4 | $KY HIGH MAKEOVER MAY 23, 2016 | VOL. 52, No. 21
YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS
WESTCHESTER STARTUP NONNATECH BRINGS SENIOR CARE INTO DIGITAL AGE BY RYAN DEFFENBAUGH rdeffenbaugh@westfairinc.com
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magine being able to track your daily habits to detect and address potential medical emergencies before they happen. One Westchester startup offers a system it says can do just that, focused on the elderly and chronically ill. Nonnatech, operating out of an office in downtown White Plains, says it is the first system to offer real-time monitoring and predictive analytics to track patients and cut down on the need for emergency room visits. It works like this: a series of sensors are placed throughout a person’s home or assisted living facility to monitor that daily activity. Sensors in the bathroom, chairs, floor, bed and more can track sleeping problems, whether pills are taken on
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schedule and unusual bathroom use. Using predictive analytics, Nonnatech can discover and red-flag potential health problems before even the most attentive of caregivers might catch on. Nonnatech’s founder and CEO Gary German gives the example of daily bathroom habits. “If for the past month they were going to the bathroom twice a day, then all the sudden you see a pattern where they start going three, four, five times a day, that could be identify a possible issue, like a urinary tract infection,” German said. The system can also do something as simple as turn the lights on and notify a caregiver if a person with a functional impairment gets up from bed at night, when German says a dangerous fall is statistically most likely to happen. » NONNATECH, page 6
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Shrimp Newburgh SEE PAGE 2
Jean Claude Frajmund has turned a section of a former mattress factory into a shrimp-farming venture near the Newburgh riverfront. Photo by Bob Rozycki.
Long-delayed development stirs to life in Sleepy Hollow BY JOHN GOLDEN jgolden@westfairinc.com
SPEAKING AT A GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY on a vast, empty expanse of concrete and broken asphalt on the Sleepy Hollow riverfront, New Jersey developer Jonathan Stein recalled the long history of a mixed-use development that will start there this spring and whose completion, at a cost of $800 million to $1 billion, might still be a decade away. “It’s been an extraordinary ride,” the regional developer told an audience of public officials, local residents and business people gathered on the 67-acre site of the former General Motors automotive plant, where the last Chevrolet minivan rolled off the assembly line in 1996. Two years after the plant closing, GM officials approached Stein, then a partner at Roseland Property Co. in Short Hills, N.J.,
about developing the site. “That was 1998,” said Stein, who later founded Diversified Realty Advisors LLC, the Summit, N.J., company partnering in a joint venture with SunCal, a national developer of large-scale master-planned communities, to redevelop the General Motors property, a short distance north of the Tappan Zee bridge construction, as a transit-oriented community named Edgeon-Hudson. “The site looked exactly like it does today,” he said, an observation that drew laughter from the crowd. Stein’s company was chosen for the project over some prominent metropolitan developers and in 2001, a contract between the Detroit automaker and the developer was publicly announced, he recalled. Gov. George Pataki that year took part in a groundbreaking on the razed site off Beekman Avenue for a project then called Lighthouse Landing, a tribute to the inac-
tive county-owned lighthouse on the site that Stein at the May 18 ceremony called “the lynchpin of our development.” Fifteen years ago, “I said to my partners, ‘No problem, two years, we’ll be in the ground,’” Stein recalled. “I was a little off on timing.” The project was delayed for several years by lawsuits brought against the village of Sleepy Hollow by GM and the bordering village of Tarrytown, the credit market crisis that brought commercial development to a standstill in Westchester, the recession and GM’s bankruptcy reorganization. Roseland parted ways with General Motors on the project in late 2007, noting at the time that Sleepy Hollow officials in their environmental review had scaled back the proposed development “to the point where it became economically unviable for our company.” Tarrytown officials in 2011 petitioned
a state court to annul its municipal neighbor’s approval of the Lighthouse Landing plan, claiming Sleepy Hollow did not take a “hard look” at the project’s impact on traffic and parking and did not thoroughly review alternative proposals. But a state judge, citing in detail the project’s “lengthy and contentious” planning approval process, in 2012 rejected Tarrytown’s claims. General Motors in 2012 issued another request for proposals from developers. Stein said the company reached out to him to see if he wanted to again participate in the project with his new company. In 2013, the automaker completed an environmental cleanup of the industrially contaminated site. In 2014, the joint venture of Diversified Realty and SunCal purchased the site for $39.5 million. When fully built, Edge-on-Hudson will include 1,177 condominiums, townhouses » SLEEPY HOLLOW, page 6