Westbury is living up to its name as a pro-housing community.
Westbury Mayor Peter Cavallaro said the village will see construction on a new 187-unit apartment complex start later this year or early next year. The new building, which would likely open in early 2028, will sit at the intersection of Union Avenue and Linden Avenue. 12% of the units will be designated as affordable.
The village’s board of trustees voted to approve the new building at its April 3 meeting, granting developer Alpine Residential permission to proceed with their plans for the transit-oriented affordable development.
“We think it’s good for our downtown. We think it’s good for our tax base,” Cavallaro said of the apartment.
He said the development will allow the village to spread the tax burden across more property and people, putting less pressure on each individual.
“It’s consistent with our overall view towards what we need to do for the future, to keep the village strong and sustainable and attractive with a healthy downtown,” he added. “We have a pretty vibrant, strong downtown and eclectic downtown already, but we want to make sure that, going forward, it becomes even better and more sustainable.”
The roughly 24 affordable units will be for people making 80% of the average regional income, Cavallaro said, a metric below the typical rate for affordable units, which he said sits between 110% and 130% of the average income across the county.
“We wanted to make sure that we had affordable units that were truly affordable to people who might not otherwise be able to live in a building like that,” the mayor said.
Cavallaro said this development, which will be the third transit-oriented multifamily complex built in the area since 2022, is exactly what the village was looking for.
“We rezoned the area around the train station several years ago for exactly this type of redevelopment because we believe in transit-oriented development,” the mayor said. The work the village has done to increase housing in the area has earned it a pro-housing designation by the state.
“We’ve had a positive response to our overall policy goals of trying to redevelop this land,” he added. “This acreage is light industrial. It’s blighted to a certain extent, and really needs to be uplifted.”
He said the village’s push to add housing to the village is also an attempt to respond to the housing shortage facing the county.
“The region in general has a significant deficit in housing, generally,” Cavallaro said. “Westbury, last year was designated as a pro-housing community by the state because of the redevelopment work we’ve done and the housing that we’ve already built.”
Plans for the apartment were originally announced in September 2024. At the time, concerns were raised about the location, traffic, and accessibility for the fire department.
Alpine representatives addressed those concerns prior to the development’s approval at the April meeting.
Nicholas Tortorella, a licensed professional engineer in New York State and a traffic engineering project manager, said Alpine would install an all-way stop control in the project area, which includes new stop signs, rumble strips, flashing lights and a speed radar.
“It’s gratifying to actually be able to see that all that work we did to rezone the property is coming to fruition,” Cavallaro said. “I believe it’s going to have a really significant benefit to the village going forward.”
