Everything you wanted to know about housing development in Croton and had the courage to ask. A hyperlinked bibliography.

The Croton Chronicle cut its teeth on coverage of controversies over housing policy, beginning nine months ago. Here, in one place, are the results of our reporting.

Jul 29, 2024

Artist’s conception of entrance to 1 Half Moon Bay Drive development/ Monday Properties et al.

On October 29 of last year, The Croton Chronicle published the first of 156 articles that we have posted over the past nine months (this one will be number 157.) That first story reported the sale of 1 Half Moon Bay Drive by its long-time owner, the Finkelstein family, to Monday Properties, a development firm based in Arlington, VA and New York City.

For many months afterwards, Monday Properties and its partners refused to divulge their plans for the site. Nevertheless, last December we were able to divulge—thanks to a New York Freedom of Information Law request to the village—that the Finkelstein family had been talking quietly with village officials for more than two years about its vision for a major development at the site. The documents revealed that the original calculations about how many apartments could be constructed there was made by village engineer Dan O’Connor, who estimated about 300 units.

Concurrent with that reporting, we have also followed “developments” at Parking Lot A, where village officials have provisionally chosen WBP Development, LLC, to construct a proposed 100 condominium complex. Those condos will be 100% affordable if WBP can get the public funds to do it (Monday Properties is only proposing 10% affordable at the Finkelstein site.)

Fortunately for our readers, we have covered many other subjects over the same period of time, not all of which are as weighty for the future of the village as these proposed housing developments. But since our subscriber roll is growing all the time, and many newer readers may not have seen our earlier coverage, we have decided to provide a bibliography to our coverage of these two projects all in one place.

We are not including stories about Maple Commons (the “Katz” property), 25 South Riverside, and other projects, to keep things manageable. But readers can use the newsletter’s search function to find those stories as well.

We hope that readers will find this a useful reference, even though it is likely to be out of date as soon as the Board of Trustees, the Planning Board, and other village decision-making bodies begin to meet again in August.

And please don’t forget that this reporting takes a lot of work and resources. If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider supporting this effort to keep local journalism—and especially in-depth, enterprise reporting—alive.