Driving Staten Island sales home
For some New Yorkers, a home in the suburbs can mean a daunting commute.
But housing developer Casandra Properties is lessening the pain — and hoping to spur sales — by offering a free car with the purchase of a home in a recently built community in Staten Island. With each purchase of a double-family residence on Dartmouth Loop in New Dorp Beach, home owners have the choice of either a 2007 Saturn Ion or a $15,000 credit in closing costs or furniture.
Home prices start at $464,900.
“The car has generated interest,” says Casandra Properties broker James Prendamano. “All the homes have garages and it’s as convenient as it’s going to get.”
Incentives offered by developers typically include a percentage of closing costs or a discount, but a free car is a new way to market to families that need the extra vroom. “We wanted to upgrade the package with this type of home and in this market,” Prendamano said.
If the market continues to slow down, maybe they’ll need to throw in a Manhattan parking space for commuters as well.
Glass kills in unfriendly skies
The Morgan Mail Processing and Distribution Center at 28th Street and Ninth Avenue has blood on its windows. Bird blood, that is. The highly reflective glass façde is one of hundreds of city buildings that prove deadly for hundreds of migratory birds flying south for the winter.
A slew of fatal collisions is expected this time of year as a host of bird species, including warblers, beat thrushes and rare sparrows, leave Canada for warmer climates, the New York City Audubon Society said.
The society’s Project Safe Flight, a volunteer-run project, patrols streets to collect dead birds along high-traffic corridors in an effort to measure the problem.
The two factors responsible for most of the collisions are low levels of vegetation and reflective windows, the nonprofit conservation group said.
“We’ve tallied close to 500 dead birds, which is only a representative sample,” said Yigal Gelb, program director of the Audubon Society, of the flocks that stop in city parks to rest during their trek to the Caribbean and parts of South America.
The Morgan Mail Processing Center has been targeted as a high-collision area.
“The building has a large reflective exterior by a park,” making it a tempting target for fast-moving, low-flying feathered friends, Gelb explains.
With high-rise developments sprouting up all over Manhattan, birds stand the chance to lose more than a few feathers. Gelb says the group isn’t against new high-rise buildings, but developers can do something to save the birds. Gelb advises the use of less reflective glass on new developments, and retro-fitted netting.
Want to meet someone special? Perhaps in this condo.
When meeting women at the bars isn’t working anymore, try buying a condo in downtown Brooklyn.
Approximately 40 percent of the condo units at 110 Livingston Street in downtown Brooklyn have been bought by single women, says David Walentas, head of Two Trees, the developer behind the development. The 300-unit building is located near Atlantic Avenue.
Sales at 110 Livingston started in July 2006 at around $700 a square foot.
Wonder walls to hit NYC
Brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher of rock ‘n’ roll band Oasis are developing a chain of hotels in the U.S., with one in Manhattan.
The project — still on the planning table — reportedly uses the band’s song titles to provide room themes for hotels in Miami, Hollywood and New York. The first of the hotels could open by the end of 2007.
For their song “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” the Gallagher brothers were reported to have wanted to install alcohol and cigarettes in every room of their New York hotel.
The brothers, infamously known for their disputes, were rumored to be working with Donald Trump to develop their business model. But Trump reps said the rumors are false.
Whether hotel rooms will come pre-trashed has yet to be confirmed.