Around KJ, home sales boom
By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
[email protected]
Woodbury - The Mandels were looking to move their family of nine from a cramped Brooklyn apartment to a house when they ventured upstate and discovered idyllic Milval Lane in Woodbury.
The neat lawns and quiet streets offered a delightful contrast to their city lifestyle, and the houses were affordable by Brooklyn standards. Plus, Kiryas Joel's religious schools were a short bus ride away - an essential ingredient for the Hasidic family.
They were sold. In September, the Mandels paid $530,000 for a ranch-style house on Milval Lane, joining a continuing wave of Hasidic and Orthodox families and investors buying homes in the tree-lined neighborhoods that surround the much more urban and densely populated Village of Kiryas Joel.
Property records show that Hasidic and Orthodox buyers have purchased at least 35 houses in Kiryas Joel's periphery during 19 months, including 21 homes that changed hands since the Sunday Record first reported on the trend in December 2004. About three-quarters of the homes are in Woodbury, the rest in Monroe.
THE TURNOVER BEGAN in the spring of 2004, a few months after Kiryas Joel real estate interests bought the 140-acre ACE Farm, signaling plans to expand the village.
Some buyers, like the Mandels, simply wanted a house with a yard and some privacy, instead of the congested, condo lifestyle of Kiryas Joel. Others are clearly investors who expect their property values to soar if Kiryas Joel annexes land from Monroe and Woodbury and loosens the zoning.
Larger properties, especially those bordering Kiryas Joel, are commanding high prices.
A house on 2.3 acres on Route 105 in Monroe sold in September for $850,000, more than double what the sellers had paid two years earlier. A Milval Lane home with the same-sized property fetched $650,000 in February, then changed hands again two months ago for $900,000.
Several people have bought more than one house. Elimelech Deutsch, a Kiryas Joel man who owns the weekly newspapers Der Blatt and the Kiryas Joel Journal, has purchased at least three, costing a total of $2.1 million, property records show.
He declined to be interviewed about his purchases.
THE INTENSITY OF INTEREST in these houses stirred animosity in the summer and fall of 2004, when prospective buyers visited streets like Milval Lane in droves and some residents felt pressured to get out. Most of the home sales have been on Milval Lane, Serpi Road, Seven Springs Road and Route 105.
Today, some resentment remains, although those who haven't sold seem more confident that their homes will bring very good prices and are more resigned that if the right offer comes along, they, too, will go.
"Nobody's panicked anymore," said Joe Ferguson, a Milval Lane resident who helped found the Southern Orange County Alliance, a citizens' group opposed to any Kiryas Joel expansion. "The people that are there now are probably going to stay there."
His secluded neighborhood, a T-shape consisting of Milval Lane and Serpi Road, has evolved into one of mixed cultures, where Hasidic children board buses for Kiryas Joel schools, rather than Monroe-Woodbury. The turnover has actually restored the neighborhood to something of what it was more than a decade ago, before the Hasidic families who had lived there earlier moved out.
THE MANDELS, who moved from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn to their Milval Lane house less than two months ago, are thrilled. The wife, who didn't want to give her first name, gushed that her neighbors are wonderful and the suburban setting is much better than the city for raising her seven kids.
"I like the neighborhood very, very much," she said.
Elsewhere, though, the home sales have left an atmosphere of heightened wariness, in which seemingly innocuous events can rile residents.
In mid-November, for instance, a minor uproar erupted when two women - both apparently Hasidic or Orthodox, and one pushing a baby carriage - strolled through the Country Crossings development in Woodbury and distributed hand-written fliers asking if anyone wanted to sell their home. Alarmed residents called the police.
A few weeks later, Jim Patterson noticed colored stickers on mail and newspaper boxes in his Woodbury neighborhood one morning and concluded they had been placed there to mark the homes that had not yet been sold to the Hasidim.
Turns out the stickers were put there by a Times Herald-Record carrier to signify who had subions.
PATTERSON AND HIS WIFE, Arlene, both New York City police officers, don't want to leave the house they bought eight years ago on First Avenue in the rustic Amdur Park development. But much to their annoyance, they say, drivers regularly stop in front of their home and point at it, as though assessing its merits.
"Every day, there's people parked in front of my house," Jim Patterson said. "That drives me crazy!"
Such complaints ring hollow to Abraham Flohr, a Kiryas Joel man who shelled out $400,000 in November for an 864-square-foot fixer-upper on Bakertown Road in Monroe, just outside Kiryas Joel.
One day, he said, lawns like the Pattersons' sport a "Not for sale" or "Not one inch" sign - slogans that some residents have posted to ward off roving home buyers and protest any Kiryas Joel expansion.
The next day, Flohr said, the sign reads "sold."
