Tuckahoe Village Departments


TUCKAHOE TALK
With Mayor John Fitzpatrick

Now For My Two Cents

October 23, 2009

Mayor John Fitzpatrick

It is time to weigh in on the Westchester County Housing Settlement. I have delayed writing on the subject primarily due to the amount of coverage and attention it was receiving. Also, the columns of Mayor Marvin of Bronxville have been so right-on target and informational, that anything other than stating whether I agreed or didn’t agree with the settlement would have been redundant. So I guess the first order of business is to state that I disagree with the settlement. Affordable housing is obviously a worthy idea. But, how it will be accomplished through this settlement is nebulous. Even more importantly, I disagree with the method used to evaluate each community.

Many readers until now might have been under the assumption that the Village of Tuckahoe would be exempt from inclusion in this settlement because we have a significant portion of public and federally subsidized housing. The reason Tuckahoe isn’t exempt is the methodology (if one could call it that) used to determine where the housing needs to be built is not based on existing numbers of affordable, public or subsidized housing, but instead race and ethnicity data from the 2000 census. According to the 2000 census Tuckahoe’s population percentages are as follows:

Tuckahoe, along with Tarrytown, fall into what this settlement lists as category “C”. This category is a community with fewer than 14% African American population and less than 16% Hispanic. Category “B” communities have fewer than 10% African-American and less than 10% Hispanic population. In the above census numbers it should also be noted that it equals well more than 100% because those residents listed as Hispanic overlap with persons counted in the racial categories. The overall settlement requires the county to build 750 units across specific communities with language that states that Tuckahoe/Tarrytown may have 60 units used to accomplish this directive. So lets call it 30 each.

This settlement’s focus on race isn’t that shocking since it is a subject that is at the center of many discussions we have as a nation. It does, however, seem odd to use this as a gauge for where affordable housing is to be erected, because under this plan it will not be distributed according to race but instead by income. I remain convinced that the barometer of a community’s commitment to affordable housing should be based on how much already exists. So why are we using ethnicity demographics from a ten-year-old census?

Obviously, all Westchester isn’t fundamentally diverse but I have found through experience that people of any race or ethnicity often choose to live in close proximity to each other. This certainly occurs with immigrants, who find comfort within a community of those from their native lands. For instance, my former Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park through the 1960’s consisted predominantly of Irish and Scandinavian families. During the 1970’s many left for the suburbs and Puerto Rican families soon constituted the main ethnicity. Throughout that time my family stayed and even I moved into my own place within the neighborhood. Just as families were exchanged, so it went for the neighborhood’s businesses. In time, in order to get a haircut in my neighborhood, I entered a shop where the music and language were different from what I remembered growing up. After a few skeptical questions, the owner relegated me to a chair at the end. Through the years I worked my way up to the owner’s chair. I think he always assumed I would eventually just go away. When I didn’t, he decided he might as well be the one cutting my hair. Sometime in the 1990’s, while delivering my haircut, he leaned over and declared that the new Dominican residents moving in were overrunning his neighborhood. Of course I laughed. I figure at this moment there is probably a Dominican barber in that very shop voicing his concern to a Puerto Rican patron about some new ethnic arrival. There is a certain natural order of things that settlements of this nature may never be able to modify.

Racially and ethnically, Tuckahoe has been a melting pot since its inception. More to the point of this settlement diversity in our housing is also well documented. Factor in the village’s size, as well as the amount of subsidized housing that already exists, and one can see that this one-size-fits-all settlement is ludicrous. To date the county has no real plan for implementation or penalization. My fears are based almost entirely on that fact. For example, the disparity in real estate costs and availability between Southern Westchester and Northern Westchester will somehow need to be considered. This could even place areas such as Tuckahoe, which has a lower real estate value than Chappaqua, at a disadvantage since the program doesn’t seem realistically funded. Nevertheless, the county has agreed to take legal action to compel compliance from municipalities that hinder or impede the agreement. This may include superseding local zoning laws.

I was informed that my recent unwillingness to attend, yet another, information-less meeting was noted for all attending officials. I want to assure you that when something of substance does materialize, I will be on it. For now, I take the position that more housing should not be forced on our community to meet guidelines that don’t take into account the amount already in existence.