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To the Editor:
On Monday, April 20, Peekskill decided to auction the blighted little blue house at 946 Second Street on Monday. April 27. After everything City officials put me through with this property I feel wronged.
I am asking for a fair chance to develop an awesome two-family home that is truly affordable and climate resilient. The City Charter says Common Council decides what happens to blighted property, not the City Manager. I think Common Council would give me a chance if I can convince them to hear my offer.
I’ve loved the little blue house on second street for years. It’s the perfect place to prove that dignified affordable housing is easy. I’ve casually been searching for its owners for years. Last fall I found out that the City owns this little house. It never crossed my mind that Peekskill owned it. My neighbors and I have lived with the four-foot high bushes, vermin, electrical fire hazard, and snow week slip-and-fall risks for years. It’s an attractive nuisance across the street from our high school. I thought the City would be glad to sell to a local person and get the liabilities off our books and our strained insurance policy. I offered to buy it “as is” last October.
I’ve been excitedly using my twenty years of experience and observations to develop this lot in a just way. It would be truly affordable to the average Peekskill renter at $1200 per month. It considers 1000-year adverse climate events. My architect friends have given me so much information on how to keep it simple, sturdy and eco-friendly and also want national orgs to document the build for a ‘how-to’ manual on affordable housing. My dad is excited to dust off his contractor license to “check on” the actual contractors. I have banks willing to finance the construction. I’m super excited for a chance to do affordable housing on my favorite residential street in Peekskill.
Our City Planner, Carol Samol, told me that the City needed proof that my offer was serious because all prior offers had been withdrawn, wasting the City’s resources. She required a non-refundable $7,500 for the appraisal and associated costs. She kept repeating that it was non-refundable for weeks after I paid it. That made me feel weird because I knew it wasn’t true. She also told me she’d heard I was “somewhat of a mover and shaker in Peekskill” which also felt weird.
Carol proposed a payment-in-lieu-of-parking program to Council that same month. I went on record at a Common Council meeting to explain that small properties should be left out of her proposal because homeowners shouldn’t have to pay for off-site parking or parking variances if they don’t have a car. She amended the proposal to exclude small homes. The little house immediately became more valuable for not having a parking requirement.
Carol emailed the following to me on November 3rd: “Tanya, Could we find a time to meet in person and we can talk about your plans and the process here?” She spoke with me and my architect on multiple occasions about how problematic the property was, repeatedly testing to see if I’d heard about this or that danger and how I would handle it. She would say things like “the lot is so small, how would you get construction done without street access?” Easy, prefabricated panels can be installed with large cranes for a solid shell in two or three days. Her last message to me was that she wanted me to know it might be quite expensive to replace the water and sewer line since the City hasn’t maintained it. I told her I’d already budgeted for it. Why would I assume the City had maintained the pipelines when they hadn’t even shut off the electricity in fifteen years, or secured all the windows. I assumed the water main was never protected from the vermin that are likely crawling around in the house pipes. She also spent months giving me reasons why the appraisal wasn’t done but insisted they couldn’t start negotiating without it. They just kept pumping me for ideas and discouraging me. After months of getting the run around, the City Manager sent me an email saying it’s not in the “City’s financial interest” to sell to me, a local housing advocate with a plan to fix the things that had stumped them for a decade.
No one knew how to make the property safe and productive for 15 years, but within months of Carol pushing me to reveal my ideas, the City has so many interested bidders they can no longer consider my offer. The City Manager says I can submit a bid but if he deems the winning bid to be low, then he plans to get an appraisal to reject the winning bid. This is why I feel wronged. This is a public process but he keeps making special rules for me and exaggerating hurdles. He won’t tell me how much the property is worth, or let me inspect it, and he might reject my bid even if it’s the highest.
Rejecting any bid when the property needs such expensive remediation is irresponsible. My neighbors and I should never have been subjected to this blight for all these years. It should have been condemned a decade ago. We hear complaints about absentee landlords but our City Manager is willing to keep this severely neglected little house on my street until he finds a buyer that seems worthy to him. It seems like it’s not in the City’s financial interest to protect the health and safety of the people on my block.
One of the most insulting things about this is that they know that I am an affordable housing expert. Last month Mayor McKenzie gave me a Proclamation for my affordable housing advocacy. I direct a litigation team that fights for homeowners at one of the biggest and oldest firms in the Hudson Valley.
I started my housing career at the United Nations asking women in Mexico, Canada and here what prevents them from having dignified affordable housing. But you don’t need my expertise to understand that auctioning blighted property is a bad idea because there is no opportunity to inspect it or appraise it. The City already auctioned it once and the out-of-town gentleman gave it back to the City after realizing how difficult it is to develop a sliver of landlocked real estate that requires a special demolition technique. Peekskill could have collected over $150,000 in property taxes over the years if anyone had the vision to develop it. But the City Manager, on legal advice from an out-of-town lawyer, thinks blindly auctioning the house again is a better financial decision for the City than selling to me.
If you can think of a way to help me with this, please let me know as soon as possible.
You can contact TPDwyerEsq at LinkedIn, Instagram, Discord or Gmail.
I appreciate all of you.
Tanya Dwyer, Esq.
Peekskill, NY
