Housing Boom and Construction
Armonk experienced a surge in new housing construction and development beginning in the late 1990s. New condominiums, town houses, and larger single-family homes were constructed primarily north of the Armonk Business District and just to the west. Armonk real estate prices have increased substantially since the late 1990s, having peaked in the mid-2000s, and never returning to their pre-2000s rates despite the subprime mortgage crisis. The new construction projects and increased housing costs have solidified Armonk's newly established reputation as an affluent town, with the residents' profile moving away from the middle-working class and towards a much wealthier upper middle class image. In the most recent construction project, Antares Real Estate of Greenwich, Connecticut purchased the long-standing Schultz's Cider Mill just south of Main Street, only to have it razed and in its place construct a premium gated community of 27 townhouses and homes (named "Cider Mill"). As a result, the population of Armonk increased significantly, but caused the public schools to become overcrowded and push forth a series of expensive school expansion projects that significantly raised property taxes.
Much of the new construction was pinned on the connections that former Town Supervisor John Lombardi had with the areas' construction and development companies. In 2005, after over 40 years in office, Lombardi was ousted in the election by political newcomer Reese Berman. A former librarian at the town's middle school, Berman's campaign promise was to put a moratorium on new residential construction to be enacted during her term in office. As of Berman's election, no new purely residential projects have broken ground in Armonk. A new community; Cider Mill was added in 2007–2008.
Read more about this topic: Armonk, New York
Famous quotes containing the words housing, boom and/or construction:
“We have been weakened in our resistance to the professional anti-Communists because we know in our hearts that our so-called democracy has excluded millions of citizens from a normal life and the normal American privileges of health, housing and education.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)