The community board of New Castle, the Chappaqua town where developers originally sought to build a 348-unit condominium on the 114-acre site that formerly housed the Reader’s Digest, ruled that Summit Development and Greenfield Partners could only build 111 units on 31 of the acres, the New York Times reported. The developers purchased the land for $59 million seven years ago and have been continually rebuffed in their efforts to build on the site, and have alleged in two lawsuits that the town opposes affordable multi-family housing. But the town supervisor, Barbara Gerrard, said the community wants to limit residential development to leave room for commercial development in order to raise more revenue for the town. [more]

The Reader’s Digest campus in the town of New Castle

The developers who purchased the Reader’s Digest campus in Westchester in late 2004 with plans to build housing on the 114-acre property are suing the town of New Castle for repeatedly refusing to approve their development plans, charging that racial, age and socioeconomic motivations were in play in their decisions. According to the Wall Street Journal, Summit Development and Greenfield Partners paid $59 million for the site six years ago and have since spent another $10 million on it, but between the financial crisis, the bankruptcy of Reader’s Digest, which forced the company to renege on its 20-year lease at its landmark headquarters there in 2009, and the town’s alleged resistance to affordable housing in the wealthy Chappaqua hamlet, the developers have had enough. They filed a lawsuit in New York state Supreme Court Friday, seeking to force the town to buy the property back from them. [more]

With commercial rents low, New York City publishers struggling to stay afloat amid paltry ad sales are looking to cut real estate costs by moving, downsizing and subleasing. TV Guide’s current office space on East 42nd Street is now bigger than it needs after several rounds of layoffs, and sources told the Post that the magazine is looking for new space; some say it could leave the city altogether. Fortune magazine, which is owned by Time Inc., has combined its space with Money in the Time-Life Building at 1271 Avenue of the Americas. Time Inc. has laid off some 280 New York employees and rumors are circulating that the company could be looking to sublease some of the newly vacated floors in the Rockefeller Center building. Meanwhile, Reader’s Digest is moving in April from its longtime Westchester headquarters to 750 Third Avenue, a former satellite office of Condé Nast for which the company is paying roughly $30 per square foot. [Post, 2nd item]