Long Island is beginning to approve developers’ plans for multi-family housing at a faster rate, as the construction industry suffers and the demand for downtown-area housing picks up, the New York Times reported.

For example, in downtown Riverhead concrete was poured last week for the foundation of a four-story, 52-unit rental complex with a restaurant, cafe and shops called Summer Wind Square being developed by Epic Partners. [more]

As financing for single-family housing has dried up, developers are increasingly looking towards clustered housing such as townhouses in Long Island, the New York Times reported.

The most active Long Island buyers — young couples and people just starting families — are choosing clustered housing for practical and financial reasons. A townhouse not only requires less exterior maintenance, it is less likely to lose value, the Times said.

“What was once the prized development to build is now the least attractive — single-family homes,” Glen Cherveny, an architect at Axelrod & Cherveny in Commack, L.I. told the Times. [more]

Voters in Nassau Country yesterday voted 56 to 43 percent yesterday toreject issuing a $400 million bond to build a new hockey arena for the New York Islanders in Uniondale, the AP reported.
Opponents of the projects said that County Executive Edward Mangano and Islanders owner Charles Wang were exaggerating when they said the project would bring 3,000 jobs and significant revenue for the area. A state fiscal watchdog group, the Nassau Interim Finance Authority had said the project would cost individual taxpayers $60, compared with Mangano’s estimate of $14.  [more]

The colonial-style house in Toms River, N.J., featured in the 1979 movie “The Amityville Horror,” is up for sale for $1.35 million, the Asbury Park Press reported. In the film, James Brolin and Margot Kidder play a couple who bought a haunted home in Amityville, N.Y., but the external filming took place in Toms River, rather than on Long Island. The Fragoso family bought the house at 18 Brooks Road in 2001, and are now selling it to move closer to other family members in New Jersey. They listed it for $1.45 million at the end of June and lowered the price to $1.5 million late last week. The Fragosos insist that the 10-room house, built in 1920 and renovated in 2003, is not haunted. [more]

While the big banks continue with their reluctance to pay back borrowers’ losses, a lesser publicized case making its way through the courts for the last four years may help others recover losses from lenders who dealt in risky mortgages, the New York Times reported.

Peter Dawson, a Long Island-based self-described financial planner, was sentenced in 2007 after stealing around $8 million from his clients who included elderly parishioners from his church in Uniondale, N.Y. Home loans were key to Dawson’s theft. He persuaded people who had paid off all or much of their mortgages to take out new home loans and entrust him with the proceeds, then absconded with their money.

Now, victims of Dawson’s crime are taking issue with the banks involved. [more]

Elviston Ramasir, the former president of Long Island-based real estate company Home Free Realty, has been sentenced to 51 months in federal prison for two separate fraudulent real estate schemes, the U.S. attorney’s office said today.
Elviston Ramasir, 28, stole $1.5 million from an investor by promising huge rates of return in properties that Ramasir promised to buy but never did. He later used Craigslist to solicit renters for two properties he owned,– one in Ozone Park, New York and the other in Long Beach, New York– then kept their money and didn’t allow them to occupy the properties. [more]

Long Island residents are warming up to rental-apartment project proposals as it becomes increasingly difficult to find financing for a single-family home, according to the Wall Street Journal. AvalonBay Communities is in the process of receiving rezoning that would allow them to build more than 300 apartments on a 26-acre in Huntington Station — the area’s first new apartment complex in a decade. Though initially rejected by a community board in September, the developers have adjusted their specification from 490 units to 379 units and are slated to get approval today. “The big need on Long Island is different types of housing,” said Frank Petrone, Huntington’s town supervisor. “It’s very easy to say, ‘no, no, no, people don’t want it.’ But if you don’t change with the times, the area will change, it will deteriorate, no question.” [more]

The tri-state area — Long Island, northern New Jersey, Westchester County and Connecticut’s Fairfield County — is holding stable post-recession and directly competing with Manhattan as it recovers, according to the Observer. Rents are up, even as vacancy rates remain steady.

In Long Island, the majority of action is in Melville and Garden City with the growth of education and health services companies. The vacancy rate for Nassau and Suffolk Counties combined was 10.3 percent at the end of the first quarter, up from the last quarter of 2010. [more]

A vacant house in Brentwood, LI exploded yesterday morning and injured 21 neighbors, the Daily News reported. The home was owned by a real estate company in the process of renovating the property, after it was sold by Donna Soto two-and-a-half months prior. Soto had lived in the home for 16 years. The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, but a small gas leak was reported and repaired in the home two weeks earlier. Nearby residents likened the explosion to an earthquake, as the home across the street had cabinets ripped from its walls and the home next door suffered substantial damage from the catapulted garage door. [NYDN]
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The level of foreclosure activity in the New York City metro region dropped 5 percent in 2010, compared to the previous year, according to RealtyTrac’s year-end U.S. foreclosure market report. The report tracks the total number of properties with at least one foreclosure filing recorded by RealtyTrac during the year. The New York City area, which includes Northern New Jersey and Long Island, saw 79,849 properties receiving a foreclosure filing, roughly 1.08 percent of the total properties in the region. But while this rate of foreclosure activity is down from 2009 levels, it is 1.83 percent higher than the number of filings in 2008.

The New York City area saw relatively little foreclosure activity compared to other major markets in the U.S. included in RealtyTrac’s report. TRD [more]