מעכטיגע ארטיקעל קומט

Neighborhood in the crosshairs?
Addresses and sale information of homes that have sold or are under contract to sell since March 16 are listed below. Homes sold to Hasidic or Orthodox buyers are in boldface. Exact dates and prices for completed deals were available only if the buyers filed deed-transfer notices with Orange County.

MONROE
117 Bakertown Road. Sold for $400,000 on April 28.
220 Seven Springs Mountain Road. Sold for $450,000 on June 28.
144 Seven Springs Road. Sold in September, reportedly for $1.6 million.

WOODBURY
18 Serpi Road. Sold for $328,000 on March 16.
26 Blueberry Lane. Sold for $340,000 on May 25.
17 Sunny Lane. Sold for $205,000 on July 22.
14 Skytop Road. Sold for $263,940 on Aug. 2.
2 Third St. Sold for $230,000 on Aug. 3.
88 Milval Lane. Sold for $361,000 on Sept. 1.
52 Milval Lane. Sold for $330,000 on Sept. 7
337 Schunnemunk Road. Sold for $459,900 on Sept. 14.
176 Seven Springs Road. Sold for $460,000 on Sept. 20.
18 Sunny Lane. Sold for $205,000 on Sept. 30.
46 Milval Lane. Sold for $369,000 on Oct. 13.
51 Serpi Road. Sold for $475,000 on Oct. 14.
7 Serpi Road. Sold in October for unknown price.
202 Seven Springs Road*
19 Seven Springs Mountain Road**
68 Seven Springs Road**
80 Seven Springs Road**
84 Milval Lane**
30 Milval Lane**
20 Campbell Ave.**

* Sold; date and price unknown.
** Going to closing.

Who's buying
For this investigation, the Times Herald-Record looked at the deeds for 184 homes on 11 roads just outside Kiryas Joel in the towns of Monroe and Woodbury. Those roads are highlighted in red on the above map. Houses on the green roads were already entirely or mostly owned by Hasidim and were mostly excluded from the study. (The three unnamed roads highlighted in green off Seven Springs Road in Woodbury consist mostly of summer homes for Brooklyn residents). The Record found that at least 23 homes have changed hands – or are about to change hands – since March 16, most going to Hasidic or Orthodox buyers. One was on Seven Springs Road in Monroe, a green road otherwise left out of the investigation. The sales followed a Jan. 29 Times Herald-Record article revealing that Kiryas Joel land interests had bought a 140-acre farm on the village border.

Who's buying
For this investigation, the Times Herald-Record looked at the deeds for 184 homes on 11 roads just outside Kiryas Joel in the towns of Monroe and Woodbury. Those roads are highlighted in red on the above map. Houses on the green roads were already entirely or mostly owned by Hasidim and were mostly excluded from the study. (The three unnamed roads highlighted in green off Seven Springs Road in Woodbury consist mostly of summer homes for Brooklyn residents). The Record found that at least 23 homes have changed hands – or are about to change hands – since March 16, most going to Hasidic or Orthodox buyers. One was on Seven Springs Road in Monroe, a green road otherwise left out of the investigation. The sales followed a Jan. 29 Times Herald-Record article revealing that Kiryas Joel land interests had bought a 140-acre farm on the village border.

