Part 4: Quality of life

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

This week, New RoAR News has presented 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
• Part 4: Quality of life (below)

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 4: Quality of life

John Delves, speaking on behalf of the Residence Park Neighborhood Association (RPNA) (3:12:17), complained about “serious quality of life issues already being felt in downtown, such as “insufficient green space; windy, sun blocked, congested streets; and inadequate parking.” “The RPNA board,” he said, “has significant reservations about approving additional residential units at this time….Progress is not the same as livability and vibrancy.”

John Delves

Like other speakers, Delves criticized the city’s reliance on incentives rather than requirements for plans that would improve the quality of life for city residents.  “Incentives alone have not worked,” Delves said, and instead urged that the plan include three specific … requirements– additional green space, wider sidewalks with real tree canopy, and municipal parking. “Density, without greenery, community spaces, walkability and access is not smart growth,” Delves said. “It does not support a healthy, viable, vibrant downtown.
  Please get the fundamentals right before approving more units.”

Marion Whitaker, a member of the advocacy group Enough Is Enough (3:20:17), attributed the “overproliferation of high rise apartment buildings” to the decision to give “developers instead of real bona fide urban planners … uncontrolled power to fully dictate what should be built,” arguing that developers’ priorities are “not what is necessarily the best for our citizens.”

Marion Whitaker

“We are not NIMBYs,” she said, calling that “a convenient label used by others to push back on those who might disagree with them.” 
She said Enough Is Enough has “supported and continues to support projects that make real contributions to the New Rochelle community” such as “affordable housing, senior housing, or something that substantially benefits the public.”  

“We were promised a smart, small, suburban city,” Whitaker continued.  But smart planning should mean “the defined intention of integrating real green space, trees, real neighborhood, playgrounds, into the plan, as well as thought out areas of midrise housing as well as home ownership opportunities.  She also noted that “a large parking deficit and traffic problems affect the ability to revitalize the commercial areas.” 

“We honestly want to trust our city government to do the right thing,” Whitaker concluded. “But it is getting difficult to do so with another expansionistic plan before us.”

James O’Toole, a downtown resident (3:03:14), criticized the quality of the construction to date.  “Those buildings that are built downtown are all garbage,” he said.  “Every single night, there’s a problem in one of those buildings. Either there’s pipes bursting, there’s walls falling down…. It’s all junk that you built down there.”  O’Toole invited Council members to “come down and stay at my apartment for a couple nights and see what goes on. 
I got the rats the size of Lassie running around.”

James O’Toole

Alison Rivers(3:34:50), a resident of the Glenwood Lake neighborhood, recalled being promised in 2015 “how great the development was going to be, how I’d get tax breaks as a homeowner, how we’d get an infusion of cash into our schools, and our library, and our civil services.  I haven’t seen that….I’ve seen my taxes go up…I’ve seen changes to the downtown that don’t benefit me. I’ve seen that it’s hard for me to park. I’ve seen … having to pay to go to my own library that I fund with my tax dollars.”

Alison Rivers

“I would like to see real change in the downtown.” Rivers continued.  “I would like to see retail businesses that promote community… I would like to see … spaces where we can … get together as a community, we can gather, we can socialize, we can have meaningful interactions.”

Sarah Longstreth (3:55:34) offered more ideas to enrich the downtown area.  “A suburban city needs a bookstore,” she said. “It needs a theater. It needs LGBT-friendly spaces. It needs event spaces like the ones that are currently walled off inside some of the luxury buildings…There are people who would want to live here who want to have all these things, and right now the best that we can offer them is a place to sleep while they go to New York City or … White Plains for those things.”

Sarah Longstreth

“I love this city,” Longstreth continued.  “I love our history with the performing arts, with arts in general.  I think there is really something here that we could connect to as … a deep, diverse, interesting place to be. … It’s both our past and our future.”

Several residents of the Rochelle Heights spoke in opposition to development in or near their historic neighborhood.  “You are now contemplating bringing the buildings from downtown to our side of the world,” said Jackie Mills of Rochelle Heights (4:14:42).  “We have these beautiful historic homes. We have these beautiful parks. 
We can’t afford to have eight-family buildings, six-family buildings built on North Avenue, abutting the historic district and Lincoln Avenue.  Imagine the traffic … what’s going to happen to these beautiful neighborhoods that we’ve maintained. 
… Three buildings, four buildings, yes. But you just, you’re like Pac-Man, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.  Enough is enough… your constituents are begging you.” 

Jackie Mills

And Sheila Small, another resident of the historic district (4:20:52), said, “We want to go on record officially, publicly, to let everyone know that we do not want any of your development abutting our neighborhoods, in our neighborhoods, on our public parks, anywhere near our neighborhoods. 
That’s what we don’t want. So if anybody’s not clear, let the record show, it’s not something we want.”

Sheila Small