Hai Yang, 37, lives in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking the Byram River in central Port Chester, a 2.4-square-mile village in Rye, County Westchester. Since moving right into a $2,700-a-month apartment a yr ago, Mr. Yang has found that he can walk to almost anything he needs.
The Metro-North train station is a three-minute walk away, making it easy to travel to New York to go to friends. Happy hour and live jazz are right round the corner on the Saltaire Oyster bar. And I do not need a automotive to get to my local gym.
But Mr. Yang has a automotive, so he can commute to his job in Danbury, Connecticut, where he’s an engineering manager for the medical device industry. Finding a automobile parking space in Port Chester is just not an issue – especially in comparison with his experience in downtown White Plains, New York, where he lived. Overall, the village is “much less crowded,” he said.
Deirdre Curran, 57, moved last June to a townhouse opposite the 20-acre Lyon Park. Retired pet sitter and dog walker Mrs Curran has rented within the village on and off over time and appreciates its diversity. “There are many various cultures, and you’ll be able to get any food you would like from Central and South America,” she said.
She paid $515,000 for her two-bedroom home, which is convenient for downtown businesses, major highways and the Westchester County Airport. But while Ms Curran loves the placement of her home, she is increasingly concerned in regards to the scale and pace of housing development planned in the town’s compact city centre.
Three large mixed-use apartment projects are currently under construction. The six-story Tarry Lighthouse on North Main can have 209 apartments and retail space. Magellan on South Main will add one other 95 apartments in a nine-story, 100% electrified constructing. A 30 Broad, opposite the train station, can have 36 flats above a microbrewery.
They follow the recent completion of Port & Main, a five-story, 80-unit constructing a block from the train station.
“They wish to do all this huge investment on this tiny village that does not have the infrastructure to handle it,” Ms Curran said. “I feel like there’s been a number of development in a really short time.”
The village has issued conditional zoning approval for projects totaling greater than 2,800 units prior to now three years, said Stuart L. Rabin, the village manager. He said this avalanche of development proposals is basically the results of the village’s zoning change three years ago to encourage redevelopment and revitalization of Port Chester’s downtown, waterfront and transit-adjacent plots.
“The village of Port Chester is definitely on the move,” said Rabin.
But the dimensions of the proposals has generated considerable public opposition, with some residents expressing concern that the high-rise apartment buildings threaten to overwhelm the town’s historic center and overwhelm many mom-and-pop businesses.
John Allen, an elected member of the Port Chester board of trustees, said that while the village was “ripe for redevelopment”, given the variety of buildings in disrepair, there was a growing sense that the council had allowed “a rare increase in density and demanded little or no in return from developers’, including the necessity to fulfill more of the community’s needs for inexpensive housing.
He said the board had recently began discussing a “narrowly tailored” moratorium on development to explore whether further zoning code changes were needed. The moratorium wouldn’t affect projects already under construction.
What will you discover
Port Chester is a densely populated village of 31,000 that “has come to life on the crossroads of varied transportation options,” including a small port on Long Island Sound and railroads to New York City, said Gregg Hamilton, a retired Manhattan transplant who runs The Port Chester Sustainable Alliance.
Remnants of the commercial heyday of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been preserved. The Simons Manufacturing Company constructing, once home to a significant textile manufacturer, is now a loft-style office complex. And the previous headquarters of the Life Savers Candy Company now houses condominiums.
In a walkable downtown area, beauty salons, restaurants, and grocery stores serving a predominantly Hispanic population are positioned along the most important thoroughfares of Westchester Avenue and North and South Main. (According to census data, the village’s population is 64 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white, 5 percent black, and 1 percent Asian.) Two large business bakeries – Neri’s and JJ Cassone – are major employers.
The city center is surrounded by modest single-family and multi-family houses, positioned near hilly streets. In the north, streets are wider and houses are further apart in suburban areas.
A 15-acre abandoned hospital campus on the outskirts of downtown, once a development goal for Starwood Capitol Group, is now being redevelopment by Rose Associates and BedRock Real Estate Partners. The corporations have received site plan approval for nearly 1,000 apartments, including 200 age-restricted units, and expect to start demolition of existing buildings within the spring, said Richard Shea, a spokesman for the project.
