the Anti-Discrimination Center.

At issue: demographics show minorities are confined to a small list of urban towns and cities in Westchester–places like Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Port Chester and Peekskill–and the Anti-Discrimination Center argued that Westchester didn't do anything to alleviate the problem.

When former County Executive Andy Spano returned to the legislature for a third time to ask for more money to fight the center, some legislators panicked at the looming $50 million lawsuit–and the prospect of losing millions more in federal money–and voted to settle. 

Spano went from fighting the lawsuit to pledging that "Westchester will be a model for the entire nation in dealing with fair and affordable housing."

But a year later, Westchester has submitted three plans to satisfy the terms of the lawsuit, and all three plans have been rejected by a federal monitor. In the next few weeks, observers say, the federal government will likely step in and force Westchester to carry out its own plan.

"The reality is that the consent decree had a two-strike rule. After the second time, the monitor could have made any changes he wanted to," the Anti-Discrimination Center's Craig Gurian said. "Rather than exercising that authority, he gave criticisms and gave them yet another chance. But after three times, it's the strikeout rule in anybody's league."

Those 750 affordable housing units are going up, and they're coming to the majority of municipalities in Westchester – towns like Scarsdale, Eastchester, Rye, Rye Brook, Hastings, Irvington and Bedford. 

A central point of the lawsuit argued that affordable–or fair–housing is either segregation-dissolving, or segregation-perpetuating. If a developer builds 200 units in a Mount Vernon high-rise or in downtown Port Chester, that's segregation-perpetuating, according to the federal government. Almost 60 percent of Mount Vernon's residents are African-American, and Port Chester is famously known as an ethnic melting pot where Brazilians, Mexicans, Argentines and others who identify as Hispanic comprise about half the population.

But places like Rye Brook (92 percent white), Scarsdale (84 percent white, 13 percent Asian) and Chappaqua (92 percent white) are what the federal government considers "A" towns, places that are monochromatic and ripe for fair housing development.

In order to receive federal aid, counties are required to actively discourage geographic segregation.

"Contrary to what some people, including the county executive seem to suggest, neighborhood patterns did not just drop from the sky," Gurian said. "They emerged during a long period of explicit, intentional racial exclusion carried out for decades by both public and private actors of all types. And as you know, patterns put in place tend to stay in place, unless there's some intervening factor."

Some local leaders disagree. Tom Abinanti, a Democrat and the county legislature's majority leader, said he believes the biggest factor in local demographics is income. People who can't afford cars or work in an urban area won't want to move to a leafy, secluded suburb that doesn't have a bus line, he said.

"The reason these towns are still overwhelmingly white is still because of income, not race," Abinanti said, noting that some of Westchester's most uniformly white neighborhoods are inaccessible by public transportation and don't offer as many local jobs as urban areas. 

Lee Roberts, Bedford's supervisor, sounded all the same notes.

"We have always made god faith efforts to develop housing opportunities for anyone who wants to live here, and we'll continue to do that," Roberts said. "The problem is our lack of infrastructure—lack of sewers, little public transportation, a high cost of living."

But Roberts also said there would be challenges. In towns like Bedford and many others throughout Westchester, affordable housing–whether it's called that or not–has traditionally been used as a means to keep firefighters, teachers and other public servants in town, not to attract homeowners from other parts of the county.

"We may have to advertise more widely to places where more minorities live, where in the past we may have prioritized by giving opportunities to our teachers or emergency workers," she said.

If towns can't section off small areas for public servants like firefighters, Abinanti said, it "makes the municipalities even less amenable to striving to implement" the plan, even with the threat of penalties for not complying.

Other towns are preparing for action by the federal government. Towns like Hastings have formed affordable housing committees before the lawsuit against the county, while so-called "B" towns like Dobbs Ferry–those considered segregated, but to a lesser degree than towns like Rye and Scarsdale–are looking at zoning changes to enable development.

Rye has two affordable housing projects in the works. Mayor Doug French said earlier this year that the city is also in talks with Lazz Development, the company that built the existing Cottage Street houses in Rye, to build up to 25 affordable homes on the corner of Theodore Fremd Avenue and North Street. The homes would cost upwards of $200,000, a steep discount in a city where the average home price is more than $1 million.

Rye Brook, a village where the average home price is around $800,000, currently has 44 affordable housing units within its borders, a small sum considering the village has a population of more than 8,000 residents. These units are on Bowman Avenue, Lewis Court and Belle Fair, a middle-income housing development with 12 affordable housing units. 

"There's no tacit number for this community, but we are required to do it because we fell within certain parameters in terms of the ethnic make-up of the community," said Rye Brook Mayor Joan Feinstein.

In the meantime, feeling pressure from the federal government, the county has responded by attaching new strings to federal Community Development Block Grants. To receive the federal money–which is distributed by Westchester – towns have to agree to zoning changes and give the county first pick of available property within their borders.

Many communities have balked, especially those that aren't directly impacted by the lawsuit. At a meeting last month, when Tarrytown officials were discussing taking $35,000 in block grant money for a park project, one trustee said signing the contract with the county "sounds like selling your soul for $35,000."

Port Chester Mayor Dennis Pilla will join seven other municipal leaders from Mount Kisco, Port Chester, Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Tuckahoe and the Village of Mamaroneck at a meeting this morning to present a unified front to Westchester County. 

Leaders from those towns–which aren't named as development sites for affordable housing by the lawsuit because of their already-diverse demographics –are hoping Westchester can exclude them from the contract language. The block grant issue has caused delays in several projects, such as a downtown beautification project in Port Chester that was partially funded by the county-administered federal grants.

Attendees at this morning's mayor's summit hope county legislators will sympathize and let them off the hook. In the meantime, leaders in more than 20 other towns–those that will be forced to build affordable housing–will wait to see what the federal government does next.