NY Post Story Targets Tarrytown Affordable Housing Practices

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April 4, 2025

By Barrett Seaman–

A March 25 article in the Murdoch-owned New York Post has brought renewed attention to a years’ old dispute over the rents paid by various tenants of a federally subsidized affordable housing apartment building in Tarrytown, co-mingling it with questions about the role played by Sadie McKeown, a major force in Tarrytown’s affordable housing efforts over the past three decades.

The Post’s story, by Josh Christenson, the paper’s Washington Bureau Chief, conflated the dispute between the current owner of Asbury Terrace and tenants of the building who no longer qualify for federal subsidies on the one hand with allegations against McKeown for unspecified financial manipulations while running a “slush fund” with multi-million dollar federal grants. (The Post story can be seen at: https://nypost.com/2025/03/25/us-news/shady-7b-biden-climate-slush-fund-recipient-approved-tarrytown-deal-that-hiked-rent-up-to-80-pushed-residents-out-of-low-income-housing-tenants/.)

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The rent disparity story is not new, having been covered thoroughly last year by Journal News columnist David McKay Wilson (as well as in The Hudson Independent (https://thehudsonindependent.com/renters-in-tarrytown-building-worried-they-soon-could-be-homeless/).

Those stories focused on the Asbury Terrace tenants who originally qualified for Section 8 federal subsidies but who continued to occupy units even after their annual incomes had risen beyond that criterion ($32,650 for an individual up to $88,350 for a family of five). As of last year, more than 20 of the 86 units in Asbury Terrace were occupied by such higher-earning tenants, while 60 units were occupied by tenants whose incomes were still low enough to qualify for the Section 8 subsidy.

Evicting those over the income limit would be illegal, but the building’s new owner, a reputable affordable housing company called Mountco, sought to raise their rents commensurate with their current incomes. A one-bedroom apartment would go from $1,080-a-month to $1,980; a three bedroom from $1,517 to $2,650. (Even at that level, Asbury Terrace tenants would be paying well below Westchester County’s average of $2,050 for a studio up to $4,300 for a three-bedroom apartment.)

The rate increase went into effect last September, with a stipulation that those willing to disclose their earnings would be charged at a rate of 30% of current incomes. Many of the tenants, however, were unwilling to divulge their earnings, viewing that as a violation of their privacy. As a result, Mountco cannot offer apartments to qualified Section 8 applicants until tenants earning above the cut-off vacate their apartments.

Four years earlier, Asbury Terrace’s previous owner, a consortium called the Asbury Terrace Housing Development Fund Corporation (ATHDF), which was chaired at the time by Sadie McKeown, sold the building for $15.5 million to Mountco. The New York Post story asserts that McKeown “got rents raised after petitioning the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).”

McKeown flatly denies having any influence over rents charged by Mountco. “I had nothing to do with setting rents,” she told The Hudson Independent, “and did not have any other involvement in the property following the sale to Mountco.”

Again, according to the Post article, McKeown who at the time also chaired Tarrytown’s Housing Affordability Task Force, “funneled millions of dollars in net proceeds to the pet projects of another local nonprofit, the Housing Action Council.” The executive director of the HAC, the story went on, was Rose Noonan, “who was serving with McKeown on the affordable housing task force.”

“Critics of the sale have charged potential conflicts of interest,” the Post story alleged (without naming any critics), further stating that “Ethics complaints filed with Tarrytown officials indicate that McKeown was allowed to serve jointly on Tarrytown’s Municipal Housing Authority and its Affordable Housing Task Force — but had to recuse herself starting in 2021 from ‘any’ deliberations of the latter.”

The person who initiated the Ethics case was John Stiloski, owner of a local towing and automotive repair company and a source for the Post story. A Tarrytown native no longer living in the village but a frequent commentator at Trustee meetings, Stiloski filed a complaint with the village’s Ethics Board, alleging that McKeown and Rose Noonan had failed to file annual financial disclosure forms, also citing Village Administrator Richard Slingerland for his failure to order them to submit such forms.

While reporting that an ethics complaint had been filed, the March 25 Post story failed to note that on March 12, nearly two weeks prior to publication, Tarrytown’s Ethics Board exonerated McKeown, Noonan and Slingerland on grounds that the two women were not village officials and thus had no obligation to file financial discloser forms. “The key part,” said one participant in the decision, “was that they (McKeown and Noonan) were never in decision-making positions.”

According to several sources familiar with Tarrytown’s affordable housing efforts, Asbury Terrace was a particularly well-run rental property that maintained its value over more than half a century but whose potential for absorbing more qualified renters was limited by the presence of renters with incomes above federal requirements. The motivation to sell the property, they say, was to monetize the asset and use the proceeds to invest in new affordable housing projects.

One such project arose in 2021, when the YMCA sold its building at 62 Main Street to Wilder Balter of Mt. Kisco. An affordable housing specialist, Wilder Balter presented the village with plans to expand the building’s footprint, turning an aging structure that housed 48 men into a modern, energy-efficient facility with 109 units. Investment in the Y struck McKeown and others as an ideal use for proceeds from the sale of Asbury Terrace. Thus $9 million out the $15.5 million earned from the sale of Asbury Terrace was reinvested in the Y expansion.

Sadie McKeown has been deeply involved in Tarrytown’s nonprofit circles since joining the board of the Y in 1994. She was involved in Asbury Terrace from 1996 until the building’s sale in 2020. She served on the Tarrytown Comprehensive Plan Management Committee until its dissolution in 2022. She chaired the Housing Affordability Task Force from 2019 to 2023 and the Municipal Housing Authority Board until that same year. “I have 34 years of experience with affordable housing,” she told The Hudson Independent. “I love Tarrytown, so for me this was an opportunity to be able to use my expertise and to volunteer my time to support the community I love.”

Overlapping but apparently unrelated was an effort by Climate United, a coalition of nonprofits, including the Community Preservation Corporation, of which she is president, to secure funding from the federal EPA under the Biden Administration’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund—$27 billion earmarked for climate-friendly housing projects. Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion from that fund and had begun investing it under contract when the incoming Trump Administration froze the money.

Local officials are among the many nationwide who say that the Trump freeze is illegal. A recent New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/climate/lee-zeldin-gold-bars-epa.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) reported that Judge Tanya Chutkin of the U.S. District Court in DC has told Trump’s EPA chief, former Congressman Lee Zeldin, that the administration has failed to substantiate its sweeping claims of waste, fraud and abuse as justification for freezing the funds. The deadline for submitting new evidence was this past Wednesday, leaving it unlikely that new information will surface before Judge Chutkin issues a ruling, which is expected next week.

The Post article on several occasions labeled various accounts purportedly overseen by Sadie McKeown, as “slush funds,” a term the Oxford dictionary defines as “a reserve of money used for illicit purposes.” McKeown said she oversees no such finds. When called for comment on both the Asbury Terrace rent dispute and the ongoing legal battle over government funding, John Stiloski declined to comment on a matter he said was “under investigation.”

“I was told not to talk about it,” he said before hanging up.

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