“Numbers to know” is a weekly web feature that catalogues the most notable, quirky and surprising real estate statistics. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s onstage compatriots during his State of the City speech, an army of snow plow machines and a boom in the number of park-adjacent New Yorkers. See this week’s countdown after the jump. [more]

Flooding along the Connecticut shore

From the December issue: The month The Real Deal looked at some of the biggest real estate stories in the tri-state area. We surveyed the damage Hurricane Sandy caused to pricey waterfront homes in Connecticut towns like Westport, Greenwich and Norwalk, the post-storm housing shortage on Long Island and a $7 million, 94,000-square-foot indoor sports complex coming to Westchester. Click here for more.

A home at 1 Cross Road in Bedford, N.Y., currently on the market with Houlihan Lawrence for $2.07 million

From the August issue: Last year, Long Island real estate broker Maggie Keats worked with a young family looking for houses in Sands Point priced up to $2.5 million. But the family didn’t buy anything, and when they started looking again this spring, they’d changed their price point.

“They came to me and said, ‘We’ve reevaluated our budget. If we’d bought last year we could have spent that much, but we just don’t feel comfortable doing that now,’” said Keats, who works in Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Manhasset office. [more]

In an analysis Jed Kolko, the chief economist for the real estate website Trulia, found New York City inferior to San Francisco when it comes to eating out.

The West Coast city decisively won the tally, which used U.S. census data to look at the number of restaurants per capita in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. San Francisco has 39.3 restaurants per 10,000 households, the analysis shows. But the tri-state area still claimed three of the top four top spots: Fairfield County, Conn. (27.6) was second, Long Island (26.5) was third and the New York/New Jersey metro area (25.3) was fourth. [more]

A beach on the North Shore of Long Island

Like many other segments of the state’s luxury real estate market, the North Shore of Long Island’s $1.5-million-plus market has seen a boost in sales to foreign buyers, according to Daniel Gale/Sotheby’s Mid-year Luxury Market Report for the region. According to the report, North Shore homes are spending less time on the market, but sales volume has remained flat. [more]

Donnelly Group President Ryan Donnelly and a Garden City home listed for $799,000

Long Island politicians have for years lamented the fact that so much of the area’s young work force has migrated to Manhattan. But according to the New York Times, with the city’s real estate prices rising beyond the means of upper middle class families, many of them are traveling in reverse on the well-paved path and back to Long Island. [more]

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]