Lottery for Maple Commons (Katz-Regan development) is under way. Are any Crotonites among the winners? The chances are slim but of course not zero [Updated]
The names are being randomly generated by computer and read off by a digital voice generator. There were 6116 applicants for 32 apartments. Here are the first 51 picked.
The lottery is being conducted via Zoom by the Tarrytown-based Housing Action Council (please see here for our earlier explanation of how this is being done.)
Above are the first 51 names picked (locations of the applicants are not being provided.) It will take up to two hours to read all the names, possibly less.
Best of luck to all applicants, and especially to anyone from Croton. If you see your name on this list, congratulations, although obviously the chances of anyone from our village getting a spot are very slim. We have discussed the implications of that in a previous post.
Update: So, it ended up taking about 4 1/2 hours for the computer to read the entire list of applicants. There was a 10 minute Q&A afterwards, and the mood was somber: More than 6000 people searching for affordable housing at Maple Commons will obviously not get it.
At the April 25 meeting of the Croton Board of Trustees, in which the sale of Lot A for a condominium project was debated, Adam Decker—cochair of Croton’s Housing Task Force and an associate at the Housing Action Council—made the point that the huge number of applicants only underscored how desperate so many people are for affordable housing.
He is quite right, of course, even if many in Croton are raising the question of whether our small village has already done its fair share of contributing to a solution of the problem. It seems clear that some pretty dramatic and wide-ranging solutions are necessary. To what extent the burden should be placed onto small communities like ours will continue to be a subject of fierce debate for some time to come.
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Thank you for covering this. I know someone who lives in Croton who entered the lottery and really needed to win one of these units but their name isn’t in the first 50. All the time the trustees here kept telling us this would help residents, was a complete fabrication. The only thing it will do is cost current residents more in taxes for decades to come. I am very disappointed, and would rather drive by and see a nice woodsy lot that hawks nested in. That would have been more beneficial to residents at this point. Sad! I am definitely not down for any more apartments. Keep Croton a village and not turn us into a city. Thank you!
I think Pleasantville, NY has multiple multifamily housing projects recently built in its downtown area near the train station. I think we are just seeing the very beginning of a new era of Croton on Hudson.