The non-profit Carver Center supports lower-income community and immigrant populations with a food bank, civic activities, after-school programs, and a teen center.
What will you pay for
As with much of Westchester County, Port Chester’s housing stock may be very low and it is a seller’s market, said Thomas E. Consaga, broker owner at Re/Max Ace Realty. He said competition is very fierce amongst first-time buyers because home prices are much lower than in surrounding suburbs like Greenwich, Connecticut, and Rye, New York.
The median sale price for a single-family home in Port Chester last yr was $645,000, almost 10 percent greater than in 2021. By comparison, in 2022. average sale price in neighboring Greenwich was nearly $3 million.
There were only about 20 single-family homes available on the market last week, Consaga said. They ranged from a three-bedroom colonial inbuilt 1955, listed on the market for $475,000, to a six-bedroom colonial inbuilt 1900, valued at $1.34 million.
The average condominium sale price last yr was $347,500; he said it was $118,000 for the cooperative.
Nearly 60 percent of Port Chester households are rented, in keeping with census figures. Over the past 12 months, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $2,800, Consaga said.
This figure includes many older multi-family homes within the village, but rents in latest apartment buildings are much higher. At Port & Main, which has a rooftop terrace and fitness center, a 400-square-foot studio starts at $2,300 a month, while a 1,150-square-foot two-bedroom condo costs greater than $4,000, said Whitney Okun, who leads a development group in Houlihan Lawrence, who oversees the project.
Climate
The Capitol Theater on Westchester Avenue hosts well-known artists that draw music lovers from across the region. Concert goers swarm with the town’s quite a few downtown restaurants, including El Tio, Bartaco, T&J Restaurant and Pizzeria, and Panka Peruvian Bistro.
The Waterfront automotive park at Port Chester Shopping Center is crowded on weekends, with shoppers stocking up at Costco. Another attraction of the shopping mall is the 14-screen AMC cinema.
The growing arts scene includes the well-known Clay Arts Center, a big complex with quite a few pottery studios and classrooms, in addition to a public gallery, and Ice Cream Social, a comparatively latest space where artists working in quite a lot of media can rent private or shared studios.
“Port Chester is my hometown, so it is a dream to have the ability to support the artists which are here,” said Jennifer Cacciola, an artist and center founder who moved to Connecticut from Brooklyn shortly before the pandemic.
schools
The Port Chester-Rye Union Free School District serves students throughout Port Chester and a couple of third of the neighboring village of Rye Brook. Of the district’s roughly 4,500 students, roughly 83 percent discover as Hispanic or Latino, 12 percent as White, 3 percent as Black, and a pair of percent as Asian, in keeping with state education records.
The District concluded an agreement with the Corpus Christi Rosary School for the implementation of a pre-school program for 4-year-olds. Pupils from kindergarten to fifth grade attend one in all 4 primary schools; sixth to eighth grade students attend Port Chester Middle School.
Port Chester High School is positioned on a 20-acre campus bordering Rye Brook with roughly 1,600 students. The academic offer includes Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. The four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2022 was 88 percent.
Commuting
Port Chester Station, on the New Haven Metro-North line, is in the center of downtown. It takes lower than an hour to get to Grand Central during peak commute times; a one-way ticket costs $13.75 and a monthly pass costs $270.
Westchester County Bee-Line bus services offers transportation from Port Chester to Rye, Harrison, Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle and the Bronx.
The CT Transit Bus 311, operated by the Connecticut Department of Transportation, runs all day between Liberty Square, Port Chester, and Stamford, Connecticut, with additional stops in Greenwich, Connecticut.
History
According to a New York Times account, Port Chester’s sizable Hispanic and Latino population has been growing for a long time, since Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro’s rule settled in Port Chester to work in factories within the Nineteen Sixties. As factories closed, more immigrants from across America Central and South settled in a working-class village, opening restaurants and serving the affluent suburbs as landscapers, day laborers, house cleaners, and babysitters. Population growth has not been without tensions: in 2009, a federal judge ordered the village to adopt a latest voting system that may give the Hispanic and Latino population fairer opportunities to elect their very own member of the board of trustees. Luis Marino, a Peruvian immigrant, was elected to the board in 2010 and is now the mayor of the village.
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