For Affordable Housing, Will Third Time Be the Charm?

The county submitted the latest update to its implementation plan for building fair and affordable housing throughout Westchester late on Monday – meeting a deadline set by federal monitors. 

This is the third revision the county has filed on its affordable housing settlement implementation plan, and the county appears to have made some significant progress in laying out goals and incentives to bring municipalities into the fold. 

"This revised implementation plan demonstrates the county's ongoing commitment to work with the monitor and his team to bring more fair and affordable housing to Westchester," said County Executive Robert Astorino in a statement. "The county is working hard and progress is being made."

The last plan, submitted in March, was panned by federal monitor James Johnson last month, and the Anti-Discrimination Center of New York – the entity that brought the original lawsuit against the county.

In the court-filed monitor's report, Johnson said that the county was failing to develop "more long-term benchmarks;" did not lay out how the county would allocate the $51.6 million it needs to spend on land acquisition, infrastructure improvement and construction; and was showing a "lack of creativity" as to how the county plans to encourage municipalities to comply with the terms of the stipulation. 

"The 46-page implementation plan provides further detail around the county's plans and processes for building 750 units," he said a statement released yesterday by the county. 

"The new plan is the product of numerous conference calls and extensive pre-submission discussions between Westchester officials and the federal monitor's team, all of which were designed to address previous questions and issues raised by the monitor in July."  

The latest proposal (summary attached .pdf) lays out more incentives and sets clear goals for zoning guidelines that the county is aiming to persuade municipalities to adopt. 

One of the biggest changes is the county's adoption of tying affordable standards to the release of Community Development Block Grants and County Open Space funds. The new requirements have already been cropping up in local municipalities like Port Chester and Tarrytown, where trustees have opted to hold off on accepting  grants due to the requirement that the municipalities adopt certain policies laid out in the county's implementation plan. 

Leveraging grant funding will coincide with the county's promotion of a "model ordinance" where any residential development of 10 or more units approved through a subdivision or site plan review process would have a minimum of 10 percent of the units designated as affordable. Developments of five to nine units must also set aside a minimum of one unit as an affordable unit. The county plans on encouraging municipalities to sign on, and leveraging grants as a means to get local governments to adopt the ordinance. The county did note, in its summary, that this goal will be hard to achieve if municipalities simply decide to snub county-administered grants.

The county may also set up a unit to purchase foreclosed properties which can be converted into affordable units – although the settlement stipulates that no more than 25 percent of 750 affordable units that need to be built can come from pre-existing family structures. The county further estimates that approximately 65 percent of the new units will be built through new construction and the remaining 10 percent of the units will be garnered through the adaptive reuse of currently non-residential structures.

Still, in the county's run-down of the revisions, it insisted that it was "premature to consider the use of an allocation plan" that would specifically allocate numbers of units to individual municipalities. The county said they would prefer to use this solution only if, after a few years, the county is not successful at "identifying enough sites for the development of the required 750 affordable units."

To this end, the latest plan also sets benchmarks for the incremental increase in affordable units across the county. By the end of 2011, the county wants 100 of the units built with 50 units waiting on building permits. By the end of 2014, the county wants 450 units completed with an additional 350 building permits being processed, until the completion of the plan in 2016. 

The plans are required under federal court stipulation as part of a $51.6 million court settlement from August 2009. At that time, county officials said they would enact a plan to desegregate housing and offer new opportunities for affordability in what are now predominantly white census blocks, in parts of Westchester.

The settlement to build affordable units with the aid of county money was reached after the Anti-Discrimination Center of New York sued the county, claiming the county had lied to receive federal monies from 2000 to 2008. During those years, the county certified that it had complied with a requirement to "affirmatively further fair housing." The Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York (ADC) disputed this certification and filed a complaint under The False Claims Act. A federal court ruled that Westchester County failed its legal obligation to explicitly analyze "the existence and impact of race discrimination on housing opportunities and choice in its jurisdiction" when it received federal funds. 

There is no set time line for the federal monitor to respond to the newly submitted plan.