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Pbergen - I agree with parts of your post, such as the suggestion to look in NJ. But please, knock it off with villifying every affordable area of Brooklyn and Queens. You say Forest Hills is the only "nice" and "name brand" place that's not far Manhattan and has good train access. Did the OP ask for "name brand" ? What does that even mean? That a neighborhood should be "discovered" before someone should consider moving there? Clearly you don't know much about Queens.
Sorry if this sounds like a rant - I guess it is. It's just amazing the sweeping generalizations people want to make about every area of NYC that's not Manhattan.
And just try getting a 2 bedroom condo in forest Hills for 350K anyway - it's not going to happen.
Pbergen - I agree with parts of your post, such as the suggestion to look in NJ. But please, knock it off with villifying every affordable area of Brooklyn and Queens. You say Forest Hills is the only "nice" and "name brand" place that's not far Manhattan and has good train access. Did the OP ask for "name brand" ? What does that even mean? That a neighborhood should be "discovered" before someone should consider moving there? Clearly you don't know much about Queens.
Sorry if this sounds like a rant - I guess it is. It's just amazing the sweeping generalizations people want to make about every area of NYC that's not Manhattan.
And just try getting a 2 bedroom condo in forest Hills for 350K anyway - it's not going to happen.
please. i have nothing against brooklyn and queens - i grew up in queens for part of my childhood and lived for a while in brooklyn after college. i am a lifelong resident of nyc proper and the inner ring suburbs. i have nothing but love for the outer boroughs and am in both brooklyn and queens ALL THE TIME to eat and meet up with friends even though i currently live in manhattan. and i'm not talking just williamsburg or long island city when the moma was there - i'm talking corona, flushing, murray hill, and ozone park in queens and parkville, homecrest, sunset park, and prospect-lefferts gardens in brooklyn, among other places. all i'm saying is that at the prices the OP is looking for, she might have to buy in a neighborhood that isn't the greatest looking.
now, does that mean these more affordable neighborhoods are dangerous? no, that's not what i'm saying at all. but they might APPEAR more seedy than she and her husband is comfortable with. you have to realize that a lot of people who aren't used to nyc often are not comfortable with neighborhoods that are perfectly fine but happen to be not as glamorous as the yuppie neighborhoods of manhattan, brooklyn heights, etc.
i mean, i've entertained friends from the west coast who thought the east village around st. marks place was "ghetto" simply b/c it wasn't as squeaky clean as what they're used to back home. but of course we all know that st. marks is the farthest thing from sketchy in 2007. this is exactly the mindset i'm talking about.
sorry you misinterpreted my post, but please don't make generalizations about me. i know brooklyn and queens extremely well due to lifelong experiences with both boroughs (i.e parents owning businesses there, hanging out in many parts of both boroughs with friends from school who lived there even after my family moved out) and in fact prefer the outer boroughs to manhattan in many, many respects. honestly, i only live in manhattan b/c i can walk to work in 10 minutes.
ok, I admit I jumped a bit at your other post, and I can see now that you are very familiar with the boroughs. However, in my defense -- the reason I made a generalization about you was because I felt you made a huge generalization about almost every neighborhood in Queens and Brooklyn with the comment about "nice" and "name brand"
I never saw the OP suggest one way or the other what they might want in terms of the look of a neighborhood. So in some ways if you assume they will make the same judgments about most NYC neighborhoods as your out of town friends seem to, then you are doing them a dis-service.
When my out of town friends visit me in my "non-name-brand" neighborhood, they all really seem to like it. Maybe they are just being nice??? I do know what you are talking about though about some people's perceptions - because it is still impossible for me to convince my out of town bf that Greenpoint Brooklyn is not a slum. I took him to a party there in a large apartment with a sweet little garden in the back - but it happened to be on a very industrial street near the river and he just couldn't understand why anyone would want to live there, much less understand how I had been priced out of that neighborhood.
you're getting too hung up over my choice of words. but i guess that's my fault for not clearly explaining what i meant.
when i used the term "name-brand" to describe neighborhoods, i was referring to well-known/hyped-up/buzzed-about neighborhoods - similar to how a name-brand clothing line is easily recognizable even to the average joe. i wasn't using the term as codespeak for "nice" - those are two distinct terms in my book. at the same time, neglecting to label other communities in the outer boroughs as "name-brand" didn't mean that i consider them to be bad neighborhoods. one of the great things about the boroughs, of course, is that there are so many vibrant, interesting areas populated by regular joes who work hard and could care less about hype or pretension.
