Part 3: Affordable Housing

More than two dozen New Rochelle residents expressed opposition to a proposed revision of New Rochelle’s downtown development plan at a  public hearing before the City Council on Tuesday, April 14 (video available here; hearing begins at 2:43:07).  No speaker expressed support for the revised plan.  Many expressed profound disappointment with the outcome of New Rochelle’s downtown development boom over the past ten years, suggesting that the project has served the needs of developers far more than the needs of New Rochelle residents.  

The original development plan, passed by the City Council in 2015, called for the construction of about 30 new buildings with 10,000 residential units.  To date some 5,000 units have been built, and another 5,000 have been approved and are “in the pipeline” to be completed in the next several years.  The vast majority of the units built and planned are luxury rentals with minimal affordable housing and, to date, no  ownership opportunities.  Only a tiny fraction of the workers employed in the construction have been union members.

The proposed revision, formally known as the Supplemental Draft Generic Environmental Impact Plan (SDGEIS), was presented to the Council by the city’s Department of Development in February and calls for the construction of 2,800 additional housing units.  The city says the plan is based on updates to theoretical development models and lessons learned from the experience of the past decade.  Yet the plan’s projections for jobs and job creation closely mirror the theoretical model used in 2015, and no lessons seem to have been learned about the importance of local hire and full-time family-supporting job creation.  The proposal also seems to contain few or no provisions for a substantial increase in affordable housing, increased parking, or improved quality of life.  Speakers at the hearings addressed all of these issues.

New Rochelle NAACP President Aisha Cook, Bruce Soloway, and Lourdes Font opened the hearing by reading a New RoAR News editorial into the record (2:45:32)  The editorial called for the council to “codify the expectations of the community as it relates to careers, local hires, green space, homeownership, and truly affordable rents. Unlike the previous administration, this council should move from simply hoping for the best from developers to demanding a return on the taxpayer’s investments.”

Lourdes Font, Bruce Soloway, and Aisha Cook read the New RoAR News editorial on redevelopment into the Council record

Over the next several days, New RoAR News will present the testimony of many of the speakers at the April 14 hearing on a number of topics:

• Part 1: Opportunity for community input
• Part 2: Family-supporting jobs
• Part 3: Affordable housing (below)
• Part 4: Quality of life

Commissioner of Development Adam Salgado told New RoAR News that the City is preparing a Final Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (FSGEIS) that will provide written responses to the substantive environmental issues and concerns raised during the 66-day public comment period that opened on February 17, 2026, and closed on April 24, 2026, as well as  the public hearing held on April 14. The FSGEIS responses, which will include answers to some of the questions raised, will be reviewed and discussed by the City Council, and posted on the City’s website as soon as they are available, some time in June.  The Council is expected to vote on the amendment sometime thereafter.

Editors Note: Although the public hearing portion of this process has ended, please continue to reach out to your council member and the mayor to share your concerns and advocate for change.   At community events, political events, neighborhood association meetings, coffee and conversation or at fundraisers, continue to press our elected officials on their commitment to making substantial transformative changes to the DOZ amendment.  We know that developers and their consultants have a vision for our community and have been very effective in ensuring the DOZ process works for them.  Let’s make sure that it is the community’s voice, expectation and vision that is reflected going forward.  

Part 3: Affordable housing

The New RoAR News editorial read at the outset of the hearing noted that despite efforts to create more affordable housing, “working class families are still rent-burdened, seniors on fixed incomes are still struggling to remain in the community, and those who qualify for subsidized housing have fewer options than ever before.”

The editorial criticized the criteria used to define affordable housing.  “Area Median Income (AMI) percentage cited for developers based on Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines should also include the AMI of the census tract in any presentation on affordable units,” the editorial said.  “The New Rochelle community deserves to know the gap between what is mandated by HUD and what is actually helpful to our community.  How can the issue of true affordability be addressed if the gap is not clearly defined?  How can incentives be put in place for developers if we don’t start by looking at local AMI and challenging developers to find a way to provide rents without mandatory add-ons that will address the needs of our economically vulnerable citizens?”

“Before receiving ‘credit’ for providing affordable units,” the editorial said, “developers should be required to outline all non-negotiable add-ons that are being piled onto renters who win the lottery for ‘affordable units’.  In many instances, the additional cost for such things as shared water use, excess garbage fees, amenities fees, and parking bring ‘affordable’ rents to market rate pricing.”

