On December 6th, 2022, Cuddy & Feder’s Eon Nichols was quoted in The Wall Street Journal article, “In White Plains, N.Y., the Long Death of an Old Mall,” by Kate King.
King went behind the scenes with the owners of the White Plains mall telling of the slow, expensive and halting process of converting a mall into an apartment complex.
In the article, Eon, who represented the mall owner, W.P. Mall Realty LLC, said his client ran the mall with the goal of keeping tenants happy and took care of the building’s repair and maintenance needs. His client recognized the property was outdated and better suited to housing and proposed razing it in 2016 to build hundreds of apartments and street-level retail and restaurants.
It took two years to obtain zoning approvals from the city and payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements with the county’s industrial development agency, Eon said. W.P Mall Realty then embarked on figuring out the project’s debt and equity structure.
This week the plan finally came to fruition. The developers are set to break ground on the first phase of the $650 million project to build hundreds of apartments in its place.
The article appeared in the December 7th, 2022, print edition as “Replacing Dead Malls Can Be a Struggle.”
The article can be read in its entirety here.
The transaction that the article discussed was the sale of the mall property to RXR and Louis Cappelli. Eon represented the owners of the mall on the selling side. Prior to the sale, and prior to RXR’s and Louis Cappelli’s involvement with the development, William S. Null obtained the zoning approvals from the City and Eon obtained the PILOT from the IDA.
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