City board to review Kingstonian

The project will be the subject of a Nov. 6 meeting at City Hall

KINGSTON, N.Y. >> City planners are likely to focus in November on new plans for the Kingstonian project that feature 14 added apartments at what officials say are affordable rents.

According to a Planning Board agenda, the Kingstonian project is to be featured for review at a 6 p.m. Nov. 6 meeting at City Hall, 420 Broadway.

City Planner Suzanne Cahill had said earlier this month that she “anticipated” a decision on whether to grant a positive or negative declaration to the project, as required by the state’s Environmental

Quality Review Act.

If the project is granted a positive declaration, that would mean the project would have significant environmental impacts, requiring the developer to find ways to mitigate them. A negative declaration would indicate no significant impacts on the environment.

But newly-devised plans could delay a decision on environmental impacts, Cahill said last week.

At the Nov. 6 meeting, public speaking will be allowed at the start. However, the public speaking portion is not an official hearing on The Kingstonian and participants can speak about any city planning matters.

On Thursday, Mayor Steve Noble and The Kingstonian developers announced the complex will be one floor higher to add 14 units of “affordable workforce housing.”

The change means the project, if built, will have a total of 143 apartments, of which 129 will be rented at market rates.

Noble, a Democrat who’s running for a second term as mayor in the upcoming election, announced the addition of the affordable units during a midday

press conference at North Front and Fair streets in Uptown Kingston, where The Kingstonian is to stand. He was accompanied by developer Joseph Bonura.

Noble has also called on the Kingston Common Council to pass legislation that would require builders of future large developments in the city to set aside 10 percent of their units as affordable.

Noble said the added units at The Kingstonian “will allow for folks of different income ranges to be able to live in this beautiful building.”

Noble said the rents for the “affordable workforce housing” apartments at The Kingstonian are to be based on a formula that takes into account tenants’ incomes and market rates in the Kingston area. If the units were in existence today, he said, an affordable studio apartment would cost $450 to $800 per month and a one-bedroom unit would cost $600 to $1,000.

Besides apartments, The Kingstonian is to comprise 8,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, a 32room boutique hotel, a pedestrian plaza, a footbridge crossing Schwenk Drive between the new development and Kingston Plaza, and 420 parking spaces.

The affordable apartments would be on the Schwenk Drive side of the complex.

Bonura said the developers have been listening to community concerns and noted there are no state programs that builders can take advantage of to include affordable units in market-rate housing projects.

The Kingstonian’s cost is expected to exceed $52 million, more than $46 million of which is to come from private funding. The project is to receive $3.8 million from the $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant awarded to Kingston by New York state, as well as other government funding.