Town Nixes AvalonBay Project

HUNTINGTON, NY-AvalonBay’s plan to develop a rental apartment complex on 26 acres here may not be dead in the water, despite a 3-2 vote by the Town Board Tuesday evening against the rezoning necessary for the project. The Long Island Business News reported Wednesday that the Reston, VA-based multifamily developer might seek to submit a scaled-down, lower-density version of the project that wouldn’t entail a new zoning district. Calls to AvalonBay for comment were not returned by deadline.

Controversy swirled around the $100-million, 490-unit Avalon Huntington Station project in recent months. “Huntington residents’ quality of life is in jeopardy,” read the headline on a flier with the logo Say No to Avalon Bay, also the name of a Facebook page created by area resident Matt Harris.

Among other objections, opponents charged that the plan would bring New York City-like housing density to the community, erode property values and overburden infrastructure. Tuesday’s Town Board meeting was reportedly held before an overflow crowd in council chambers.

However, AvalonBay’s Mark Whalen, a VP of development for Long Island, told the New York Times earlier this month that the project was “far from the Queensification of Huntington.” He noted that the 490 units had been scaled back from 530 units and currently represented 18.5 housing units per acre. “In the city it’s 1,000 units per acre.” According to the New York City Department of Planning, the city’s densest census tracts contain fewer than 300 residents per acre.

AvalonBay had promised to set aside 20% of the project’s apartments as affordable housing—a move seen as a liability by some opponents. On the Say No to Avalon Bay site, Harris says the area is “already overburdened with too much low-income housing, nearly 80% of the town’s total, and not enough classroom space.” He also has posted a video measuring the distance from the project site to the Huntington train station at six-tenths of a mile, or more than the half-mile standard for transit-oriented districts.

The Huntington school board initially threw its endorsement behind the project, on grounds that the 490 apartments would produce fewer school-aged children than the 109 single-family homes for which the property is currently zoned. Yet in August the board voted against it, a move which Huntington councilman Mark Cuthbertson says in a statement led him to drop his support for it as well.

“My support for this project has always been premised, in part, upon support from the school district,” according to Cuthbertson’s statement. “When the school district voted to enter into an agreement with Avalon on August 10, 2009 to accept up to a $1.5-million mitigation fee if the project was approved, I believed that this demonstrated sufficient community support to allow this proposal to be considered. It also demonstrated that the school board had considered the project’s implications on school capacity. With that support now withdrawn, I can no longer support the project.”