Kingston's Planning Board took up two very different housing projects at its Oct. 19 meeting: a 10-unit rebuild of an older building at 350 Broadway, and a six-story, 135-unit affordable complex planned for a closed car dealership at 111 Schwenk Drive in Uptown (via Shawangunk Journal). The board moved to approve the Broadway project once final documents and signatures are in. The Schwenk Drive plan heads to a public hearing on Nov. 16.
Both items were on the board's Oct. 19 agenda as new business, each up for site plan review and a SEQR determination. City records put both properties in the T5MS transect zone.
At 350 Broadway, applicant Diane Chen brought her general contractor, Michael Shiloh. A previous owner had approval for seven apartments and a storefront, but Shiloh told the board that plan would never have qualified for a building permit, because the two neighboring lots didn't allow for proper fire egress. He and Chen also found that the roofs over the second and third floors needed to be fully replaced.
After working through it with their local architect, they decided to take the building down to the second floor and rebuild and renovate from there. That's what led to the current plan: 10 apartments, three of them affordable. The city's agenda describes the work as an addition to an existing building and lists 350 Broadway Kingston LLC as the owner.
Some practical site issues came up, too. The deed doesn't include an easement for trash removal at the rear of the property, so Shiloh said the worst case is carrying garbage through the ground-floor corridor to the front on pickup days. He also plans to rework an area near the street into an entry for a future retail space, for when Chen decides to rent out that part of the building.
Shiloh told the board he'll apply for permits on the downstairs space that was already permitted, finish the drawings with the architect and do the roof "sooner rather than later."
The bigger project is up the road at 111 Schwenk Drive, the former Romeo Kia dealership, which has closed for good. Milestone Development, partnered with the housing nonprofit RUPCO, plans to tear down the dealership building and put up an all-affordable building with apartments ranging from studios to three bedrooms. The city's agenda lists Ross Hoffman of Milestone Development as the applicant and CMRC LLC as the owner, and describes a mixed-use building with commercial space on the ground floor and housing above.
The construction plan is not a typical stick-built job. The developers intend to use a hybrid cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure, with geothermal heating and cooling. Because the site sits in a floodplain, the finished floors would be raised five feet above the ground. The plans also call for 100 parking spaces with electric vehicle charging, plus bike parking.
Kingston Planning Director Suzanne Cahill asked the developers for more visual simulations, both day and night and from several vantage points, so the board can judge how the building would affect its surroundings. Board members specifically want to see how a six-story building would look from the lower-scale buildings along North Front Street.
The developers hope to close on the project in about a year, according to the Journal's report.
Why it matters for Contractors
350 Broadway is the kind of job a lot of small shops will recognize: an older building with an approval on paper that didn't hold up once someone looked closely. Here, fire egress between neighboring lots and two worn-out roofs changed the whole scope, and a missing trash easement changed how the building will run day to day. If you're bidding renovation work on older mixed-use buildings, those are exactly the things to check before you price anything. The near-term work at this address is a roof replacement and a partial teardown and rebuild, and the contractor says the roof is coming soon.
Schwenk Drive is a longer play. The public hearing is Nov. 16 and the developers are talking about closing roughly a year out, so there's no bid package to chase yet. When it does move, a six-story building on a former dealership lot means demolition and site work, flood-related elevation work, geothermal drilling and mechanical systems, and a lot of interior finish work. The CLT structure will likely go to specialty crews, but the trades around it won't. Small subs who want a piece should watch the Planning Board agendas and the outcome of the Nov. 16 hearing, then keep an eye out for who Milestone picks to build it.