WORLDS APART
Looming land war sparks home-buying frenzy in Woodbury

By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
cmckenna@th-record.com

Robert Reveille was looking out his kitchen window one afternoon in August when he saw a Hasidic man with a camera walking through his neighbors' back yards. Two houses were for sale, so he didn't think much about it. But soon the man was in Reveille's driveway taking pictures of his house, which wasn't for sale.
Reveille and his family live on a little dead-end street with only six houses, surrounded by woods. They moved to Campbell Avenue from Queens 10 years ago and cherish the quiet, country atmosphere. But a half-mile away and a world apart is the Village of Kiryas Joel, a densely populated community of 16,000 Hasidic Jews.
There, low-rise condominiums crowd the landscape. Sidewalks teem with pedestrians. Streets bustle with vans and buses. It's a booming community that must look past its borders to keep growing – toward places like Campbell Avenue.
So Reveille, a retired New York City police officer, went outside to talk to the photographer.
"I'm thinking of moving here to be close to my family in Kiryas Joel," said the man, whose minivan had Quebec plates. "And you know, this is going to be part of Kiryas Joel in a few years."
When Reveille said he wasn't selling – except maybe for $700,000, an improbable amount – the visitor persisted: "Oh, let's be reasonable on a price."
Many Hasidim have been on shopping sprees lately, buying up the homes of non-Hasidic residents just outside Kiryas Joel. From Kiryas Joel, Rockland County, Brooklyn and beyond has come a stream of prospective buyers, a mixture of families yearning for suburban houses and speculators more interested in the valuable land beneath them.
So far, at least 23 homes have been sold – or will soon be sold – on 11 roads near Kiryas Joel in the towns of Monroe and Woodbury since mid-March, the Sunday Record has found through property records and interviews. Sixteen of those homes were sold or are being sold to Hasidic or Orthodox Jewish buyers. By comparison, 13 homes on the same streets sold in all of 2003, only one to a Hasidic family.
The sudden turnover is infuriating many of the area's non-Hasidic residents, who see it as further evidence that Kiryas Joel plans to commandeer the surrounding area to accommodate its population growth. They say they don't care who lives next door to them. But they fear becoming unwelcome outsiders in neighborhoods destined to sprout the same dense, multifamily housing they abhor in Kiryas Joel.
"All the sweat we put into our homes – forget it," said Gerry Jones, whose family has lived on Milval Lane in Woodbury for 18 years. "It's terrible that we have no control over our own homes."
The Hasidim meanwhile, question what all the fuss is about. They point out that the sellers are getting good prices for their homes and that many are empty-nesters who would likely have moved anyway.
"If it happens, you should thank God it happens, because you can sell your old junk house for a million dollars," said Isaac Wagschal, a Kiryas Joel builder who's trying to buy a house outside the village. "Did anyone force anyone to sell their house?"
He scoffed at fears that Kiryas Joel would soon try to take control of nearby roads like Campbell Avenue. But village leaders make no bones about their determination to expand Kiryas Joel's borders, in some fashion. Throughout the area are hundreds of acres of undeveloped property owned by Hasidic land interests.
And so, as more homes outside Kiryas Joel change hands, the holdouts watch each new sale with mounting alarm, feeling like the last defenders at the Alamo.

Let's make a deal
One evening in September, about 20 residents met at the Milval Lane home of Thomas and Deanna Powers, gathering in a front room renovated into a perfect replica of an Irish pub, complete with a Guinness tap and bottles of Irish whiskey mounted on the wall behind the bar. They had come to discuss the recent home sales and debate what they should do.
"I just want to ease everybody's tension," John Jones began. "We've only lost six homes."
"Seven," someone chimed in.
"No, eight," said another.
Ground zero for the recent property turnover is this picturesque suburban neighborhood formed by Milval Lane and Serpi Road. They are two quiet side roads with ranch-style and bilevel homes set far back from the street, shrouded in trees.
For months, residents have witnessed a sort of real estate bazaar, with a steady stream of Hasidic and Orthodox men patrolling the neighborhood on foot or in cars and looking at homes. Some knock on doors. Some wait in the driveway to make offers. Others call or hire Realtors to write letters.
One man said he'd been offered $300,000 for his home, then $340,000 and $350,000, but he was holding out for $400,000. Another said he didn't want to sell but had been approached twice. He planned to hold out for $750,000.
Some vowed to hold out forever. Others vowed to hold out for the right price.
"The key is not to undersell your property," someone advised. "If you undersell, you're hurting everybody."
The panic-selling began with a farm sale.
In late January, the Times Herald-Record reported that the real estate arm of Kiryas Joel's main congregation had secretly bought ACE Farm, 140 acres of mostly fallow fields just outside the village. It was one of the last farms in Monroe and Woodbury.
Until then, neighbors might have noticed the thick buffer of woods around fast-growing Kiryas Joel and put two and two together. But now, with ACE Farm selling, the community's manifest destiny became clear. Many started thinking about moving.
"Some people want to leave, and that's a decision they have to make," Joe Ferguson, a Milval Lane resident, told his neighbors at the gathering in September.
Others rushed to the barricades. A furious campaign erupted to block Kiryas Joel's proposal to tap into New York City's water supply, a project that until then had aroused little opposition but was now seen as the key to Kiryas Joel's future growth. And a movement began to incorporate new villages outside of Kiryas Joel, including one encompassing most of the Town of Woodbury.
Thomas Lemmey, another Milval resident, helped circulate the petition to create a Village of Woodbury, hoping the new designation would prevent Kiryas Joel from annexing his neighborhood.
"We were trying to hold out with the rest of the two-block area, thinking we could fight this thing," the retired Coca-Cola executive said.
Then he got a phone call in August from a stranger who wanted to buy his house. He wasn't interested at first. But he and his wife, who have five grown children and expected to move someday, discussed their options and decided it might be their last chance to sell before their property value dropped.
"We felt in the long run the die was cast – you're just not going to sell to any other buyers," Lemmey said.
The buyer, an Orthodox man from Brooklyn, needed only a cursory glance.
"He looked at the house for maybe five minutes and said, 'Let's sit down and talk price.'"