An African-American senior who attended the hearing testified to the hardships created by the new development for low-income seniors. ”I have lived in New Rochelle all of my life,” this senior said, “and I am afraid. All of this development has been focused on attracting new people and not on keeping us old residents. I have a friend who applied for an affordable apartment downtown through a lottery and found out that they wouldn’t be able to afford the amenities. When they asked about it they were told that they could opt out of the extra amenity charge, but why should they move into a new building and not be able to enjoy the extras? All this time we were promised by the politicians that they would look out for us, but the reality is that they were looking out for everybody but us, and now we are more vulnerable than ever before.”

In 2023, New RoAR News provided an in-depth analysis of New Rochelle’s affordable housing shortage in an article entitled, “Campaigning for Affordable Housing: The Devil in the Details.”

The New Roar News analysis found that “The demand for affordable housing in New Rochelle is revealed by diving into the demographics and housing needs of citizens in Zip codes 10801 and 10805 only, and leaving out Zip code 10804 residents (high-income, single family home owners whose demographic statistics skew the overall statistics for New Rochelle).  There is good reason to do this”, the analysis continued.  “More than 80% of New Rochelle’s 80,000 residents live in zip codes 10801 and 10805, and nearly 100% of the rezoning approved by City Council and the new development is located in these two Zip codes.”

“In these two Zip codes,” the analysis went on, “there are 23,000 households or families (out of 29,000 total).  Half of them earn less than $75,000, and according to the 2018 Hudson Valley report, most of them are already living in housing that is severely unaffordable, with rent plus utilities payments that exceed half of their incomes.

“Digging deeper into the Census data to look at the greatest need for affordable housing, in Zip code 10801 alone (again, where all the development is occurring) there are 5,884 households—families—who earn less than $50,000 per year, with 3,500 families earning less than $25,000 per year. Most of these families are renters; 35% of renters in 10801 have children under age 18, and 70% of renters are self-identified as Black and/or Hispanic. Compared to the other two Zip codes, 10801 has a significantly higher official poverty rate, at 14.3%, or approximately 2,000 households.  And 23% of the impoverished are children.  Many of these families are in desperate need of affordable housing.”

The New RoAR News analysis cited a report commissioned by New Rochelle in 2018 called “Navigating Affordable Housing,” which found that “in the view of many city residents, the recent rapid rate of new housing development in New Rochelle, “reduces the availability of affordable housing instead of increasing it by virtue of its typically higher rents, which in turn raises the prices in surrounding neighborhoods”.

“Navigating Affordable Housing” reported that:

Most experts define “Affordable” as housing that costs less than 30% of household income, and labels families that pay over 30% as “Cost Burdened,” and over 50% as “Severely Cost Burdened.” The concepts apply to both rental and homeownership costs, which in the latter case include mortgage, taxes, insurance and utilities. Households paying more than 30% of their income on housing are probably unable to afford other critical elements of the “basket” of goods and services a household typically requires: food, transportation, health care, clothing, and education, for example. Their economic distress can create a negative cycle affecting educational outcomes, mental and physical health, property maintenance, property values, use of emergency services, financial mismanagement, and neighborhood deterioration that further decreases their ability to thrive, and imposes preventable and costly burdens on schools and other supportive services. Making housing more affordable for more people, by contrast, invokes the reverse cycle, a positive socio-economic dynamic that bolsters a city’s overall prospects for attracting investment and talent in a competitive world.

Currently New Rochelle is poised to add another 2,800 units of living spaces into the Downtown Overlay Zones.  Development Commissioner Adam Salgado recently told New RoAR News that he views the planned amendments to the Downtown Overlay Zones (DOZs) as “a refinement phase designed to optimize quality, future-proof development,and economic value.” 

The proposed legislation would require 10% of all new units to be affordable at 70% of AMI (Area Median Income). The AMI applied in New Rochelle is based on all of Westchester county, where the current AMI for a family of 4 is about $125,000, so units “affordable” at 70% of AMI would require an annual income of about $87,500. The median income for Black households who rent in the10801 Zip code is estimated to be $48,000-$56,000, placing New Rochelle’s new “affordable” units far out of reach for most seniors and Black and Brown renters who live in the part of the city that is most impacted by current and future development projects. 

It’s been more than a decade now since the inception of  New Rochelle’s Master Plan for redevelopment, and most of the then professional staff and elected officials have moved on. Today there are new people in power, people who represent more fully the diversity of the city’s population, and yet there is still little truly affordable housing or low-income housing in the city’s development plan. 

As the senior who attended the public hearing put it, “If the city doesn’t fix this now, then there won’t be any place for me to live in New Rochelle.  This is gentrification by another name.”

Next: Part 4: Quality of life