City of Beacon's Workshop Agenda for 3/10/2025 Posted: Legalizing ADUs (aka sheds as houses), 248 Tioronda Update, etc.
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The City of Beacon’s Workshop Agenda for the March 10, 2025 Meeting has been posted. At the meeting, the Council listened to a presentation from Dutchess County Department of Health on how people can access social benefits like SNAP, that the office is right in Beacon in the DMV building, and how emergency shelter housing works. As the Council continues to try to prioritized affordable housing as an issue, they had requested a presentation from the county. There continues to not be an overnight warming center in Beacon for the cold temperatures, and no one on City Council brought this up during the meeting. A Little Beacon Blog wrote about it earlier this season here.
The Council received an update from the owners of 248 Tioronda Avenue. At the owner’s continued request to open their residential units before building their required commercial office space that the City of Beacon mandated that they do years prior, the Council had reluctantly granted special permission for 248 Tioronda to open their residential units to be rented by the public before their proposed office space is built.
While the City of Beacon demanded that 248 Tioronda build and open the commercial space before their residential space, the owners of the development insisted that they tried and could not fill the commercial space. But that they had strong demand for their residential units. In a compromise, the City Council required that 248 Tioronda add a couple more Below Market Rate (BMR) apartment units to rent, and then report back.
This appearance by the owners was that required report. To which they said they rented all of the Below Market Rate apartments to people mainly from Beacon, and still had no deal or other interested parties except one that fell through on the commercial space.
The City of Beacon is reversing is decades long position on Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU). For a long time, the older generation of Beacon snubbed the idea of ADUs, not wanting to let people rent their back houses and sheds to other people. Now that the older generation needs places to live if they want to stay in Beacon, and now that New York Governor Hochul is encouraging the legality of ADUs and incentivizing them with grants, this City Council is spearheading the about face on ADUs to legalize them.
