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Residents press board on permit delays, safety at Larchmont Acres and affordable-housing impacts
Summary
Speakers urged the board to resolve long-running permit delays for an individual homeowner, raised safety and habitability concerns at Larchmont Acres, and questioned the parking, enrollment and tax impacts of proposed affordable housing developments.
Several residents used the public-comment period at the Sept. 23 meeting to press the Board of Trustees on building permits, tenant safety and affordable-housing proposals.
Nancy Tourette told trustees she bought a distressed house at 841 Taylors Lane in 2017 and has been trying to complete a complicated building permit for years. Tourette said repeated consultant revisions, shifting staff guidance and an extended floodplain-review process have delayed her project and increased her costs. "We call, we send emails, we get nothing," she said, and asked the board to assign a single staff advocate empowered to move her application toward approval. Chuck from the building department agreed to follow up and staff said a new inspector will take a fresh look this week.
Kirk Lebensfeld, a tenant at Larchmont Acres, described safety and habitability problems across the complex: an un-barricaded basement elevator door replaced without a permit, ongoing basement flooding, recurring leaks and a persistent vibration from an elevator he said shakes adjacent apartments. Lebensfeld said he has video evidence and that multiple department contacts had not returned calls; trustees asked staff to take down his contact information for follow-up.
Other public commentators raised housing-policy concerns. Daniella Bierman cited case studies and said recent affordable projects in the region attracted thousands of applications while selecting only a handful of local residents through lotteries; she pressed the board to enforce eligibility rules and to reconsider proposed parking ratios (citing village code that requires 0.75 spaces per unit for all-affordable housing versus higher observed car-ownership rates). Andreine Smith, chair of the affordable housing task force, countered with task-force data showing car-ownership rates closer to 0.7 per unit for transit-proximate projects and reported that the task force will include localized Westchester data and school-enrollment modeling in its November report.
Trustees acknowledged the concerns and asked staff to follow up on individual enforcement and permit cases, to ensure the building department addresses safety complaints, and to place affordable-housing task-force findings on an upcoming agenda.