Showdown
There has been no rush to move into most homes that were recently sold. Several were rented immediately to non-Hasidic tenants, including one couple that signed a three-year lease. Another is being used as a boarding house for some of Kiryas Joel's immigrant domestic workers. Still others have sat empty, like ghost houses, for weeks or months.
Meanwhile, the buyers – some of whom are scooping up more than one house – were letting the Lemmeys and other sellers stay in their homes and pay rent until they could find new places to live.
This has fed speculation that the buyers cared more about land than houses, since the property value would soar if the Hasidim took control of the area and rezoned it for multifamily housing. Dozens of apartments could then be built on lots now zoned for single-family houses.
Michael Weiss, the Brooklyn man who bought Lemmey's house, said that he works in real estate management, and that his family was buying several homes in the area. But he insisted his family bought the houses because they like the area and plan to live in the houses.
"I'm looking to have a home the way it is, even if the zoning changes," Weiss said.
Kiryas Joel leaders say enough vacant land remains in the village's 1.1 square miles to continue building homes for several years. But after the ACE Farm sale was reported in January, talk of expanding the village through a process known as annexation suddenly accelerated. Already, one group of landowners has petitioned for Kiryas Joel to annex 184 acres from Monroe and Woodbury.
Meanwhile, Kiryas Joel officials hinted this year – as tension with neighboring communities grew – that landowners might simply incorporate a second Hasidic village instead, to bypass opposition in those towns.
The whole land conflict now appears headed for court.
Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin suggests the two sides could avoid a legal battle by sitting down and negotiating which parcels Kiryas Joel will annex – like heads of state carving up Europe after World War I.
"Put aside the emotions, put aside the negativity," Szegedin said. "Let's have a mutual agreement. Why do the judges and the courts have to decide these issues?"
But he admitted that prospect was unlikely: "People are so blindfolded and they're so hysterical that it goes up to the level of the town officials, and they're afraid to negotiate."

