This week White Plains backed three downtown projects worth roughly $1.2 billion, about 1,800 new apartments, and $32.87 million in public incentives. The argument that followed was the one we always have: how much land, how much money, and why only about 140 of those units are affordable.
Nick Khamsopa thinks we are arguing about the wrong thing.
Khamsopa builds housing for a living, and he came on the show to make an uncomfortable case: in Westchester, the real bottleneck is not land, and it is not money. It is people. Specifically, the vanishing number of developers who can hold a municipality, a pension fund, an environmental attorney, a lender, and an architect together in one room long enough to actually break ground.
He would know how hard that is, because he started with a hammer. Five years in a union carpentry apprenticeship, then up through contracting into financing and community development. Today he runs Hudson Housing Lifestyle out of Warwick, building on brownfield sites with union labor and long-term financing designed to keep working families in the places they already live.
Why it matters: Westchester is short roughly 21,000 homes, and rental vacancy sits under 2%. If Khamsopa is right, the county can approve towers and hand out incentives all day, and the math still will not close, because approvals are not the chokepoint. The people who can carry a deal from a zoning hearing to a groundbreaking are. That is a very different problem than the one most of the coverage, ours included, tends to chase.
It is a sharp, honest conversation, and it runs about 33 minutes. We get into the deal-by-deal grind of assembling a project, why brownfields and union labor are central to his model, and what it actually takes to put a shovel in the ground.
This is The Conversation. It is the long-form side of I Live Here, where we hand the mic to the people actually building, running, and reshaping Westchester, the ones who do not fit in a four-minute brief. New editions land here between the daily Briefs. If you know someone in the county worth an hour, reply and tell us. We are always looking for the next one.
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