Good evening.

Welcome to the January twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-six meeting of the City of Neurochel Planning Board.

Welcome for thank you for joining us this evening.

There are two portions of the meeting.

The first portion of the meeting is uh open to the public.

Um we do have a few um adjournments that I'll go over.

Um we have item two point one, application PB twenty-six, twenty twenty-three by Guild Capital LLC for site plan approval to construct a single family dwelling on Premium Point Road, block fifty lot one and R one ten A zone district is adjourned until further notice.

Uh block nine seventy-six, lot fifty-four, and R two seven zone district is adjourned till February.

Um, and then next month we'll have a pub open public hearing for comment and a vote, and that's application PB thirty-two-2024 by Crossroads Center LLC for site plan approval to demolish four buildings and construct a new twenty-eight story mixed-use residential and commercial building at Five Seventy Main Street, Block Four Thirteen, Lots One Three Eight in a DB DO Two zoned district.

Here.

Christine O'Connell.

Here.

And staff members with us today.

Jeff Bream, Deputy Corporation Counsel.

Paul Vaca, building official, Kevin Kane, Director of Planning Sustainability, and present here today, Adam Salgado, Commissioner of Development, and myself, Benito Seja, Senior Project Manager.

Okay.

So item one, we don't have any minutes to approve, so we'll move on to item 2.2, as I stated, application PB 32-2024 by Crossroad Center's LLC for site plan approval to demolish four buildings and construct a new 28-story mixed-use residential and commercial building at 570 Main Street, Block 413, Lots 138 and a DB DO2 zoned district.

Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the board.

My name is Mark Weingarten.

I am a partner in the law firm of Del Bello, Denellan Weingartenwise and Wheedaker, and it's my pleasure to be here this evening representing Crossroads Center LLC in connection with its request for site plan approval to permit the construction of a 28-story mixed-use building, which now contains 504 apartment homes, approximately 4575 square feet of retail at its base, together with 418 parking spaces at the properties located at 570 Main Street and 102 and 106 Center Avenue.

We are joined by our entire team who are here for questions, but after me, you will hear from our architects, Setra Rudy, John Setra, will come up and walk you through the revised building, which I'll give you a little bit of background on.

And then we also have with us our traffic engineer, Nick Tortorella from Stonefield, who is going to walk you through some of the changes we have made to the access, the egress, where the parking, the loading, and all the rest of that is.

The applicant, as you are well aware, is a related entity of Allstate Ventures, a New York-based real estate developer, which is well known to the City of New Rochelle and this subject neighborhood.

They have built three buildings, the 16-story Arc at 7064 Center Avenue, which is now open and fully occupied, the Altier, a fully affordable 65-unit building, fully leased, located at 8 Westchester Place, and the 27-story building, the Allery at 33 Westchester Place, which is now approximately 35 percent occupied, only having opened in August.

Allstate essentially converted a back alley into a beautiful downtown location for hundreds of new homes for New Rochelle residents.

It's made quite a significant investment in the city, and it keeps building, even though many of its competitors have stopped doing so and taken a step back.

Allstate has also enjoyed much greater success in its retail spaces than some of its uh competitors, particularly Sushi Baibao, and they have some other exciting uh things that will be opening soon in art galleries, et cetera.

As we have made presentations to you previously, we will not go into the details of those prior uh investments, but suffice it to say, Allstate is very proud of its accomplishments here in the City of New Rochelle, believes that this project will further enhance the revitalization of this particular neighborhood and strengthen its growing investment.

The subject property is 30,546 square feet.

It's located in the DOZ2 downtown overlay zoning district.

The current buildings, one-story and two-story retail and restaurant buildings will be removed as mentioned by the Chair to make way for the proposed improvements.

The project complies with all DOZ2 standard 3, and as you will see in a moment, it is fully amenitized as a luxury building.

We are also requesting a four-story community benefit bonus as part of the application.

The application was filed on October 7 of 2024.

This project required the reallocation of units from DOZ1 to DOZ2.

On November 26, 2024, our firm wrote a letter to Commissioner Salgado requesting the reallocation and outlining the necessary qualitative criteria for said reallocation.

We included a trip generation study from Langan Engineering, which analyzed the traffic impact of the requested reallocation.

Please keep in mind that the changed project that you will see now has reduced the amount of units as well as the amount of retail from the study, which was originally submitted to the city.

After much work with administrative staff and numerous submissions back and forth, we appeared at the planning board last March.

There were a series of comments from your board and the public at that meeting and thereafter.

Rather than proceed with the typical 90-day approval process, which has accompanied the other towers that have been built in the DOZ.

Allstate felt that many of the comments were reasonable, and rather than rely on pursuing its legal rights to proceed, it agreed to hire a new architectural firm to take a fresh look at the project and attempt to satisfy the stated concerns.

In addition to hiring a new architect with a new vision, Allstate met with the Halland School across the street from the project, as well as attending three separate meetings with the representatives of 25 LaRoy to discuss modifications to meet their concerns.

The main concerns which we heard at this meeting from the neighbors was a request to reduce some of the unit count and the commercial square footage if possible, enlarge the building setback from 25 LaRoy, creating public open space, reallocating some of the loading and resident parking on LaRoy to center, preventing queuing issues from our garages backing out onto the public street, and helping to fill the need for municipal parking in the neighborhood.

As a result, the building was pulled back 30 feet from the LaRoy lot line, which created an area for public open space between the buildings, which you'll see in a moment.

Changes were made to reduce the visual impact of the building to its neighbors.

The unit count was reduced by 41 apartments.

A subsurface municipal parking level was added to help satisfy the existing parking demand in the neighborhood, which is in addition to the our own parking, which is built again underground and above within the building.

The truck loading was shifted away from LaRoy, as well as much of the resident parking access and egress, which has now been reallocated to Center Street.

The entrance into our garage on center was significantly enlarged to accommodate more cars waiting to be picked up or parked, and the retail square footage was reduced by over 60 percent.

So that is it in summary.

The main summary of it is we tried to listen, we heard the concerns, we've made these changes, and now I'm going to ask John Setra from Setra Rudy Architects to come up and walk you through the plans themselves and the uh significant modifications which have been made.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you, uh members of the planning board.

I'm John Setra, the architect, design architect for uh this project.

And I'll go through these front slides quickly.

Uh this is just outlining some of the buildings that Allstate has been responsible for building in the city, quite an impressive uh group of structures.

And uh Setra Ruddy, uh I'm the one of the founding principals of this firm, is uh is a firm that is almost now 40 years old.

And one of the things that we have specialized in is high density residential design, uh mostly in the metropolitan area, but also outside of that area as well.

And so we're we're delighted to be able to propose this project for for uh New Rochelle.