Bigotry or separatism?
All year, as arguments over the Kiryas Joel water pipeline and potential land annexation have escalated, Kiryas Joel leaders and residents have detected an undercurrent of anti-Semitism, or anti-Hasidic bigotry, in the vehement opposition.
New homes are being built all over Orange County, they say, and yet all the clamor about population growth and development is focused on one village of 16,000 people.
"Anti-Semitic, anti-Hasidic prejudice which has reached hysterical proportions," is how village trustees described the opposition in an Oct. 29 resolution.
Those kinds of charges have enraged Campbell Avenue residents. Here they are, they say, living in multiethnic, multiracial neighborhoods, being called intolerant by a homogenous, separatist community.
"Every time you open your mouth, they call you anti-Semitic," Steven Lopez said. "I'm getting sick of hearing that."
"It feels like 'The Twilight Zone,'" Reveille's wife, Darleen, added. "We're a diverse group of people. We choose not to live in a culturally exclusive community."
The residents said they'd welcome Hasidic neighbors, as long as their block stayed the same. They could even accept houses being built across scenic ACE Farm, they said, if the housing conformed to existing zoning rules.
"If they want to build single-family houses, that's fine," Robert Reveille said. "We're not trying to keep people out. We just want our zoning."
But the Hasidim, who must live within walking distance of synagogues, ritual baths and stores for religious reasons, will want less restrictive zoning for their land in Monroe and Woodbury, so they can build housing there at much greater density.
Wagschal, the Kiryas Joel builder, believes Woodbury residents are getting worked up prematurely about Kiryas Joel annexing their streets.
"The village expansion is just in the dream stages," he said. "It could take 15 to 20 years."
He and others from the Hasidic community are settling outside the village because they want the space and privacy of single-family houses, something they can't find in Kiryas Joel, Wagschal said. If he gets a house, he wouldn't want it annexed into Kiryas Joel, he added.
But on Campbell Avenue, residents are sure the nearby village will want their property, sooner or later.
"We just don't think it's morally and ethically right for someone to annex your property because they want to expand," Reveille said. "We like it here. It's so peaceful. It's a perfect place to raise your kids. I don't want to see that taken away."
He paused. "I taught my daughter how to ride a bike on this street."

Staff writer Maureen Nandini Mitra contributed to this report.

Some call it 'blockbusting'
Some Woodbury homeowners who have been approached with unsolicited offers to sell their homes claim the prospective buyers or their real estate agents have engaged in scare tactics known as "blockbusting."
"Blockbusting" is when someone coerces a homeowner into selling his or her house by claiming that an undesirable group is moving into the neighborhood and will cause harm, such as lowering property values or increasing crime. The practice is illegal in New York under the state's Human Rights Law.
One Milval Lane resident, in a letter to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, dated Nov. 15, said a Realtor who contacted him said his "neighborhood would be annexed (by the Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel) in 3-5 years and do I want my children living where they can't play with the neighbors?"
Spitzer spokesman Marc Violette said last week that his office had received complaints about the spate of home sales and alleged blockbusting in Woodbury and would look into it.
"All I can tell you is we look into everything that's sent to us," he said.
The agency normally expected to investigate blockbusting complaints is the state Human Rights Division, based in New York City. A spokeswoman, Deputy Commissioner Denise Ellison, said such allegations are "few and far between," but was unable to provide more specific information.
Woodbury residents have also complained to the town police about the tactics of the prospective home buyers. Police Chief Robert Kwiatkowski said he has referred their complaints to an outside enforcement agency, which he wouldn't identify.
"We're doing everything we can to ensure that their rights and everyone's rights are being protected under the law," Kwiatkowski said. "We work with county, state and federal officials all the time, and this time is no different."

Keys to the Story
Satmar Hasidic families migrated to Monroe from Brooklyn in the early 1970s to form a satellite community where they could practice their strict form of Orthodox Judaism, free from the city's corrupting influences. They incorporated Kiryas Joel in 1977, naming their village after Joel Teitelbaum, the late founder and grand rebbe of the Satmar sect.
The population, now around 16,000, grows fast because couples typically marry young, settle in the community and raise large families – since birth control is forbidden. The annual growth rate in the 1990s was 5.9 percent a year. The census bureau estimated this year that Kiryas Joel's population had jumped 10.5 percent between July 2002 and July 2003. Village officials say the annual growth rate is closer to 5 percent.
The differing landscapes in the villages of Woodbury, top, and Kiryas Joel, bottom, characterize the divergent needs of the two communities. Kiryas Joel resident must live within walking distance to synagogues and stores for religious reasons, while Woodbury has required a minimum of 1-acre lots for its homes since the '70s. Kiryas Joel officials estimate that new homes can only continue to be built in the village for several more years before new land will be needed. The rural space of Woodbury could possibly meet that need.

"Some people want to leave, and that's a decision they have to make," Joe Ferguson, a Milval Lane resident, told his neighbors at the gathering in September.

A furious campaign erupted to block Kiryas Joel's proposal to tap into New York City's water supply,a project that until then had aroused little opposition but was now seen as the key to Kiryas Joel's future growth. And a movement began to incorporate new villages outside of Kiryas Joel, including one encompassing most of the Town of Woodbury.