While campaigning to be the next governor, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino is continuing to wage a separate campaign — this one against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Astorino’s fight is costing Westchester millions of dollars in federal funds, with no sign of the candidate backing down as he enters the spotlight as a small-government conservative.
Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino in the Bronx, on the first day of his campaign for governor. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
Astorino has been sparring with HUD over the 2009 agreement signed by his predecessor Andrew Spano, a Democrat. The consent decree, which settled a 2006 lawsuit brought by the Anti-Discrimination Center, requires Westchester to build 750 affordable housing units by 2016 in neighborhoods with few black or Hispanic residents. The decree also ordered the county to set aside $51.5 million for the construction of affordable housing.
Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg says that the showdown over housing segregation in his county is not likely to affect Astorino’s prospects in his race for governor.
“I don’t think it is an issue that people outside of Westchester have heard of,” said Greenberg. “Three-quarters of New Yorkers say they don’t know enough about Astorino.”
Both Astorino and Spano have battled HUD over the terms of the settlement, including fights over timetables and obligations of landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers and other forms of government rent aid.
But so far the biggest standoff has been over Westchester’s claim that the county’s development rules do not prohibit the creation of apartment complexes alongside single-family homes.
The county has submitted analysis to HUD showing that no such “exclusionary” zoning exists. The county’s conclusion was supported by a study from the Pace University Land Law Center.
Finding that Westchester’s zoning analysis was “lacking in substance,” HUD vowed to withhold three years’ worth of block grant funding, totaling $17.4 million until the county submitted a version it found acceptable. In September 2013, HUD permanently pulled $7.4 million of those funds, and the remainder of the block grant money remains in jeopardy.
In the past, Westchester has spent the block grant funds — which must primarily benefit lower-income communities — on street repair, parks and other community improvements.
Faced with the spectacle of losing $17.4 million in federal funds, in the lead up to his 2013 reelection as county executive Astorino dug in with a Wall Street Journal op-ed that began: “Do you think it is a good idea to give the Department of Housing and Urban Development unchecked power to put an apartment building in your neighborhood?”
He argued that Westchester was ahead of schedule on the timeline set in the agreement, with 400 units in the pipeline and 124 already occupied, and that the county had completed the necessary zoning analysis.
Astorino opined that despite the county’s adherence to the 2009 agreement, “HUD isn’t satisfied because it wants to control local zoning and remake communities.”
The court-appointed monitor, James Johnson of the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, has not contested Astorino’s 400-unit count. But Craig Gurian, the lawyer who originally brought the suit, disputes both the housing tally and the zoning analysis.
According to Gurian, several of the affordable units counted toward the 750 total were initially approved before the agreement went into effect — excluding them under the terms of the consent decree.
In addition, Gurian argues that many of the affordable developments are in non-residential areas. The consent decree requires that the county maximize development in census blocks with the lowest concentration of African-Americans and Hispanics. In its filings with the monitor, Westchester points to several developments in blocks without any black or Hispanic residents. Gurian notes that these are often in either commercial strips with few residents at all or are in unpopulated tracts of land.
“Concentration is a relative term,” said Gurian. “This doesn’t help reduce residential segregation.”
Ned McCormick, the county’s communications director, says that all of the developments are in line with the settlement.
“There is a set of benchmarks in this settlement and we are almost a year ahead of schedule,” said McCormick. “We will do what is in the settlement but we will not bow to the federal government and change zoning where we don’t have to.”
Just a day after Astorino’s announcement of his bid for governor, the developer of a proposed complex in Chappaqua, which is slated to include 28 of the required affordable units, filed a housing discrimination complaint with HUD alleging that Westchester and town of New Castle sought to block the development after the county’s Board of Legislators turned down funding for the project.
Astorino’s office says he supports the Chappaqua development.
