Alms House project running a bit behind
Construction of Landmark Place, a planned affordable housing development at the site, won’t begin this fall.
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> Construction of Landmark Place, a planned affordable housing development at the site of the former Alms House on Flatbush Avenue, won’t begin this fall, as once planned.
RUPCO, the agency behind the project, now expects to start building in the spring of 2020 and complete the work about 18 months later, according to Guy Kempe, RUPCO’s vice president for community development. That would make the planned 66 apartments available in late 2021 at the earliest.
Kempe said RUPCO employees are in the midst of applying for funding from a state agency.
“We are in the funding application process for Landmark Place to the [state] Housing Finance Agency, a public benefit corporation and arm of NYS Homes and Community Renewal,” he wrote in an email.
The Housing Finance Agency uses taxable and tax-exempt bonds to provide mortgage loans to developers of affordable multifamily rental housing.
The Kingston Planning Board in April narrowly granted the approvals RUPCO needed to create apartments at the former Alms House, reversing a previous vote on the matter that had also been overturned in state Supreme Court.
The board voted 3-2 to grant a two-year site-plan approval and a specialuse permit for Landmark Place, which will be at 300 Flatbush Ave.
The Landmark Place plan, which drew considerable opposition from people who live near the site, calls for 34 apartments to be created in the existing vacant Alms House structure and 32 more apartments in a new building to be constructed on the same site.
The housing is to be open to people ages 55 and older, and some of the units are to offer support services for a mix of homeless populations with special needs.
The board’s original vote against the project occurred on Aug. 20, 2018, and was formalized in a separate vote on Sept. 17, 2018.
RUPCO responded by suing the Planning Board, and state Supreme Court Justice Richard Mott ruled in the agency’s favor this past March. In a 14-page ruling, Mott called the Planning Board’s rejection of the Landmark Place plan “arbitrary and capricious.”
The judge’s ruling sent the matter back to the Planning Board, leading to the April vote.
Constructed as a place to care for the city’s poor, the Alms House later served as a tuberculosis ward in the 1950s before housing Ulster County offices.
RUPCO ultimately bought the property from the Ulster County Economic Development Alliance for $950,000.