How to Ease a Parking Squeeze

When the White Oak co-op was built in New Rochelle in the early 1950s, no one groused about the lack of parking. Consisting of four 40-unit buildings, the White Oak boasted 86 parking spaces – a reasonable number when it was easy to find spots on the street.

“Now, it’s a whole different ball game,” says board president Martin Cassidy. “Iona College, which is nearby, has expanded like crazy, and there’s a seven-story dorm going up down the block. Every family here has at least one car. It all adds up to a lot of headaches.”

Cassidy kept looking for new space for expansion, but there wasn’t much. The owner of a private lot with 40 spaces next door rebuffed a number of purchase offers. And with only five houses on the block, chances of one going up for sale were slim.

Then the co-op got a break. “I knew the owner of one house, a fire captain here in town, and by luck I saw him in the driveway last September, shortly after his mother had passed,” Cassidy recalls. “I asked if he was ready to sell, and he said, ‘Perfect timing.’” Cassidy promptly met with the nine-member board and proposed they buy the house, tear it down, and put up a parking lot. “We made a fair market value offer,” he says. “It was accepted right off the bat.”

The board could do that because White Oak was flush with cash. Since 2002, the co-op board had been annually challenging the building’s tax assessments. “They finally heard us in 2011, and we got a huge settlement, one of the largest for a property this size in Westchester County,” Cassidy says. “We sat on it for four years, then decided that instead of making one percent [interest each year] in the bank, we should improve White Oak with every capital improvement we could think of.”

The co-op converted from oil to gas, installed new lighting and a closed-circuit camera security system, redesigned the lobbies, built a new gym, repointed the brickwork, and upgraded the landscaping, among other projects, totaling nearly $500,000. “Even after paying for the parking lot, we’ll still have over $1 million, plus $400,000 we’ve already set aside to repair the roofs,” says Cassidy.

After closing on the purchase of the house in February, property manager Robert Ferrara, president of Ferrara Management Group, solicited contractor bids and then filed for all the necessary permits. “We had to get approval to take trees down, remove asbestos, turn off the electricity, and cap the sewer line,” Cassidy says. The house was razed in August. The lot, which will accommodate 28 cars, is scheduled to be completed Nov. 1.

“We kept shareholders informed every step of the way through board meetings and memos,” says Ferrara. “I had been fielding their complaints for years, so it was great to work with a board that was able to think outside the box and find a solution.”

The parking lot is already boosting property values at White Oak. “Our sales have been outstanding in the last year, and we just sold a three-bedroom duplex apartment for $325,000, a huge amount for a co-op unit in our neighborhood,” says Cassidy. The moral of the story? “If you’re building a new place, make sure you have enough parking,” he says. “And if you don’t, get creative.”