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New mix of homebuyers hitting Hempstead

BY PEGGY BROWN | peggy.brown@newsday.com

When Candice Glibbery and her boyfriend, Troy Ingenito, decided it was time to move out of separate residences in Ronkonkoma, Hempstead Village wasn't the first place they'd thought to look for a co-op. But then they started pricing what was out there.

Glibbery, 24, a visual merchandiser who designs the showroom floor for the Massapequa Ethan Allen store, says she started looking online, and "everything was in the $200,000 to $300,000 range" -- but most were old apartments that needed renovation.

Then, Glibbery says, "I saw this place" -- Cedar Valley Apartments, a 1966-era building at 20 Wendell St. in Hempstead offering newly renovated co-ops. "The prices were much lower; the building had new everything," she says. "I came here on my lunch hour just to see the building. It's a quiet street, it's a quiet area ... as soon as I walked into the lobby, I said, 'I'm going to live here.'"

A new mix

And so, about a year ago Glibbery and Ingenito bought their spacious two-bedroom, two-bath corner unit, complete with balcony, for only $130,000. And, coincidentally, they became part of what could be the start of a changing demographic in Hempstead Village.

Like most new buyers at Cedar Valley Apartments, and unlike most residents in the village, the couple is white. (The latest U.S. Census, in 2000, shows 73 percent minority residents -- most black, the rest Hispanic.)

"About 80 percent of our buyers are non-African-American," says Joe Foster, director of sales for Cedar Valley.

Celestina "Tina" James bought her one-bedroom co-op there in April for $98,000. James, a widow, is black. But she says the complex's diversity attracted her. "The people in the building are very nice," says James, 56, a paralegal at a commercial services law firm in Great Neck who also sells insurance and mutual funds. "It's a cross section of people. It's not all black or all white or all anything."

The building is owned by ABC Properties of Manhattan, which began renovating the co-ops about a year and a half ago. Foster says Cedar Valley, which has sold about 60 of the building's 239 co-ops, has attracted police officers and firefighters, teachers and social workers. Quite a few are single women.

And they bought at prices ranging from about $80,000 for a studio to $158,000 for a two-bedroom. Whereas in Garden City, the least expensive co-op shown on the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island Inc. is $259,900, and prices reach up to nearly $1.43 million for a two-bedroom. And in Rockville Centre, on Hempstead's southern border, co-ops range from a few in the low $100,000s to $699,000.

"A lot of our buyers, their first choice wasn't Hempstead," says Foster. "I think, unfortunately, at this point, anyway, Hempstead doesn't have the reputation that some of the other communities do." So, he said, people first looked in "Rockville Centre, Mineola, even Garden City ... but when they came and saw and got comfortable, it made sense for them financially."

At a time when many potential first-time buyers on Long Island are priced out of real estate, Cedar Valley is marketing to those willing to take a chance on a suburban community that has faced more than its share of urban-style blight and hard times -- where headlines like "Hempstead boy shot while riding bicycle" (Newsday, Oct. 8, 2007) still aren't unusual.

In its promotional materials, Cedar Valley likens the village to well-known parts of New York City that were once rough: "From Hell's Kitchen and the Meatpacking District in Manhattan, to Williamsburg and Red Hook in Brooklyn, these formerly gritty, urban neighborhoods are gentrifying at a rapid pace. ... Could the same thing be happening to Hempstead?"

James says she knew some people in the building and had no problems buying there. "The way I looked at it, Hempstead had already been on the downturn, so there was nowhere to go but up," she says, adding that she's comfortable with the building's security, which includes a staff person on duty overnight.

Glibbery and Ingenito agree. Ingenito, 35, a service representative for Cintas, a document management company in Farmingdale, says he grew up in Elmont, "and I've always known Hempstead, and I know what people say. When she told me where this place was, it wasn't an issue at all."

Glibbery says her mother's family is in real estate in Sag Harbor "and they encouraged me to buy this. My grandfather came to see the place, the way I've done it, and he said it doesn't look like a $130,000 apartment. My main thing was to love where I lived."

Hempstead has the potential for attracting other buyers like Glibbery and Ingenito, says Richard Guardino Jr., executive dean of the Wilbur F. Breslin Center for Real Estate Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead. "There's a tremendous opportunity there because a public transportation network is in place and people are looking for the opportunity, especially young people, to have easy commutes into the city and to be able to get around the Island," he says.

As for the private house market, it's been suffering along with that of the rest of the Island, says Anthony Atkinson, a broker for Weichert Realtors Quality Homes in Hempstead. "This year we've seen a lot more on the market and a lot slower turnover," he says, adding that at any given time last year 55 percent of the houses listed were in contract; this year it's about 16 to 18 percent. "Right now, we're working aggressively with the homeowners to price right," he says.

Meanwhile, Cedar Valley isn't the only new player betting this is the right time for a Hempstead turnaround. Less than a mile and a half south, Villa de Hempstead Condominium, a new, five-story building at 148 Greenwich St. with 40 units, including four penthouses, scheduled to be open early next year, advertises itself as "Manhattan-style luxury in the heart of Hempstead Village."

Just south of Peninsula Boulevard near South Franklin Street, Grove Partners, based in Merrick, is building a new complex of nine attached townhouses.