The Village of North Hills Board of Trustees and a luxury condominium developer have mended their numbers disagreement and are ready to see the Ritz Carlton Residences to completion.
RXR Realty can combine 28 condos at the high-end complex into 14 larger ones, the board ruled Jan. 20, but they’ll still count as 28 toward the previously approved total of 244 units.
The board’s decision allows RXR to start closing apartment sales in early March, executive Frank Haftel said, a step forward despite the numbers issue.
The firm will separately present plans for the second phase in February or March.
“We were hoping just to kind of have everything wrapped up into one application, but we really need to move the project forward, or at least this aspect of it,” said Anthony Guardino, RXR’s attorney.
The physically combined condos in the development managed by hotelier Ritz Carlton, all of which have been sold, will be legally counted as one lot, said Haftel, RXR’s vice president for development and asset management.
The caveat is in how the village views them as part of the whole project, he said, first approved in 2006 to build 244 condos.
“There’s still two units, you’re selling two units, they’re still getting paid for two units, so how can you count them as anything other than two?” Village of North Hills Mayor Marvin Natiss said in an interview.
RXR sought the change in unit count in December as an amendment to the site plan for the first two buildings of the development, located at a 17-acre site on New Hyde Park Road near the Long Island Expressway Service Road.
With 124 condos in the first phase reduced to 110, 14 units would have been added to the fifth condo building in the project’s second phase, Haftel said then.
Haftel and attorney Anthony Guardino argued the change made sense under village code and the trustees’ previous decisions on the project. It wouldn’t bring any more people or traffic to the complex, they said, because all the condos are for single families.
But the board couldn’t control or foresee whether that would be the case, Natiss said, and adding to the final building would have increased the scope of the project beyond what was originally approved.
“That may have been their thought process, but that’s not the Board of Trustees’ thought process,” Natiss said.
With this issue resolved, there’s no longer any conflict, he said, and both parties are ready to move forward into the project’s second phase after 10 years and many changes.
Some North Hills trustees met with Haftel and Guardino recently to discuss plans for phase two, which will build 120 units in three buildings. Phase one also included a clubhouse.
“We’ve worked together in creating a great project that the village officers, the village elected officials, are proud of, and so we’re going to continue working with them to make sure the project gets completed to everybody’s satisfaction,” Haftel said.
RXR, which calls itself the leading real estate owner, manager and developer in the tri-state area, had sought to develop the Ritz Carlton project since it bought the previous owner, North Hills LLC, in 2007.
The developer paid the village $21 million that year in lieu of providing public amenities under a zoning regulation that allows the high-density development.
The then-bleak real estate market pushed RXR to split the project into two phases in 2009.
In 2014, the project got a $3.6 million tax-break package from the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency, which the Great Neck school district vehemently opposed.
Condos range from 1,500 to 4,300 square feet and cost between $1.2 and $5 million in the previously approved plan. Haftel said RXR has sold about 75 percent of the phase-one units.
Phase one is expected to be complete by August 2017.
“I’m really happy that they’re proceeding,” Natiss said. “I think it’s wonderful for the Village of North Hills, the Town of North Hempstead and the County of Nassau.”
