By Dana Williams
At the West Hempstead Community Support Association’s annual meeting, Town Supervisor Kate Murray said that in the coming months, town officials would review proposals from the four developers who submitted plans for the URP and choose a design that best fits the needs of the area. That section of the hamlet was deemed blighted by an independent study adopted by the town in May 2006.
The developers, chosen by a town committee in March 2007, are Trammell Crow Residential, the Sheldrake Organization, Breslin Realty and the Benjamin Group.
The URP was originally a 10.5-acre design that called for a mixture of homes and businesses on both sides of Hempstead Avenue. Now that the 2.7-acre Courtesy site is slated to be sold to Trammell Crow Residential for redevelopment, however, the URP has been scaled back to roughly 7.8 acres. Its goals, town officials said, include eliminating the blighted parcels of land by creating new, market-rate housing and developing underutilized land along Hempstead Avenue.
“The town will first have to make an amendment to the Urban Renewal Plan to cut out the Courtesy piece,” Murray explained to more than 50 people in the West Hempstead Public Library. “Then we will be reviewing proposals from the four developers and discussing different ideas.”
The URP has received little support from residents, mainly because it called for the Courtesy’s closure through eminent domain proceedings. Now, with the hotel property out of the design, town officials now are optimistic that they will be able to garner more community support for the plan.
The original URP, adopted by the Hempstead town board last January, included a portion of the parking lot adjacent to the Courtesy site, which is now home to Shopper’s Village, but Murray said that would also be changed. “We are in a new world with the Courtesy parcel out of the plan, so we will revisit a number of ideas for the area,” she said. “Residents should know that nothing in the plan is set in stone at this point, and we will be tweaking the plan.”
No further information about the URP was available before press time Monday.
Town officials also announced at the meeting that there are only several more steps, including obtaining permits, before the seedy Courtesy can be demolished. “With the passage of the site plans, there’s not much else that needs to be done before that nasty hotel can come down,” Murray said. “We’re hoping that in early fall we’ll be knocking down the Courtesy and breaking ground at the site for construction.”
Trammell Crow’s four-story complex, to be called the Alexan at West Hempstead, will feature a mixture of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, two levels of underground parking and a host of amenities. The Hempstead town board approved the rezoning of the Courtesy site to residential use at a public hearing on Nov. 25. The developer is now working to obtain construction financing for the project, which is expected to take 15 to 18 months to complete.
The Long Island Rail Road has agreed to transfer a .97-acre parcel of land it owns next to the Courtesy to the town, which will allow Trammell Crow’s complex to be in compliance with the town’s density limit. The deal still needs to be approved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board, officials said.
Comments about this story? DWilliams@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 205.