forest hills qualifies as name-brand because it's well-known throughout the region, even to people in manhattan, jersey, connecticut, and so forth who might never travel to queens. i mentioned that it's "nice" as well as "name-brand" to convey that it's an attractive, desirable area that also happens to have some cachet with people who care about that type of stuff and are looking in the outer boroughs. doesn't mean that it's the best neighborhood in queens, of course. but i guess the hype may have sounded like i was indirectly dissing other areas of queens, which i definitely wasn't.
on the flip side, middle village is not what i'd consider name-brand despite being a nice area with good housing stock simply because it isn't well-known or buzzed about outside of its immediate area.
so to paraphrase: "forest hills is really nice, and oh, btw, it's a much-talked-about, prestigious neighborhood that many people really want to live in AND it has quick and easy mass transit access to the city AND it's not too far from midtown - all of which is a package that's tough to find." in retrospect, i probably phrased it the way i did knowing that many newcomers to the nyc metro area desperately want to live in manhattan, and if that's not possible they look to well-known, affluent neighborhoods or suburbs with a good rep and/or good schools. because as much as i like neighborhoods like homecrest and could talk about its many selling points, i'm not sure that many people in the OP's situation and with her criteria consider it a serious option. but hey, what do i know?
Henna:
A quick Craigslist search turned up a number of two bedrooms under $350k in Forest Hills. I'm not overly familiar with the area but are these listing just pushing the boundaries of Forest Hills into Rego Park or Kew Gardens? I was reading on the Queens Central board you recommended to me and the consensus seems to be that places which are actually in the desireable parts of FH are much more pricy than the real estate listings let on (ie $250k 1 beds and $350k 2 beds). Are those prices unrealistic for prime FH?
Henna:
A quick Craigslist search turned up a number of two bedrooms under $350k in Forest Hills. I'm not overly familiar with the area but are these listing just pushing the boundaries of Forest Hills into Rego Park or Kew Gardens? I was reading on the Queens Central board you recommended to me and the consensus seems to be that places which are actually in the desireable parts of FH are much more pricy than the real estate listings let on (ie $250k 1 beds and $350k 2 beds). Are those prices unrealistic for prime FH?
Are you sure those are condos and not coops?
It's perfectly reasonable to find a 2 bedroom coop for 350K but not a condo (at least I don't think so). And it seemed to me that with an OP moving here from out of state or out of country that she would not want to go through the hassle and time of board approval in a coop, and may not even be sure what a coop is.
Also she specifically asked about condos.
edited to say that I just checked craiglist and I found a listing for a ONE bedroom condo in "Forest Hills" (though actually it is definitely smack in the middle of Rego Park) for 359K. LOVELY 1 BR CONDO IN A DOORMAN BLDG CLOSE TO SUBWAY (broken link) It also says it's HUGE but from the pictures I am guessing it is around 650-700 sq feet.
On the other hand, I did seem some "no board approval" sponsor units that are COOPS not condos, in the mid 300 range listed in Forest Hills (though they may be in Rego Park as well). However, I would not suggest buying a coop to someone who knows they are going to be here for a finite amount of time - like exactly 4 years, since even though they would not have to get board approval for their purchase (if buying a sponsor unit)-- when they sell their buyer will have to go through the board approval process and this can take months and fall through in the end. Obviously some coop sales happen incredibly fast and board approval can happen fast as well, but if I were advising someone who wants to move here from abroad, buy something and move in right away, live here for 4 years and then sell and move away, I would not suggest that they buy a coop. Others may disagree.
My bad. Thanks Henna. They are actually co-ops. I didn't read your post clearly enough. You're absolutely right though, condo 2 bedrooms for $350k isn't doable.
Wow, thanks for all the discussion so far. I had looked into the whole co-op thing a little bit and thought it wasn't really what we were looking for and it seems as if I was right. Does anyone know anything about living in Westchester and commuting to midtown or is that just too far?
Does anyone know anything about living in Westchester and commuting to midtown or is that just too far?
It depends on how close you work to Grand Central and how far into Westchester you go, as well as what you think is "too far," but it's quite manageable from many places. Westchester can be quite pricy and some less expensive areas are not so great, but there are a lot of nice areas. You don't pay NYC income tax if you live there, but property taxes are very, very high in most of Westchester. I don't know how they break down with a condo as opposed to a single family house. I know in some places, like Brookline, Mass., I've heard taxes are astronomical on single family homes and quite modest ($2,500/yr) on 2-BR condos.
Many trains from White Plains to GCT are 35 mins or so in the morning. There are plenty of places in Westchester as close or closer. One drawback is that the train schedule is not as frequent as the subways and you're at the mercy of the schedule. It's also a couple of hundred a month for a commuter pass. Check out the schedules at mta.info | Metro-North Railroad
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