Forest Hills Gardens: only single family homes or are there apartments to buy?

Several years ago I looked at SFHs in Forest Hills, but found the housing stock to be craoppy. You may find the exteriors of the houses to be beauthiful, but on the inside all the houses I saw needed total gut renovations.

The realtor is right. The charming tudor style apt building on Greenway that caught my eyes turns out to be rental only. Expensive: 2bd 2bth for about $3500, 3bd 3bath starting at $4200 . Tennis View & another midrise building are technically in the Gardens. But they are both on Burns street bordering the LIRR track. Convenient to Subway & Austin st shopping but noisy & shaky when trains pass by. Very little inventory if any. Both the purchase pirce & maintenance are comparable to prewar coops in Manhattan. A couple of agencies around the station sq are specialized in FHG, the biggest being Terrace Realty:
http://www.foresthillsrealestate.com/Template1/NextPage.asp?OrderId=7888&SuppId=877770&LanguageId=0&FileName=SelectedCoop%2FCondoListings&LinkId=SelectedCoop/CondoListings&MultiPage=1

Agree w. the President. All those houses were built in the 1920-30s. The local population has an aging issue. B/c it's so family friendly w. good elementary schools & green space, the residents tend to live there for generations. I looked into some OH last summer, which haven't been renovated for 30+ years!
However, if you have school aged kids, work in Midtown and don't care about hip restaurants & bars, FHG is an ideal "suburb in the city".

If you click on the link on the terrace realty web site titled "selected coop/condo listings" you will have your answer

Grew up in FHG -- several coop buildings amid the charming private homes and rental apartments. A beautiful neighborhood -- hard to believe it's in Queens, and 15 minutes from 53rd & Lex.. but it is missing the hip restaurants and bars.

FHG IMHO promises so much and delivers so little. What I mean is that despite the beautiful homes in the gardens, so many are overpriced and dilapidated, requiring major renovations both structural and cosmetic, while asking prices are obnoxiously high. The neighborhood, while safe and friendly, is rather disappointing for the trendy coffee shop crowd, not a culinary destination. OTOH, LIRR is 14 minutes to Penn and and subway is 30 minutes to same. Schools are OK at the elementary level after which you'll want to look elsewhere. Parking is a pain if you're not a gardens' resident but garage parking is appreciably cheaper than Manhattan.

any FHG experts have opinions on current pricing?
Have prices dropped much on these houses? also, do the homeowners 'own' the deed to the land(with major restrictions) or is it land-lease?

the taxes+garden tax are close to 2,000 a month for entry level homes there!

Not an FHG expert but I did one deal with Linda Carlo (De Carlo? perhaps she's Linda Powers now) at Terrace and would recommend her.

ali r.
DG Neary Realty

A very provincial and insular market. You've got to go on a sunday and see the balloons to know where the open houses are.

Forest Hills Gardens is not for everyone. We lived there, liked it a lot and may head back there pretty soon. Lately, I've been longing for all that peace and quiet that is so close to good transportation and other services.

FHG was a Garden City Movement village, along with Garden City (in LI) and I believe the Kensington area of Great Neck. It was begun a hundred years ago, funded by Olivia Slocum Sage as a mixed-income model town. The FHG Association owns the streets, sewers and common areas but the residential properties are not leaseholds. The Association made a deal with NYC long ago to allow through traffic on their streets in return for city services such as sanitation.

Not all the houses were buit in the '20s and '30s and not all of them require gut renovations. There are large and small single-family houses, attached and semi-attached townhouses, a few coop buildings and some rental buildings. Within the Gardens, there are different kinds of micro-areas according to how big the lots are and where they are situated within the community. Taxes are high, but not as high as in the suburbs. There is also a yearly Association fee.

It is VERY QUIET in most parts of the Gardens and the streets are clean. There are many rules about what you can do with and on your property and an Architectural Committee that enforces them in court. Parking isn't a pain if you're a resident, because only residents and their guests can park on FHG streets and only residents can park overnight. For us, it was a great place to raise kids bcause it's safe and there's many green spaces. There are residents' committees that run different aspects of life in the Gardens, including all the holiday celebrations and other traditions.

The two public elementary schools, 101 and 144, are perfectly fine and no different from any other good public school these days. The zoned middle school is Russell Sage and the zoned H.S. is Forest Hills. The Kew-Forest School is an excellent private school on the edge of the Gardens and there are several others nearby, as well as the FHG Community House School. My children went to all of those schools, in various permutations and combinations, as well as to a local Montessori school, Bronx Science and Townsend Harris. They all got into Ivies, just like children from Manhattan private schools.

I didn't realize the value of the FHG architectural rules until I moved to a different area of Queens about a dozen years ago. Many areas of Queens have been under assault by developers who don't bother to follow any rules or laws. Where I live now, we fought back and with great effort managed to get our area rezoned. To my knowledge, they haven't been able to get that done in Forest Hills yet. In the areas surrounding FHG many beautiful old homes have been torn down and replaced by illegal zero-lot-line McMansions, some of which are stuffed to the roof with illegal SRO occupants. Of course, no developer could do that in FHG.

I like Forest Hills. It's convenient to everything, although I freely admit I care little about haute cuisine and all-night bars and my hipness quotient is low. If you're looking in FHG, you should go with a broker who specializes in that area. There are two agencies: Terrace (now a Sotheby's affiliate) and Madeleine Realty. There is also a broker, Anna Pinto, who was with Madeleine for a long time and recently started her own agency. The Hofs, who owned Terrace, have lived in the Gardens for generations. These FHG brokers know everything and everybody, all the dirt and all the scoops.

I can't comment much on RE values in the Gardens because I've been away from there for a while. Our former neighbors tell us about some houses that have been on the market forever because of unrealistic expectations. They said the market was tough since 2008 and prices went down but are firming up and rising a bit now. Again, I don't know this for sure.

As with any other community, if you are the FHG type, you'll know it. If you're not, you won't be happy there.

generalogoun,

Thank you so much for the info, very helpful indeed!

nice post, general--congrats you launched your kids well

agree with a lot of what the general says. especially the part about the architectural review board. every community - particularly a lot of places in Queens and Long Island- even the well-to-do ones - would be well served by having one, particularly as strict as they are in the gardens. FHG is expensive- townhouses on burns street on the "train side" ie, the LIRR is literally in the back of the house can be over $1M. Detached houses easily $1.3-1.4M and up. there are some that have sold for $2-3M . And i agree also on the state of the homes- you walk into a lot of them that are for sale and most of the time it looks like the people who are asking $1.8M for their house, that is in such a state of disrepair, could never afford it today. Taxes are way lower vs. the LI and westchester suburbs. and there are some coops on Burns and Dartmouth street- but they are also expensive - small 1BRs can be asking $350k and up. While in general you are close to the E,F,G,R and LIRR not all of the homes are a short walking distance to transportation depending on where in the gardens you are- but you arent far from the grocery stores, restaurants (there are some although not super hip) and other shopping on Austin.

5thgenNYer : Recently did some checking out in Forest Hills.
You're correct about the small one-bedroom current pricing for coops.

There are small one-bedroom coop apartments for sale in Manhattan that you can get for 350k.
In the east 60s - east70s, in very nice doorman buildings, many with roof-decks.
You can even find some with maint. under $1000 a month.