James Molinaro asks a politically appropriate question: “Where are they going to play?”
The borough president of Staten Island is pondering the children – future and current – of Staten Island’s newer residents, mostly young adults who moved to the borough for a variety of reasons.
Home prices were probably one of the biggest. Homes are generally tens of thousands of dollars less than those in other boroughs. And there’s simply more homes going up, as developers capitalize on what was the fastest-growing of New York’s 62 counties in the 1990s, growing at a rate nearly double that of the city as a whole, though a zoning change that went into effect in late 2004 could slow things.
“Housing is being built all over Staten Island,” says R. Randy Lee, principal of Leewood Real Estate Group and a homebuilder in Staten Island for more than 35 years. “There’s construction in every neighborhood. I can’t imagine a place where there isn’t some sort of construction going on.”
This is the dizzying pace of construction in a borough where the median age among the estimated 463,000 residents is just under 36, according to the Census Bureau. Where, indeed, will the children play? “In the street?” asks Molinaro. “You can’t have that.”
Rezoning chases building boom
So, in 2004, the borough undertook its largest rezoning since the early 1960s, basically wiping out the prospect of attached housing in the middle and southern parts of Staten Island and limiting it in the northern reaches nearest the ferry.
The changes, backed by Molinaro and approved by the City Council in August 2004, also ensured space for the children to play, requiring backyards to be 30 feet, side yards to be at least 20 feet for corner lots, and all homes to be 25 feet back from the curb. Also, most of Staten Island’s new housing has to be detached or semi-detached, which rules out condo towers.
A decade of rapid growth preceded – and, some say, spawned – the zoning changes. During the 1990s, 15,789 permits for housing units were approved by the city – more than for any borough that decade save Manhattan. In the current decade, the briskness of the development pace has only stiffened. From 2000 through the first quarter of 2005, the city approved 11,592 permits. But the rezoning may have had an effect: 226 housing permits were approved during the first quarter of 2005, the last period for which data was available; that’s a decrease from the 305 permits approved in the first quarter of 2004.
Using separate data that tracks offering plans submitted to the state Attorney General’s office (see chart), 2,150 home owner association houses were either built or in the pipeline in Staten Island between 2000 and mid-December. During the same period, 554 condo units were either planned or built.
The demand to buy this fresh housing remains.
In the city overall, according to the state deputy comptroller’s office, 31.7 percent of households owned their own homes in 2002; in Staten Island, that rate reached 64.4 percent. (Queens was a distant second in home ownership at 46.2 percent.) This level of ownership gels with Staten Island’s vibe as the suburban outpost of the nation’s largest urban nexus. Staten Islanders, for one thing, drive more than average New Yorkers – more than eight in 10 households there own a car, and as many as 41 percent own at least two, according to the deputy comptroller’s office. They drive those cars to work much more than those in other boroughs; in 2003, 62.1 percent of Staten Island commuters spent, on average, 41.3 minutes driving to work – the second-longest commute time in the nation, according to the Census Bureau.
Which is precisely why Staten Island seems a running joke among residents of other boroughs – the commute to and from it, either by ferry or by bridge, and getting around once inside it. But this relative isolation has also spurred Staten Island’s brisk development and low home prices.
“Where there’s vacant land”
Being so isolated for so long – the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the borough’s main vehicular connection to the city, didn’t open until 1964 – allowed Staten Island to retain sizable tracts of vacant land. About one-quarter of the borough, in fact, remains parkland off-limits to development.
Most of the newest post-downzoning housing development is happening on vacant land in the southern end, said Mike Diaz, president of Coldwell Banker Village Realty and the new president of the Staten Island Board of Realtors. The southern end includes formerly mostly rural neighborhoods like Tottenville, Prince’s Bay and Pleasant Plains. The mid-island neighborhood of South Beach has also seen a lot of development.
“It seems the Russian community loves the waterfront,” Diaz says of the development in South Beach. “The other [neighborhoods] are because it’s where there’s the most vacant land.” Diaz notes three different developments cutting up one block on Peterson Lane in Prince’s Bay, for instance.
From 2000 through early October of 2005, 192 condos and 431 single-family houses were either built or planned in the South Beach area, according to the state Attorney General numbers. In Tottenville and Great Kills slightly farther north, 14 condos were built and 1,041 houses – nearly half the number of houses planned or built in the entire borough during that time period.
The large number of houses vs. condos on the southern end is no accident: Even before the downzoning of 2004, only half the borough was zoned for attached housing. After the downzoning, that dropped to less than 25 percent, while space zoned for detached housing jumped from 30 percent to 57 percent. Molinaro’s office reported that in the one month following the August 2004 City Council downzoning approval, applications for new house addresses from builders dropped by 41.4 percent. The city buildings department reported that, while it issued 664 permits for new buildings and major alterations in Staten Island in the month before the zoning changes, it issued 291 permits in the month that followed.
Still, Staten Island remains popular with developers. Simply, it’s a bargain: Land prices for development are much cheaper than elsewhere in the city. Vacant land for residential construction costs about $5 to $35 a foot, according to the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation.
“There are very few tracts [of land] left,” Lee, the longtime homebuilder, says. “To the extent that they are left, they suffer from some disability – steep slopes, wetlands, they don’t have sewers.”
The remaining developable tracts, says Diaz, the Board of Realtors’ president, should fill up “within five to six years, maybe 10, but 10 is tops.” And with that development – if the last 15 years, at least, are any guide – will come new residents seeking that certain Staten Island vibe unique in the city, where houses have room for backyards with iced-over swimming pools and with piles of chopped wood, and the Staten Island Railway drips south past bucolic spaces more Upstate than Uptown.
“We need to plan ahead,” Molinaro, the borough president, says. “With young people moving in, when they have children, when those children are adolescents, where are they going to play?”
Staten Island a housing bargain – by Big Apple standards, at least
One of the enduring allures of Staten Island is the relatively low price of its housing. The city’s smallest borough boasts condos that sell for under $250,000 and whole stand-alone houses (complete with actual backyards) that sell for less than $1 million.
But prices are creeping upward.
“The demand for land is high, and the demand for housing is high,” says veteran Staten Island homebuilder R. Randy Lee of Leewood Real Estate Group. “For semi-attached housing, there’s places where you won’t find anything less than $450,000 to $500,000. Detached housing can go for $700,000 to the sky’s the limit.”
High numbers nationally and regionally, but, still, not so much for the city overall. The median sales price for Manhattan housing in October was $699,000, according to a Halstead Property report.
The median sales price for a one-family attached house in Staten Island in October was $335,000, according to the Staten Island Board of Realtors. One-family detached houses went for a median price of $485,000 in October, the latest month definitive data was available. Condos, which are rare, especially below northern neighborhoods near the ferry, went for a median price of $282,000 in October, the group reported, and co-ops, also generally rare, went for $134,900.
The median sales price for all housing in October in Staten Island was $406,500, a roughly 13 percent jump from the $359,000 median price in October 2004. Every type of Staten Island housing, in fact, surveyed by the Realtors’ board saw median price increases from late 2004 to late 2005.