Plans to Demolish Decaying Cottages on Route 6

Shopping carts, box springs, children’s toys and other furniture sit in a large pile behind Sokol Drejaj’s house and tool shed. The belongings are a smattering of what often gets left behind in the Seven Oak cottages in the Mohegan Lake section of Cortlandt Manor where Drejaj works as the superintendent.

The 56-units of decrepit homes, originally built decades ago as summer bungalows, are well known drug dens where tenants come and go as they please, often staying for just a few months and leaving units full of furniture, Drejaj said. (View a slideshow of the cottages here.)

"They usually try to get other family to come and live here so they can make their drug business bigger."

While community members complain of the eyesore and police activity, Drejaj deals with the dilapidated buildings on a daily basis. And he says that he sees the illegal activity that ramshackle housing attracts. The most recent publicized was in February, when eight people were arrested on drug charges following a police raid on two of the units. Police found crack, cocaine, marijuana and pills in the two cottages, and observed a woman dropping off her child at the cottage just before the raid occurred.

“I think that it is more than just a good idea to knock these down and build something else,” Drejaj said in a slight Albanian accent.

A lot of people in the community agree with Drejaj, including the property's owner, Demetri Vourliotis, neighbors and town planning board members. Vourliotis bought the property in 2004 intending to knock down the cottages and build a 56-unit condominium complex called Pondview Commons. The first public hearing on issuing the project a residential reuse special permit, which would allow the units to be demolished and replaced, was held this Tuesday.

Because the project requires planning and town board approval in several different areas, full site plan approval is still at least a few months away. Approving the special permit would be the first step towards real action. A new public hearing is tentatively scheduled for July 6.

“I didn’t buy it to keep it what it is,” Vourliotis said. “I bought it to do this, but I didn’t think it’d take this long.”

Vourliotis and his attorney, David Stienmitz, have been working with the Town of Cortlandt since they implemented the residential reuse special permit (RRSP) in 2007. At Tuesday’s meeting Stienmitz told the planning board that when the town adopted the RRSP, they did so with Vouliotis' project in mind. Stienmitz pleaded with the board to do all they could to speed up the process.

“We are now armed with environmental studies, professional analysis from in-house staff and outside consultants to approve the RRSP,” Stienmitz told the Planning Board, listing engineering reports, traffic studies, sewer line research and other studies put into the proposal.

But, while some members of the board explained they support the project, they still had concerns over the sewer line that would be installed, traffic safety, the restricted left-hand turn out of the property onto Route 6, the state of New York (which owns Route 6) and Yorktown’s involvement and density impact.

“What are we asking people to buy into,” Planning Board Chairwoman Loretta Taylor asked. "I can't speak for all the board members, but I think most of us are in support of this project," she said. “But, if people can only turn right when they want to turn left that can be a problem.” The development plans include a road network, but there is little that engineers could do to allow for making a left onto Route 6 from the development.

Towards the end of the long discussion, Stienmitz told the board, “something needs to happen to create a synergy for other pieces to fall into place.”

Five community members spoke in favor of the project at the public hearing and one man spoke neither for or against, but asked the board to keep in mind that the project will displace people and impact school density.

But according to Drejaj, there are already many children living on the property in its current form, and tenants never stay long.

“I think five or six familes have been here for five or seven years,” Drejaj said, explaining that the other 35 currently occupied units are rented by people who rarely stay more than a few months.

“We have a lot of kids breaking the windows,” Drejaj said as he pulled open a thin wood door beneath a cottage to show the lack of foundation.

Cinder blocks and beams are all that support each unit, which cause the floors to slope and the structure to buckle, Drejaj said. Click here for a virtual tour of the cottages.

“To try to fix this would not make sense,” he said. “Putting in something new would be a good thing.”

James McParlon, who has lived parallel to the cottages on Regina Street for 26 years has probably never seen the internal structural issues, but he said he has seen enough of the police presence across the street from his home and he wants Pondview Commons to happen.

“This is an opportunity for the planning board to do something right for the town,” he told the board Tuesday night.

“It is a chance to make it better for residents, family and everyone else in the area.”

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Editor's note: This article has been changed to reflect that Pondview Commons would be a moderately-priced condominium community.